Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (27 page)

After ten takes, Khan says to Chadda, “
Rikki, we have to do something
else
.
How much longer can we keep doing this? It’s a simple line, but she doesn’t
know Hindi. If this is the case today, then what will we do for the rest of the
shoot?

Chadda responds, “
Haan, she needs a lot of coaching. We’ll put Arif on it
. Anyway
, we will
dub
her voice for sure
—obviously
we won’t
use
her voice
. We can’t change the lyrics at this point after the song is already recorded. Why don’t we pull back from the extreme close-up and shoot her through a row of
diyas
[clay oil lamps] to get a diffuse effect, and then we won’t notice her mouth movements so much?”

Khan says, “But all of the
diyas
are on the wall; how would we do that?” Chadda thinks some more, walking around the courtyard. “What about if she has a
diya
in her hand? The part of the line that she has trouble with—we shoot the
diya
and then zoom out to a medium close-up of her singing the rest of the line, you know, like that song in
Devdas?
”
¹¹
Khan says, “That would work, then we would have to make sure that she can hold that
diya jagah jagah
[everywhere] for the rest of the
antara
.”

Chadda chuckles, “
Whenever she can’t get a line, we’ll take a close-up of
the lamp
.”

Khan bursts into laughter. “You’re too much!”

Chadda walks over to Menon to inform him of the changes. Menon says, “If you want me to shoot a
diya
then I’ll have to change the lighting set-up.”

Looking at his watch, Chadda says, “Change the lighting set-up quickly; the shift is almost over.”

Meanwhile, Khanna has stepped outside the set to meet with Lakhani. As there are only two chairs, Lakhani’s assistant stands up so that Khanna may sit.

Khanna asks, “
So Lakhani-saab, what brings you here?

Lakhani responds, “
I’ve got an excellent story and you are perfect in it
.”

Khanna inquires, “
Do you have the
script
? I don’t have time to hear a
narration
right now. After this shoot, I have to go to Aradhana
[name of a recording/dubbing studio]
to
dub
for a film
.”

Lakhani responds, “
If you like the idea, then I’ll get the script written!

”

Khanna retorts, “
Oh Lakhani-saab, those days are over! Nowadays I don’t
agree to do a film that doesn’t have a
bound script.”

Lakhani replies, “
If you want a script, remember that
English [language] picture
, Notting Hill? It’s something like that
.”

Khanna stifles a groan, “
Now I’d like to do roles that are slightly different
from my usual ones
.”

Lakhani persists, “
Please think about it
—
the money is good
—
there are
some nri investors from the U.S. and Canada. You can get a lot more than your
standard remuneration
.”

“
How much more?
” asks Khanna.

“
Currently you get 30 million, right? You can easily get 40 or 50 million
.”

Khanna says, “
Okay, I’ll think about it. When are you thinking about beginning
production?

Lakhani answers, “July
ya
[or] August.”

Khanna does a double-take, “
What, that quickly! How is that possible! It’s
already February! Anyway, I don’t have any
dates
for the next two years; I’m
doing four movies
.”

Lakhani says, “
It will get made very quickly; everything will get completed
in one or two
schedules!
The entire shoot will take place abroad and will be
in
synch-sound
so it’s just a matter of 30 or 40 days
.
Think about it; you can
spend the monsoons in Canada and the U.S. with your family, maybe do some
stage-shows
; think of it as a vacation on our expense
.”

Khanna stands up and says, “
Okay, I’ll see what I can do, I’ll have my
secretary
try to juggle my
dates
around, and I’ll give you a reply in a few days.
Very well, goodbye
.”

Lakhani stands up and folds his hands in departing. While Khanna walks toward the set, Lakhani and his assistant leave the studio. As he enters the set, Khanna hears Chadda say on the microphone, “
Accha
[okay] everybody, pack up!” Khanna turns around and walks toward hiss makeup room to change; he then leaves for the dubbing studio where he has to dub his dialogues for a different film.

At the end of the shift, all of the workers who receive a daily wage, such as spot boys, background dancers, lighting assistants, and various others line up outside the shooting floor, where Malhotra’s production manager, Iqbal, and an assistant have set up a table with a ledger. Iqbal’s assistant hands each worker his or her daily wage along with conveyance— money for transportation costs—in cash that Iqbal dispenses from his briefcase. Each worker then signs the ledger to record the receipt of payment. Chadda and his assistants pile into his car to go to the music studio, where the last song of the film will be recorded later that night. Khan and her assistants take off to another film shoot that Khan is choreographing. After Iqbal finishes paying all of the daily workers, he and his assistant take the magazine of exposed film to the lab for processing. The camera is packed up by its attendants and taken back to the offices of Sai Arts—the production company that rented it out for the shoot. After everyone leaves, one of the studio guards locks the entrance to the set.

On November 14, 2009, a panel discussion titled “East and West: A New Co-Dependency” was held at HBO headquarters in New York City as part of the day-long “Film India: The MIAAC-09 Industry Panels.” This event had been planned to occur in conjunction with the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Ninth Annual Indian Film Festival. Filmmaker Sri Rao was conversing with his agents from William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, who asked him to relate his experience of working on the
Bollywood
film
New York
with Yashraj Films. Rao and his production company associates were the local line producers for the Hindi film, which was shot extensively on location in New York and Philadelphia during the summer of 2008. Speaking about his experiences working with the team at Yashraj Films, Rao related that while the Bombay film industry exhibited a high level of production expertise, “It’s sort of like we both do the same thing, you know us here in
Hollywood
and them there in Bollywood, but it’s like we speak different languages.” Asked to elaborate, Rao described how the first two weeks of the shoot were “chaos,” because of what he characterized as “cultural differences” between the working styles of the American and Indian crews. “They have grips and gaffers, and we have grips and gaffers, but the expectations about what their grips and gaffers do is very different from what our grips and gaffers do.”

Despite Rao’s acknowledgment of the differences, his use of
occupational terms, like grips and gaffers, which are not part of the working parlance of the Hindi film industry, his assertion that both Hollywood and Bollywood “do the same thing,” and his attribution of conflict to epiphenomenal representations of language and culture, reveal an underlying assumption that the material practices of filmmaking are somehow universal, outside the realms of social relations and cultural context. Throughout the course of my research I have encountered assumptions and questions generated by the conventions, norms, and practices particular to Hollywood, but assumed to be applicable to the structure and workings of the Hindi film industry.
¹
Although the main imaginary for feature film production in much of the world is derived from Hollywood,
²
in the next two chapters I aim to denaturalize and de-westernize conventional understandings of mainstream film production and dislodge Hollywood from its default position. Although both Hollywood and “Bollywood” are commercially driven film industries, they are not organized similarly, nor do they operate in the same way. The commercial nature of a media institution does not necessarily render its structure, organization, or working style transparent or universal. Whereas this chapter examines the structure, organization, and social relations of the Hindi film industry, the next one focuses on the work culture of the industry.

While my point of departure is the ethnographic material presented in the previous chapter’s portrayal of life on a Hindi film set, I first outline the decentralized and fragmented nature of filmmaking in India to establish the ease with which individuals with access to capital can become filmmakers. Following this, I detail the basic political economy of the
Hindi film industry
, describing particularly the significance of the film distributor. After that, I illustrate the importance of personal relationships and social networks, which can have the effect of both granting an immediacy to interactions and serving as a form of gatekeeping. I then discuss the significance of kinship, a prominent reason for the industry’s personalized nature, as a relation of production and reproduction. Finally, I explain how the industry’s hierarchy is made manifest in sites of production by examining in greater depth the centrality of male stars to the production process.

During a symposium on Indian and Egyptian musical films held at New York University in January 1999, Gerard Hooper, an American cinematographer who worked on the Hindi film
Satya
(Truth), was asked the
main differences between working on an American film compared to an Indian film, as it was his first experience with Hindi filmmaking. Hooper replied that he liked the set-up in Bombay because it was like the independent film world in the United States. I smiled at the delicious irony of applying a label like “independent,” with its connotations of being alternative, unconstrained, and oppositional, to the dominant mode of filmmaking in India—the mode most commonly referred to as “commercial.”

What Hooper was actually commenting upon was the extremely decentralized, flexible, and freelance nature of the Hindi film industry, characteristics that are belied by the Fordist metaphors of factories and assembly lines used so frequently by Western and Indian journalists to describe it: “Bollywood’s dream factories churn out hundreds of films a year” (Bajaj 2011; Dey 2004). While there have been instances of integration throughout the history of the Hindi film industry—producers who venture into distribution, distributors who venture into exhibition, or exhibitors who venture into production—to date it has not resulted in a consolidation of the industry, nor has it precluded others from entering the business. Essentially, the “industry” has been a very diffuse and chaotic place where anyone with large sums of money and the right contacts has been able to make a film. A case in point is the late G. P. Sippy, the producer of
Sholay
, who came to Bombay from Karachi after the Partition of British India in 1947 and made his foray into filmmaking via the construction business. During our interview, Sippy explained that in the process of building apartments in Bombay, he met members of the film world who convinced him to “migrate from the world of real estate to the world of illusion called films” (G. P. Sippy, interview, 22 September 1996).
³

The potential for complete novices to enter film production has been a characteristic feature of filmmaking in India for decades, and it has been commented upon and criticized in government reports about the state of cinema in India. The 1951
Report of the Film Enquiry Committee
is a valuable source of information about filmmaking in India during the late 1930s and 1940s. It details the fragmentation of production, remarking that India had a “plethora of producers” compared to Hollywood of the time (Patil 1951: 64). For example, in 1947, 214 producers made a total of 283 films in India, with the highest number of films produced by any single producer being 7; in 1948, 211 producers made 264 films, and the highest number of films produced by any single producer was only 6. Among these producers, a large number—nearly 70 percent in 1947— were what the
Patil Report
termed “newcomer independents”—those who had no prior connection with the film industry. Due to their lack of
experience, the attrition rate of these independent producers, characterized as “infant mortality” by the Patil Report, was quite high. It noted that, “Only 25 producers continued in the industry through all of the three years from 1946–48” (Patil 1951: 65). The Patil Report blamed newcomers for the problems besetting filmmaking: “The free entry of stray elements is generally held responsible for many of the ills of the industry, such as competitive bidding for stars, the sacrifice of quality in the hurry to complete a picture at any cost, payment of usurious rates of interest, mortgage of a film before it is completed, and also the many ‘still-borns’ among the production ventures that do not go beyond the stage of the first thousand feet or so of shooting” (Patil 1951: 65). From the Report’s point of view, not only were there too many producers in India, there were also too many films being produced, judged by the high rates of commercial failure. It advocated reducing the number of films made annually: “It seems to us essential to find out ways and means to eliminate the production of useless pictures, which have not the slightest possibility of being certified for exhibition or of being screened successfully” (Patil 1951: 94).

The problem of the “free entry of stray elements” producing too many “useless pictures” did not resolve itself over time, and one finds similar criticisms in a later state-initiated inquiry about filmmaking—the
Report
of the Working Group on National Film Policy
, published in 1980. The Working Group characterized film production in India as a highly speculative enterprise because of the large number of “ad hoc producers who are attracted to filmmaking, largely because of glamour, the possibility of making quick money, and the scope which filmmaking offers for sanitizing black money” (Karanth 1980: 16). The consequence of a large number of new producers every year, according to the Working Group, is the erosion of professionalism, since these producers “do not have any expertise in the financial management of film production or an insight into the market for which their film is designed. They also have no definite involvement with the medium of cinema” (Karanth 1980: 18).

Both the Patil and Working Group reports suggested measures to rationalize and professionalize film production, which involved some form of regulation and erecting barriers to entry. For example, the Patil Report recommended the establishment of a Film Council of India, which would “superintend and regulate the film industry, to act as its guide, friend, and philosopher” (Patil 1951: 187). Additionally, the council would serve as an advisory body, offering guidance to the Central and state governments regarding film production, distribution, and exhibition. The
Patil Report also argued that a Production Code Administration needed to be set up in order to scrutinize scripts prior to production, “which would serve not merely to exclude objectionable material, but also to improve the quality of films” (1951: 102). Acknowledging the Patil Report’s recommendations, the Working Group asserted that changes in filmmaking over the interim three decades necessitated a different approach to regulation, which did not involve control over the creative process of filmmaking, such as the vetting of scripts. Stating that regulation of film production was necessary “only to the extent that there is a need to discourage the entry of ‘adventurers’ in the area of film production” and to ensure that filmmaking met some “basic minimum professional business management standards” (1980: 20), the Working Group recommended that all film producers register with the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC). Since the NFDC was the government agency responsible for the import and distribution of raw stock at that time, the Working Group asserted that only producers who registered with the NFDC be allocated raw stock. The Report stated that when allotting raw stock, the NFDC needed to evaluate producers’ past experience and how well planned and organized the current film project appeared to be. The Working Group’s desire to severely curtail the entry of novice producers was apparent from its recommendation that even those producers who could have access to raw stock through a separate channel and licensing regime would be required to register with the NFDC; according to the Report, this regulation could be enforced by modifying the alternative importing license to include this requirement (Karanth 1980: 21).

Such recommendations never got implemented, however, and the high ratio of producers to the numbers of films produced by the Hindi film industry annually is an indication that stringent barriers to entry still do not exist. In my first year of fieldwork in 1996, 88 production companies, referred to as “banners” in the film industry, had produced the 96 Hindi films released that year, while the following year, 90 companies had produced the 92 Hindi films released. Even with the entry of the Indian corporate sector into filmmaking since 2000, film production has remained fragmented in Bombay. For example, in 2005, 177 production companies were involved in making the 187 films that were released, and in 2009, 128 companies produced the 135 films that were released, with the highest number of solo productions by a single company being 5.
⁴
The number of producers is potentially even larger, since a greater number of films are produced—as indicated by their certification for exhibition by the Censor Board—than are released theatrically every year. Even from the
perspective of commercially successful films, the ratio remains relatively stable. The number of Hindi films successful at the box-office from 1995 to 2009 and the number of companies involved in making them is shown in
Table 2
. The years where there are more companies than films are due to co-productions. The table demonstrates that while commercial success is concentrated with respect to the number of films produced, it is not concentrated in terms of the number of producers. The table also reveals that while it may be relatively easy to produce a film, it is difficult to have it released and even more difficult for it to be classified as a hit. Despite the reported high rates of commercial failure, Komal Nahta, the editor of the trade magazine
Film Information
, asserted that it was “hope and new money” sustaining the film industry. “It’s the hope of every producer that he will get one
Hum Aapke Hain Koun!
or a
Sholay
and new money; [this is] the glamour which attracts people, who absolutely have no idea what filmmaking is or what they’re getting into” (Nahta, interview, September 1996).

TABLE 2
FRAGMENTATION OF THE PRODUCTION SECTOR

Although new infusions of capital sustain the industry financially, the high number of producers and high rates of turnover from year to year have been a source of anxiety—for the industry and the state—regarding the intentions and true identities of some producers. This is noted
in the Working Group’s reference to “black money” (Karanth 1980: 16). While black money refers to unreported, untaxed income that could be generated from legal enterprises, the intensely cash-based nature of the financial dealings of the film industry until the early 2000s made it possible for the world of organized crime to be involved with filmmaking. References to the underworld–film industry “nexus,” as it was most commonly referred to by the Indian press, began in the late 1980s. The intersections between organized crime and filmmaking came into the national and international media spotlight in the late 1990s and early 2000s after the gangster-ordered murder of Gulshan Kumar, the founder and head of an audio company that expanded into film production, and the arrest of Bharat Shah, a diamond merchant who had become one of the most significant financiers within the industry, for his links to organized crime.
⁵

While I did not come across explicit examples of, or references to, criminal involvement during my initial fieldwork, given Hindi filmmakers’ desire for social acceptance by elites and their anxiety about respectability, I encountered more oblique statements in which filmmakers erected a distinction between themselves and those whom they did not consider legitimate filmmakers. For example, actor Sanjay Dutt predicted a better future for the film industry based on his sense that higher costs of production and an emphasis on quality would lead to a culling process: “I think people who love films will remain, you see. Filmmakers will remain. The riff raffs will go away. That’s exactly what’s happening today. There was a time, a couple of years back, when anybody was making a film. ‘I’ve got so much of money, make a film,’ but you’re not making a film because you love to make films; you’re making a film because you want to be known” (Dutt, interview, May 1996). Dutt’s dichotomy of filmmakers with a genuine love and passion for cinema versus “riff raffs” with money, who make films for spurious reasons, can be understood as an indirect acknowledgment of the criminal presence within the industry, especially since so many of my other informants emphasized the participation of individuals from a variety of other businesses—jewelry, construction, textiles, hotels—that would not be regarded disreputable.

The involvement of individuals from legitimate businesses also posed potential problems, due to their lack of knowledge and experience in filmmaking. Producer Mukesh Bhatt described how the glamour of the film industry consistently attracted new investors from other sectors of the economy, who treated filmmaking as a form of speculation—an easy route to making quick money—rather than the difficult business that it was. “They come here for the glamour, more for fun than actu
ally doing it in the proper way. They get caught with these con people, who tell them, ‘Yes, we’ll make a film for you.’ They get duped and then they abuse the industry and go away” (Mukesh Bhatt, interview, October 1996). Not only did such individuals spread an undeservedly bad reputation of the industry, by paying stars much higher remunerations than established producers, they also upset its economics. “They muck it up,” Bhatt complained, “because they’re not producers, you see? So they do more harm than good. Apart from burning their own money, they also spoil the industry by giving the stars a ridiculous price they don’t deserve. For a star, they’re like a man-eater: once they taste blood, drawn blood, then he wants to, you know, once some fool comes and gives them, one
crore
rupees [10 million], they feel that’s their price. Their price may not be actually worth more than 40
lakhs
[4 million] of rupees, but they suddenly feel that, ‘Mukesh Bhatt is exploiting me,’ and this guy comes and pays me one
crore
” (Mukesh Bhatt, interview, October 1996). Bhatt likened such outside producers to nris (non-resident Indians) who came to Bombay and paid much more money for real estate than its market value and thereby drove up prices out of reach for local residents. “He spoils the market. He pays a ridiculous price, and you know, gets people’s heads going [topsy-turvy]. Others suffer because of that” (Mukesh Bhatt, interview, October 1996). Bhatt’s criticisms echo those found in the Patil and Working Group reports mentioned above, demonstrating the remarkable persistence over time of certain structural conditions and discourses regarding filmmaking in India. The representation of neophyte producers paying stars unwarranted salaries is a very longstanding criticism, one that is cited as the main reason for the demise of the studio system in India (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy 1980; Binford 1989). Bhatt’s condemnation of stars as avaricious and undeserving is also part of a dominant discourse of criticism about them. His assertion that “they’re not producers,” and his reference to the “proper way” of making films forges distinctions between those who can be regarded as genuine producers and those who are not worthy of that occupational title. His criticisms operate as a sort of “boundary-work” (Gieryn 1983), which is part of a longstanding effort by members of the industry to cast filmmaking as a profession, with all of its attendant practices of exclusion.