Last week, news went viral on the blogosphere that ex-international, Austin Jay Jay Okocha was delving into Nollywood to produce a world class movie on the life of the ‘rainmaker’, Majek Fashek, which will be shot in Nigeria and New York.
The story generated lots of dust until popular filmmaker, Charles Novia, vehemently reacted to the story claiming that he and not the former Bolton Wanderers of England’s midfielder owns the movie.
The controversial movie producer released a statement on Thursday and stressed that the story was a pure imagination of the writer.
According to him, “my attention has been drawn to a story, which is gaining grounds on major blogs and sites about football legend, Austin Jay Jay Okocha, being involved in the production of The Majek Fashek movie written by me and starring Francis Duru. That story is false and is an attempt by a lazy and reprobate online writer to gain traffic to his site.
“It is public knowledge that since 2010, I have been on the production of Majek Fashek movie and that half of the production, which has to do with the childhood years of Majek, has been completed. The adult years are the next part to be shot and this will involve his musical sojourn in New York and what happened thereafter. Production has been suspended because of a few technical and logistics hitches, which have been rectified and hopefully we will continue to shoot soon.
“I have never met Austin Okocha, whom I respect a lot and I certainly do not intend to meet him over this or to solicit his involvement as I am the major Executive Producer of the movie.
“A lazy online blogger sat down, took snippets of my past interviews on the movie and added some sound bites from Francis Duru and coined his story. He also must have taken a past story of Austin Okocha’s biopic being planned by someone else and by a stroke of reprobate ingenuity, used a photo-ops picture of Majek and Okocha to give credence to his story without even finding out from any of the parties he mentioned.
“This writer, whom I have traced as a contributing correspondent with 360Nobs, has succeeded in spreading a half-truth and as is wont in today’s viral culture, the story has gone all over the place, causing untold embarrassment to me, Majek and even my co-investors in Hollywood who drew my attention to the story. I am pretty sure Jay Jay Okocha is as surprised about this story as I am. I urge the general public to disregard the story.”
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