[2] Along with his father, Raghupathi Venkaiah Naidu, he produced Bhishma Pratigya in 1921 — generally considered to be the first Telugu feature film.
Raghupathi Surya Prakash Rao Naidu was born in 1901 in Madras in a Telugu-speaking Kapu family.
Venkaiah Naidu started film exhibition in South India around 1910 and built the first movie theatre in Madras in 1914.
Prakash went to London and joined Barker Motion Photography in Ealing in 1918, then went to Paris (Pathé), Germany (where he saw F. W. Murnau at work) and to Hollywood.
Surya Prakash reportedly directed the Catholic propaganda film, The Catechist of Kil-Arni (1923), produced and written by the Irish priest Thomas Gavan-Duffy together with Bruce Gordon as a fund-raiser for the Paris Foreign Mission Society in Pondicherry.
[14][15] Surya Prakash also became a distributor and founded Guarantee Pics (1926) with backing from the merchant Moti Narayana Rao, but it went bankrupt.
[2] He directed Leila the Star of Mingrelia (1931) in 20 reels for General Pics, declaring that people were not fed up of silent films.
In Draupadi Vastrapaharanam (1934) he managed to make one actor appear in five places within one image, apparently without resorting to optical effects.