How It All Began
It started with an encounter. While working on an Argentine television documentary, Marcelo Molina spent several days filming with the legendary clown Oleg Popov. Standing before a wall covered in photos with famous people, he asked Popov whether he was happy — after all, he had achieved everything an artist could dream of. After a long pause came a surprising answer: he had never really wanted to be a clown. He had wanted to be a singer, like Pavarotti. But as a child he was forbidden to sing. His voice, he said, was “dangerous”: whenever he sang high and loud, everyone listening was struck with stomach cramps. And because he was clumsy and tender, he became a clown instead.
“Well — in the next life.”Oleg Popov, in conversation with Marcelo Molina
Those words stayed with Marcelo Molina for years. A voice that could literally turn people’s stomachs — that was the seed of Kallo: the sad clown who always wanted to sing, who became the most famous clown in the world, yet never found happiness, because his one true dream was always out of reach.
When The Voice Factory was preparing a showcase for the young talents trained by Yana Kris — some of them already professional musical-theatre performers, joined by guest stars from the musical stage — that idea grew into a full story. That is how “Pipo & Kallo” was born.
It was staged in a 400-seat circus tent, with circus artists, acrobats and magicians woven into the story. The show was planned for an audience of 200 — on opening night, more than 300 came. Then word of mouth took over: performance after performance sold out, and there were often as many people outside the tent trying to get in as there were inside. Audiences laughed so hard that the show repeatedly had to pause until they stopped.
Planned for 200 people — in the end, there were as many outside the tent as inside.
Marcelo Molina then developed the story for a large musical-theatre stage. Just as that version was finished, the pandemic arrived. A filmmaker friend who had seen one of the performances urged him to turn it into a feature film: wholesome, warm-hearted humour, with situations and songs that deserve to be shown to the world.
For two years he worked with Olga Juzyn to adapt the story — already written in German and Spanish — into an English-language screenplay, while composing new songs and developing the arrangements together with other musicians. Through contacts in the film industry, script doctor Susan Lee Smith then joined the project to refine and polish the screenplay to Hollywood standard. The result is the version that exists today — made possible by the support of many wonderful and talented people.
Special thanks go to Ana Lozano and George Marshall Ruge — two leading figures of the Hollywood film industry — for their help and support on this project.