There’s this scene in Luck By Chance (the wittiest Bollywood insider movie ever), in which Rishi Kapoor, playing old-school producer Romi Rolly, is trying to get a corporate to fund small-time producer Satish Chaudhury’s next film.
Chaudhury begins his pitch to two men from the corporate, sitting across a wide table: “We’ve talked to John [Abraham] and Bipasha [Basu] and we have their dates…” but one of the men cuts him short: “… Our basic criteria (sic) is the property.” When Rolly throws him a puzzled look, the other one kindly explains, “In Hollywood, they call a script a property.” And the former elaborates, “You see, there, content is king. We want to bring this culture into your industry. There has to be a change in your mindset.” At which Rolly leaps up and exclaims, waving a half-eaten biscuit, “Change aa raha hai, brother! (change is coming, brother!)”
There’s no doubt on whose side director Zoya Akhtar’s sympathies lie in this scene — the corporate guy is cold and patronising, Rolly is all lovably bumbling emotion. Though the film’s dialogue writer Javed Akhtar diplomatically told this writer, “Rolly was many producers rolled into one,” most will agree that the character was broadly modelled on Subhash Ghai, the classic Bollywood producer who revels in his showman tag.
Luck by Chance released in 2009. Until as late as five years ago, the battle for dominance between the Hindi film industry’s old-school producers and the corporates was still a matter for some amusement — and for taking sides.
Dynasty vs executives
Not any more. As Rolly had predicted, the change did come. And the corporates are no more the villains of the piece; they are now established, dominant and have a track record that cannot be denied — or ignored.
Dynastic biggies such as the Chopras’ Yash Raj Films, Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions or Rakesh Roshan’s Filmkraft saw the benefits of corporatisation and joined hands with the corporates. Many others followed suit, tying up for both production and distribution. Says Nitin Tej Ahuja, Publisher, Box Office India, the industry’s leading trade magazine, “My guesstimate is that about 75 per cent of [A-grade] Hindi films made today will have a corporate connection of some sort.”
However, Amit Khanna, industry veteran and a pioneer of corporatisation, says, “The corporates will always remain the bad guys for one section of the industry.” That section is the old school, which once ruled the roost but has now been left behind. It was a clash at many levels: dynasty vs executives, property vs script (even if the latter was often written on the sets), a disorganised work style vs an organised set-up, chancy funding vs financial stability and transparency. Though many of the old-style safari-suited solo film-makers found the ground shifting beneath their feet, they could not adapt quickly enough or fight the money and muscle of the big guns.
Khanna was the one who saw the change coming very early on. In 1989, he set up Plus Channel, India’s first entertainment conglomerate, which produced feature films, TV programming and music albums, and was its Managing Director until 2000. Between 1999 and 2013 he was the chairman for Reliance Entertainment. Khanna, who says, “I’ve seen it all since 1970, seen the industry at its chaotic best,” believes the sniping came largely from those who “did not understand how a large company works and presumed we were fools who had aspirations of being creative and were squandering money. But it was they who were being foolishly presumptuous.”
The price of breaking in
The spendthrift accusation stemmed from the manner in which corporates marched in and hiked star fees to levels that solo producers simply could not match. Remuneration for key technicians such as cinematographers and editors also went up. Old-timers screamed murder, declaring that such prices would make projects unviable.
“It was a fair criticism,’ says Ahuja. But, he points out, “The corporates had to break into an industry that was controlled by tight, family-run outfits and this was one way of doing so. There was about a 50 per cent escalation in star prices and big-budget, low-budget paradigms went for a toss.” >
Ahuja, who was producer of last year’s Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster Returns and Bullett Raja, says, “A budget of Rs1 billion (about Dh60.3 million) no longer makes people gasp.”
Ram Mirchandani, CEO, Rampage Pictures, who was earlier with Eros International and before that with UTV Motion Pictures from its inception in 2003, says it was a question of that old industry bugbear, dates. “It wasn’t that easy to get dates out of line. So you had to pay a premium to be able to make your film quicker and within schedule.” It was a premium that was well worth it, he says, given the savings accruing from quick production times.
Business or passion?
The other big grouse against corporates was that they were not headed by film-makers such as the older production houses, but by executives for whom making films was a business, not a passion.
Mirchandani concedes that having a film-maker at the helm might lend a “slight creative advantage” but says that is more than offset by the other benefits that corporates bring (more about those later). He adds, “With all the movies I was involved in, my decisions were dictated first by passion and then by financial feasibility.” Swades (2004) was one of those Mirchandani backed at UTV. It had superstar Shah Rukh Khan, but in a story and role that were not expected to set the box-office on fire. However, it went on to become a contemporary classic, has collected a heap of awards for UTV and remains one of the superstar’s best performances.
Ahuja points out that path-breaking films such as A Wednesday, Paan Singh Tomar, Kahaani or Vicky Donor were all backed by corporates.
“None of these were safe projects by any means. So you can’t accuse corporates of putting business first. Making movies needs a lot of heart and passion,” he says.
“I’ve been a writer, producer and director; I understand creativity,” says Khanna, before arguing that being an executive does not automatically disqualify you for creativity. “You cannot limit creativity to a choice few. Corporates have a number of creative people too.”
He cites the example of film-maker Mani Ratnam who has an MBA degree to bolster his argument. And he adds, “Large companies operate in an organised manner in book publishing and the music industry. Why should film-making be any different?”
The benefits of corporatisation are clear, beginning with financial transparency in funding, budgets and revenues; a far cry from the murky days of underworld financing and when shootings stalled for lack of funds. Mirchandani lists the others. “Corporates can create a slate of movies instead of producing a couple of them in a year. Not only is their output greater, they can also be multilingual and thus have a pan-India presence.” UTV started out with Hindi films, but three years down the line started doing Tamil and Telugu films too.
Next, Mirchandani says, “They ensure robust marketing and have a sound distribution system that has access to international markets.” Given that corporates such as PVR Cinemas and Reliance Entertainment are also in the exhibition business, their presence extends from one end of the film-making chain to the other, giving them enormous clout across the board.
The flip side
Of course, there’s a flip side too. “There’s a danger that too much power might be concentrated in the hands of a few. But there are five or six big corporates and the competition between them should offset that,” says Ahuja. Another concern: “Also, what might work against corporates is that since they need to churn out films, there’s a chance they might overbid for projects.”
But Mirchandani observes, “Corporates need a portfolio — so you need the blockbusters, the classics such as Lagaan and small-budget, edgy films such as Vicky Donor.”
It is one of the reasons one sees so many experimental films from the corporate stables; smaller films keep the numbers going and with some luck might become runaway hits too.
That can only be a good thing for viewers, who can now choose from a range of films that is broader than it has ever been. So, while different factions of the industry take potshots at each other, viewers couldn’t care. They know they hold the ultimate power in the industry. And that all-important ticket. n
