From Mumbai

I’ve been traveling in India this past month - Bangalore for a week, then Delhi, and I’m now in Mumbai. While I was occupied with family-stuff in Bangalore and Delhi, my time in Mumbai is devoted to hanging out and conducting interviews with a range of professionals in film, television and new media companies. I’ve been here a week now and there is already much I need to chronicle and write about.

Back in 2005, I spent a few months in Mumbai conducting fieldwork towards my dissertation. So I do know the city, but this time around, my experience of the city is completely different. I am staying in Colaba, right next to Regal cinema (I was in Chembur the last time), and within walking distance of some fantastic galleries and stores. But most important, my dear friend Parmesh is in the city and is showing me a fantastic time.

So far, I’ve been to a studio where I was able to hang out and osberve a meeting between an art director and a global fashion magazine that has signed on as a major sponsor, brunch at Basilico (apparently run by a gangster’s son) and Not Just Jazz By the Bay, a Raghu Rai exhibit at the National Gallery of Modern Art, and the launch party of Amitav Ghosh’s latest novel (Sea of Poppies) at The Oberoi! And yes, I am getting work done as well I’m off in a couple of hours to Mehboob Studio in Bandra to meet an asst director and of course, hang out and observe the shoot in progress.

I’ll do my best to write a few posts over the next few days. If not, expect something new here after the 15th of July.

Of Chai and Samosas: Indian cinema and exhibition in the U.S.

Distribution and exhibition of Indian films (mostly Hindi language Bollywood films) in North America have been un-organized sectors for nearly five decades now. In cities/regions with a large concentration of South Asians - New York/NJ, California, Toronto, and so on - a desi family would often run a weekend business that involved screening films at university halls or by renting a screen (for one weekend) at a local cinema theatre. While things have changed in larger cities - from dedicated screens to entire multiplexes (Naz8 in California, for e.g.) for Indian films - there has been no concerted effort to organize distribution and exhibition across the continent.

However, given the ways in which the “NRI market” has been targeted in increasingly sophisticated ways by the film industry in Mumbai, perhaps it is not a surprise that a Bollywood company has decided to launch a major exhibition venture. According to a story in India West, Adlabs is in the process of acquiring close to 200 cinemas in cities across the U.S. (link):

The new theater chain will likely be branded as Big Cinemas and will program a mix of Hindi, South Indian, and first-run and second-run Hollywood movies.

It has already begun a quiet rollout: the company’s first West Coast property to open is the Norwalk 8 Theaters in Southern California, which will screen the subtitled Hindi thriller “Tashan” and the unsubtitled Tamil romance “Santhosh Subramaniam” starting April 25, along with a mix of second-run features such as “Fool’s Gold” and “The Spiderwick Chronicles.”

If Adlabs does succeed in establishing a chain of theatres across the U.S., I have no doubt it will change the way Bollywood imagines and mobilizes an “overseas market.” In addition to bringing about a shift in distribution and marketing practices, this will also allow filmmakers to track revenues in a more organized and reliable fashion.

Family Matters - two takes

On the one hand, a story in the Washington Post about lower class/caste men and women trying to break into the film industry (go here):

Today, a trickle of actors, dancers and screenwriters from India’s lower and middle castes are trying to break into a formerly impenetrable star system, full of actors from Bollywood royalty and other insiders hailing from high-caste families. New drama schools are training Indians from all castes. And Bollywood is starting to tackle more serious plots that could potentially star low-caste actors.

“Will you get more attention if you have the right surname and are part of an entrenched star family? Of course,” said Anupama Chopra, a film critic and author of several best-selling books on Bollywood. “But there is increasing space now for a booming Bollywood film industry, and there’s a feeling that if you are talented enough, well, maybe you will get noticed, no matter what your family ties are.”

And on the other hand, Time Out Mumbai offers a map of the film industry to illustrate how important family ties are (subscription required, link):

Despite enormous changes in recent years, the Hindi film industry is still influenced tremendously by society’s most basic unit. A snap survey of today’s noteworthy actors reveals that many of them were either born into a film family or married into one. Hrithik Roshan? The son of actor-turned-filmmaker Rakesh Roshan and the grandson of filmmaker J Om Prakash. Salman Khan? The son of scriptwriter Salim Khan. Aamir Khan? The son of filmmaker Tahir Hussain, the nephew of producer Nasir Hussain, and the cousin of director Mansoor Khan. Abhishek Bachchan? The son of Amitabh Bachchan and Jaya Bhaduri. Saif Ali Khan? The son of Sharmila Tagore. Kareena Kapoor? A member of the Kapoor clan. Kajol? The daughter of actor Tanuja and director Shomu Mukherjee. Rani Mukerji? A member of the Mukherjee clan and the niece of Bengali actor Debashree Roy. The only outsider to have made it in recent times without family connections is Shah Rukh Khan. Akshay Kumar qualified too until he married Twinkle Khanna, herself an actor and the daughter of actors Dimple Kapadia and Rajesh Khanna.

Many more DNA matches can be found among directors, producers, and distributors as well as among second-rung actors. These include Karan Johar, Rohan Sippy, Goldie Behl, Aditya Chopra, Farhan Akhtar, Sidharth Anand, Sajid Nadiadwala, Anil Thadani, Meghna Gulzar, Amrita Arora, Zayed Khan, Esha Deol, Neil Nitin Mukesh, Ravi Chopra, Shaad Ali, Pooja Bhatt, Bobby Deol, Farah Khan and Sanjay Leela Bhansali.

Workers and Unions in Bollywood Inc.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal (link) pays attention to an aspect of film production we don’t think about very often - who gets to be an extra in contemporary Bollywood films. Pointing out that directors these days look for “extras who fit the scene,” the reporter Amol Sharma documents the emergence of entrepreneurs who work closely with directors to help cast extras. And what’s more, these entrepreneurs, who carry CDs with images of potential extras and broker deals with directors and producers, are proving to be a threat to a well-established institution in the film industry - the Junior Artists Union.

Indian directors say they need to be picky about extras as they try to go global and appeal to the United Kingdom and the U.S. markets, where higher production values are expected. “You can’t keep using the same faces every time,” says Sudhir Mishra, director of the recently released “Khoya Khoya Chand” (Lost Moon), a love story set in the 1950s. Mr. Mishra bypassed the union to hire actors he felt could more authentically portray prostitutes, bouncers and pimps in a brothel scene.

Directors also try to boost the international appeal of their films by using foreign extras, often European or American vacationers rounded up at Mumbai tourist spots — a tactic that is particularly galling to unionized extras. Film producers “give excuses, like ‘We’re shooting in a pub, so we want to have some foreigners there,’” says Firoz Khan, a 25-year-old member of the Junior Artistes Association, the union for male extras. “It’s just excuses.”

The Junior Artists’ Union is fighting back valiantly, trying to figure out how they can renegotiate their place in an industry that is currently besotted by the language of “corporatization.” Read the whole article here, and here’s a video that accompanies the article:

It’s important to note that this isn’t an isolated domain of the industry that is under siege. In an article in Anthropological Quarterly, Clare Wilkinson-Weber maps the changing world of costume design and the growing marginalization of “dressmen:”

Dressmen have always employed informal methods and techniques in their work, and they now find their skills, knowledge, as well as their privilege of maleness in a male-dominated industry being eroded as Hindi filmmaking is transforming itself aesthetically and organizationally in response to global forces.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with a number of such “dressmen,” Wilkinson-Weber explains how the “de-skilling” of dressmens’ jobs has to be understood in relation to changing industry logics and specifically, the entry of a number of young, urban women who “claim superior knowledge of filmmaking techniques and of the fashion world that informs film costume” [The Dressman's Line: Transforming the Work of Costumers in Popular Hindi Film, Anthropological Quarterly, 79(4), 2006].

I know very little about the history of workers’ unions in Mumbai, but this story points to the importance of industry-focuses studies that can provide nuanced understandings of production culture in “Bollywood Inc.”

NDTV Lumiere

Over at MediaCommons, two comments pointed to the importance of situating initiatives like NDTV Imagine in relation to the network as a whole. I couldn’t agree more, and as I’ve pointed out in earlier posts, transitions in the television industry are central to the film industry as well. It would be a mistake to continue to examine film and TV in isolation, especially given the importance of television rights to producers in Bollywood. Films aside, we are yet to map, in any systematic fashion, the workings of numerous filmy shows on television - song and dance talent/game shows of various kinds have been part of television for nearly two decades now (ZEE TV’s Antakshari began in 1993).

And now, NDTV has added another dimension to TV’s relationship with film with the launch of NDTV Lumiere.

Led by Sameer Nair, former CEO of Star Entertainment India, NDTV Lumiere has roped in Manmohan Shetty, founder of Adlabs, and Sunil Doshi, a film producer. The goal, as the video above suggests, is to develop NDTV Lumiere as a niche space for audiences interested in cinema from around the world. Instead of competing with Zee Cafe and Star World for “elite audiences” (see this), this seems like a smart differentiating tactic.

More broadly, I think this initiative signals the working out of a radically new set of relationship between two screens in India - at the level of industry logics, productions cultures, and audiences’ viewing practices. More on this in posts to come.

Filmy Flashback: Silver Jubilee Filmfare Awards

A couple of years back, I chanced upon a set of Filmfare issues from 1977-78 being auctioned on eBay. And as luck would have it, I managed to get them (12 issues in all) for about $14! I figured I might as well use snippets from them and make “filmy flashback” a regular feature on BollySpace 2.0. To kick things off, here are some snapshots from the April 1978 issue that covered the Silver Jubilee of the prestigious Filmfare Awards!

Best Actor: Amitabh Bachchan, for Amar Akbar Anthony; Best Actress: Shabana Azmi for Swami; Best Supporting Actress: Asha Sachdev for Priyatama; Best Supporting Actor: Sriram Lagu for Gharaonda; Special award: Amol Palekar for Bhumika; and a Special Award to Naseeruddin Shah for Manthan.

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Movie channels and syndication

While soaps, sitcoms, and mythologicals do attract audiences and at times help a new TV channel establish itself very quickly (Ramayan on NDTV Imagine, for e.g.), there is no escaping the fact that Bollywood has the largest program library and a reliable one at that. Every major television channel launched over the past decade or so has relied on Bollywood films to boost ratings and gradually diversify its programming. This trend, in turn, has been a major source of revenue for film producers. All the hype surrounding “new media” aside, TV rights constitutes a large percentage of a producer’s revenue stream.

Now, with major companies like Reliance, UTV, and NDTV entering the domain of “general entertainment” TV, the business of film rights is set to change. According to this report on the Indiantelevision trade site, established TV channels such as Sahara and SONY are syndicating titles to new entrants.

Sony Entertainment Television (SET) India has syndicated 70 titles to INX Media, the Peter-Indrani Mukerjea venture, for over Rs 400 million. For 9X, the Hindi general entertainment channel from the INX Media stable, this was an important part of the overall programming strategy. Movies have primarily driven the ratings of the channel.

Not surprisingly, the decision to buy syndication rights to a specific film or set of films is closely tied to the new TV channel’s branding strategy which, in turn, is premised on exclusivity (will this film air on a competing channel in the near future?). Entire story here. As far as I know, TV channels have not played the syndication game with soaps/sitcoms/other programs. It’s interesting to note that TV industry logics are still being shaped by the film industry.

TV and taste: the “saas-bahu” question

In a recent article in the avowedly “upper-class” Mint, columnist Vir Sanghvi wonders why television in India speaks to PLT (People Like Them) and asks the readers of Mint, People Like Him, why “so many of us (readers of Lounge, for instance) thrill to masala Hindi movies while remaining resolutely unmoved by the appeal of the mega-serials that have much of middle India so completely enthralled?” He writes:

As much as you may have enjoyed Om Shanti Om or even Saawariya, do you watch Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi? When you flip from one Hindi entertainment channel to another, can you really tell the difference? Isn’t there a certain stultifying sameness to the manner in which over-made-up, overdressed women waddle around lurid and garish sets, pausing every five minutes or so for an extreme close-up, accompanied by loud and, frankly, disturbing explosions of music? Do you really find the jokes on the many stand-up comedy shows (spawned by the success of The Great Laughter Challenge) genuinely funny? Can you understand why Navjot Singh Sidhu laughs so hysterically at every weak gag uttered by each aspiring comedian?

It’s a strange thing, but even as Hindi cinema has become the great leveller, television has become a world unto itself, carving out a solid constituency in the lower- to middle-middle class (look, I’m sorry if this sounds snobbish, but there’s no other way to say it), while almost completely ignoring the upper-middle class and the elite.

Given that these shows remain highly popular and continue to draw the highest ratings points, it is rather easy to imagine what Ekta Kapoor, the architect of many a saas-bahu television serial, might say to Sanghvi and People Like Him. But it is not as easy to brush aside Sanghvi’s assumptions about taste, class, and the expectations of a medium like TV - in fact, it wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest that academic culture is yet to take saas-bahu serials seriously. I have heard nothing but dismissal of shows like Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi (Because mother-in-law was once a daughter-in-law) as regressive and that they do little more than reinforce gender stereotypes. But is this all we have to say?

Does the study of TV begin and end with this all-too-easy ideology critique? Would it not be worth exploring how Ekta Kapoor, a young woman, managed to become one of the most important figures in the TV industry? What about looking closely at how writers on this show think through characters like Tulsi Virani (Smriti Irani)? Do we have nothing interesting to say about Smriti Irani’s move from a TV soap into the realm of politics? And tempting as it may be, are we really prepared to call women and men (yes, men watch these shows too) across India who enjoy these serials cultural dupes? Without falling into the trap of 80s-anglo-american-style “resistant reading” ideas, would it not be important to explore the politics and pleasures of these TV serials in relation to everyday life?

In many respects, this piece by Vir Sanghvi reminded me of the discussion about taste cultures in the context of television scholarship/writing in the U.S., and the fact that there is hardly any “ideological and cultural diversity within television studies per se” (more here). Talking specifically about discussions at a conference (Flow), Henry Jenkins picks up on Greg Smith’s question - why JAG, a popular show never gets the kind of attention that a cult hit like Buffy does - and writes:

I would argue that our inability as a field to write intelligently about shows like JAG has something to do with our sense of cultural isolation from those people who live in Red States. One challenge may be to broaden our object of study. An even bigger challenge may be to expand who studies television and what kinds of perspectives are welcome at our conference. Very few folks at the Flow conference rose to defend JAG as a worthy object of study. My bet though is that there are people out there reading this blog who regularly watch JAG. Indeed, it was one of my late father’s favorite programs and I found watching the program with him helped me to understand how his generation saw the world.

Along the same lines, while I cannot bring myself to watch a saas-bahu serial, I did spend many hours watching a Tamil-language saas-bahu show with my mother. This was right after my father had died, and I was with my mum in Bangalore for a couple of months. At one level, the ritual of watching TV, quite simply, provided great solace. And for my mom, these shows with their strong (and yes, in some ways regressive) women characters were almost a balm for grief. During those weeks, I was, in Sanghvi’s terms, PLT. The “saas-bahu” question needs to be framed differently and not just in a banal isn’t-it-regressive vein.

It’s all about TV

Over the past few years, both popular and academic writing on the changing mediascape in India has focused mostly on Bollywood - take one look on Amazon and you’ll see for yourself. To be sure, there are countless topics to explore and a growing group of scholars and graduate students are mapping and analyzing the substantial changes in the film industry (mostly Bollywood). My own research is very much a part of this space, and I decided to focus on relationships between film, TV, advertising, and the “new media” sector for my dissertation.

But now that I’ve had some time away from the dissertation, and as I begin to think about turning the diss into a book, I find myself looking more closely at developments in the TV sector and wondering about how much more dynamic the TV industry has been this past decade. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that all the experimentation going on in the film industry is largely being underwritten by TV - be it through the entry of TV companies like UTV into the film business, the fact that TV rights allow producers to recover half or more than half of a film’s production costs (link), or the countless film-based shows on TV that serve as promotional vehicles and much more.

It did not come as a surprise, then, to hear about NBC’s decision to acquire 26% share in NDTV Networks (link) and the possibility that NBC will raise this number to 50% in the near future. NDTV has expanded beyond news and launched NDTV Imagine (a general entertainment channel), NDTV Good Times (supposedly India’s first lifestyle channel), NDTV Emerging Markets (a consulting unit), and NDTV Convergence (a digital media business that controls all Web/mobile content). And NBC isn’t alone here - both Sony and News Corp. have been involved in the TV market in India for much longer, and just last year, Viacom and Disney entered the picture as well (Viacom teamed up with the TV-18 group and Disney bought a 15% stake in UTV). It’s becoming increasingly clear that all the buzz surrounding the growth of the Internet and gaming sectors has been a distraction at best (mobile phones are a different story). It’s time we paid closer attention to developments in the TV sector - not only in terms of mapping changing ownership patterns but also re-assessing TV’s role as a cultural center for every imaginable audience demographic.

Crate & Barrel goes Bolly-crazy

Netflix account, recommendations from friends, Indian takeout, maybe even a bottle of Kingfisher to make the evening *really* “Indian,” and you’re all set to pick up the remote and settle down for some good masala. Do you still feel something is missing? Crate and Barrel can take care of you -

Comes with a Bollywood pillow (customizable, perhaps, with your favorite Bolly-hero/heroine?). More here.

(HT: Geoff)

Re-booting for the new year

Apologies for disappearing for over a month now - inexcusable, especially given I can make no claims whatsoever about a large readership. But grading and other end-of-semester craziness, a vacation, and a brutal January 3 start to the winter semester has kept me busy.

That said, I have bookmarked a number of interesting stories in the south asian-mediascape and will get to them over the next few days. I have also spent a lot of time browsing through The Hindu from 1953 onwards in an attempt to map relationships between the film industry and radio in post-independence India, so expect a post or two with some terrific images from the early 1950s. This preliminary look at film-radio connections will be part of a paper I will be presenting at the Cinema South Asia conference to be held at UPenn this coming weekend (line up here) - more on this tomorrow.

But I wanted to kick things off with a bit of self-promotion - my first book, a co-edited anthology of essays on Bollywood, will be out this August from NYU Press!

I’ve spent a good week of the past month poring over the copyedited manuscript, and I have to say it is exciting but also nerve-wracking to think about how the book will be received (and maybe even reviewed). And of course, it is quite the thrill to see the book listed on Amazon (link)!

p.s. I’m not sure I dig the cover, but I’ve heard from a couple of people who thought it was ok.

Newsweek on Bollywood: 2000-2007

Way back in 2000, when Bollywood meant little to American audiences, Newsweek did a feature trying to explain why they needed to pay attention. It was a deeply problematic piece, with the writers making a number of terrible assumptions - here’s an excerpt from that article:

The West have the biggest stalls in the world’s media bazaar, but it’s not the only player. Globalization isn’t merely another word for Americanization–and the recent expansion of the Indian entertainment industry proves it. For hundreds of millions of fans around the world, it is Bollywood–India’s film industry–not Hollywood, that spins their screen fantasies. Bollywood, based in Mumbai, has become a global industry. India’s entertainment moguls don’t merely target the billion South Asians, or desis, at home; they make slick movies, songs and TV shows for export. Attracted by a growing Indian middle class and a more welcoming investment environment, foreign companies are flocking to Bollywood, funding films and musicians. The foreign money is already helping India’s pop culture to reach even greater audiences. And it may have a benign side effect–cleaning up an Indian movie business long haunted by links to the underworld.

The “Indian” film industry isn’t just based in Mumbai. At the time, foreign companies weren’t exactly flocking to Mumbai, and as several others have pointed out, Newsweek’s assumptions about “clean” money are questionable.

Now, 7 years later, Newsweek has revisited Bollywood in an attempt to take stock of changes sweeping through the industry. “Hooray for Bollywood” focuses attention on Ronnie Screwvala, CEO of UTV Software Communications, as a way to map the “corporatization” of the industry.

Over the past five years Screwvala has led the transformation of India’s prolific but chaotic film industry…professionalizing the business, bringing in outside investors and accounting standards as well as aggressively marketing films with novel plots. His production company has cut the old three-and-a-half-hour marathons to between 90 and 120 minutes and has hired Hollywood scriptwriters to make its features more watchable.

Read the whole thing here. And while you’re at it, take a look at this video:

If things don’t work out well in Iowa over the next few weeks, Obama can call Ronnie Screwvala, no?

Film Journalism: a new media twist

Over a three-month stretch in Bombay, I spent many hours chatting with film journalists in a range of print, television, and dot-com companies. These were by far the most interesting conversations I had and the gossip aside, I learned a lot about how the Internet has made film journalism one of the key sites of participatory culture surrounding Bollywood. While landing a full-time film journalist gig remains difficult, it is impossible to ignore the growing influence of blogs and sites like Passion for Cinema or Naachgaana.

However, even as the line between a full time film journalist and blogger-writers are beginning to blur, there is no denying that institutional affiliations continue to matter. Stars, directors, producers and others in the film industry recognize that film journalists play a key role - at the very least, their reporting provides the basis for much of what film bloggers do. And over the past 5-6 years, dot-com journalists have become key players, particularly when it comes to the crucial friday film review. As Raja Sen of Rediff explained -

In Mumbai, the world of film journalism is small. There are a handful of reviewers who are read every week, and now some websites are being read regularly. Like this one time, I met Shilpa Shetty a couple of days after Dus had released. And when I said I was from Rediff, she asked me, “are you Raja Sen?” I said yes, and she went on to say that Abhishek Bachchan had called her the previous day and asked her to read the Rediff review! Thankfully I had said good things about the film so she was happy! But you know, there is no doubt that websites like Rediff are now on the same plane as a Mumbai Times or Mid Day.

What’s most interesting to see is film journalists like Raja Sen beginning to experiment with the very structure of the film review. In the video below, Sen plays with a Dostoevsky short story (White Nights) and wonders what it would take to make it a Bollywood spectacle. Taking a dig at Bhansali’s Saawariya, he says towards the end -

Story theek hai (story is alright)

Now add 35 crores, 11 songs, and paint everything blue!

While I think this works as an interesting new layer to the film review, I doubt if other journalists and even the most committed film-bloggers will take to this anytime soon. Besides, I also suspect that this is part of a larger publicity drive for iShare, Rediff’s new video networking site, and nothing more.

Do families matter in Bollywood Inc.?

Kinship networks have always mattered in the film industry in Bombay. As Tejaswini Ganti’s ethnographic accounts of the industry have shown, kinship serves as the most important “principle of organization and hierarchy within the industry” and that it “functions as cultural capital, symbolic capital, and a form of risk-management or insurance within the industry.” Every aspect of the film business, including the crucial activity of tracking a film’s revenues, determining its box office success or failure, and developing an understanding of the “audience,” relies on a web of personal contacts and relationships developed over a long period of time.

Is this the case today? Do families matter in post-1998 (when the government granted “industry” status to filmmaking) Bollywood Inc.? Consider this opening paragraph of an article in Mint which provides an overview of who the major players are (link):

Over the next two years, India’s film industry will actually start functioning like one. In this period, business groups and companies such as Network 18, the Reliance-Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (R-Adag) , UTV Motion Pictures Plc., Percept Holdings, Carving Dreams Entertainment Ltd, Eros International Plc. and Saregama India Ltd have lined up between 120 and 140 projects at a total cost of around Rs. 4,000 crore.

It is striking to note that large, established, family-run production banners like Yashraj Films and Rajshri Media are not even mentioned here. Of course, personal relationships continue to determine who gets plum acting breaks, a chance to direct a big budget film, and so on. At the end of the day, surnames like Kapoor and Khan do matter. But it is no longer possible to ignore the establishment of a network of social relationships defined not in terms of kinship, but through new circuits of capital. More from the Mint article:

The Indian Film Co. and UTV Motion Pictures raised around Rs. 450 crore and Rs. 300 crore, respectively, from the London Stock Exchange’s Alternative Investment Market earlier this year. And Prime Focus Ltd and K Sera Sera Productions Ltd raised around Rs150 crore and Rs60 crore, respectively, from the Indian stock markets last year. Executives in the entertainment industry say that while funding matters, companies are moving to a studio model to address issues such as shortage of talent, rising demand for content, better cinema (or exhibition) infrastructure and emerging revenue generation opportunities.

The shift from mercantile capital (often, tax-sheltered “black” money) to what everyone likes to call a “corporatized” funding model is, however, only a part of the picture. The other key transition involves the development of television, mobile phones, and the Web as significant revenue streams. To be sure, established banners like Yashraj and Rajshri are responding creatively to these shifts and have even led the way forward in some respects. But it is abundantly clear that media execs like Ronnie Screwvala (UTV) are the ones restructuring the institutional framework of the film industry and Bollywood families have little choice but to keep up and figure out where they belong in the mix.

Multiplex Effect(s)

One of the most interesting transitions in the world of commercial Bombay cinema over the past few years has been the experimentation with low-budget and offbeat films. While lavish nationalist-diasporic films that the likes of Karan Johar, Yash Chopra, and Subhash Ghai churn out are the ones that seem to define “Bollywood,” especially for viewers and critics outside India, films like Omkara, Dor, and Johnny Gaddar have drawn audiences, critical acclaim and, importantly, made money at the box office. To be sure, films like these would have been unimaginable in the commercial sector a decade ago.

Writing in the Mint (link), Gouri Shah takes stock of this development and argues that these low-budget films have succeeded primarily because of the shift from single-screen to multiplex theatres as the mode of exhibition in urban India (and to a lesser extent, in smaller cities and towns). Shah also writes that recent successes have prompted large production houses to set up separate divisions to focus exclusively on low-budget films with new talent across the board.

Subhash Ghai’s Mukta Arts Ltd has set up two divisions—Mukta Searchlight Films, which handles small budget films, and Malpix Films, which will launch its first Marathi film, Kaande Pohe, soon. UTV Motion Pictures Plc. has Spot Boy Motion Pictures and UTV Classics, while Percept Picture Co. recently set up Cause Cinema, which will look at projects with socially relevant themes as well as corporate films. Yash Raj Films Pvt. Ltd is also planning to set up a separate division that will focus on small budget projects or independent films, according to people in the industry familiar with the developments.

I agree, for the most part, that this is very much a “multiplex effect.” As Aparna Sharma explained in her Seminar piece, in addition to flexible scheduling that allows multiplexes to accomodate films of varying lengths, low budget films are lucrative for a multiplex because the number of viewers they bring in translates into “a greater, more competitive marginal value” (more here).

At the same time, it is difficult to overlook the fact that an “indie” filmmaker has little hope of getting his/her film into a multiplex unless s/he is working with a large banner like UTV, Mukta Arts, or Yashraj Films. My Brother Nikhil (Onir, 2005), the film that, in many ways, started this trend, would not have worked without Karan Johar and Aditya Chopra’s patronage. To get a sense of how critical this patronage is, all you have to do is take a quick look at the films that NFDC, the government of India enterprise that defines “good cinema,” has produced over the past few years - not only are they predominantly in regional languages like Marathi, Kannada, and Tamil, none of them made it into a multiplex.