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Two top Ghanaian producers; Shirley Frimpong Manso of Sparrow Productions and Abdul Salam of Venus Films, have watered down what is described as misconceptions being created by controversial movie producer, Socrate Sarfo... that movie premiering in Ghana is a waste of money, time and energy. Speaking in separate interviews with BEATWAVES yesterday, the producers, who are currently the frontrunners when it comes to premiering movies in Ghana, said premiering is not a waste money, time and energy as Socrate Sarfo implied in a story posted on peacefmonline.com and later published in the Thursday edition of DAILY GUIDE. They said premiering is not about recovering all monies spent on setting up the event as Socrate seems to have suggested. Rather, it is a business strategy to help the movie sell big on the market. It contributes to making a bigger net profit. Thus, they said the basic reason they usually premiere their movies before releasing it is to create general awareness and make the movie popular, before finally making it public. Besides that, they also make some money from the tickets. �You can�t recoup everything from the premiere. It is not possible. The adverts that are done for the premiere are just to create awareness. Whatever you put into a premiere is not primarily for the premiere�, Shirley pointed out. According to her, everybody enters into business to make profit. However, she said she would have stopped premiering her movies if she had incurred losses. �It is definitely not a waste of money for Sparrow Productions to premiere a movie. It may be a waste of money for some people. We don�t even have money to waste�, she disclosed. Abdul Salam declared that Socrate could not premiere his movies because they are substandard. He stated that Socrate shoots low budget movies. He said the amount Socrate uses to shoot a whole movie is less than the amount he (Salam) uses to pay a single member of his cast. The quality, he said, cannot be compared to the likes of movies from Venus Films and Sparrow Productions. Hence, premiering a Socrate movie will not only lack attention, it will be a disaster. �When you do a good job, you feel like people should see it. The kind of movies he has been shooting is not up to standard and cannot be premiered. Premiering doesn�t mean we are premiering to make money. It is to create awareness for the movie and make some money to cover the cost of publicity. If there is nothing in it, we will not continue to premiere�, he said.