Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (30 page)

In 2006, during my last trip to Bombay, Kumar expressed his frustration with what he saw as the increasingly impenetrable social world of the film industry, which closed off opportunities for outsiders like him: “You know, some people in this industry are never allowed to fail; they keep getting multiple chances, and then there are those of us who barely even get one chance.” We were sitting in an auto-rickshaw, stuck in traffic while traveling between the western suburbs of Andheri and Santa Cruz. I asked him to elaborate and he pointed out that people whose families have been involved with filmmaking have the financial security and family support to keep trying their luck at various roles within the industry. “If a man fails as an actor, he then tries his hand at direction; if he
doesn’t succeed as a director, then he becomes a producer and produces films starring his brothers or friends. They keep it all in the family, so how does someone from outside have a chance?” He also explained that for a new director to have a shot at having his film produced, he needs to be able to convince a star to come on board the project, but for unconnected individuals like Kumar it is difficult to develop relationships with stars prior to becoming successful or noticed: “Producers want stars, but how do I get a star? They’re busy working for their own or their friends’ films. They won’t say no to their friends. I mean will Abhishek say no to Rohan?”
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Since his chances of cultivating a relationship with a star appeared slim, Kumar’s strategy was to try to convince a high-profile producer, who would have no problem attracting stars to a project, of his talent and ideas. He told me that he was so desperate to meet Aditya Chopra, who had become a very powerful and successful producer, that he had befriended Chopra’s driver, cooks, and even washer-man, hoping for some inside information that could lead to a chance meeting with him. “Having that Y stamp [the logo of Yashraj Films is a stylized Y] on my film would get me noticed,” Kumar said. I thought back to my interaction with Chopra and how easily he offered me a chance to assist his father. Although his college training, work experience, and passion would have appeared to prepare Kumar for a career in filmmaking, he did not possess the most important element: friends in the right places.

From Chadda following in his father’s footsteps to Malhotra installing his sons as assistant directors and producing his nephew’s debut film, the chapter four sketch presents filmmaking almost as a hereditary occupation in India. While the Hindi film industry is very diverse in terms of the linguistic, regional, religious, and the caste origins of its members, the unifying characteristic of the contemporary industry is its quasi-dynastic structure. Although there are other avenues for entering the industry, kin and social networks have become the most dominant, especially for lead actors—and increasingly for directors.
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Nearly everyone I met during the course of my research had entered the film industry through a family or friendship connection, and my own navigation of the industry was facilitated through extended kin networks. Additionally, film people have been marrying other film people—across caste, religious, and re
gional lines—and their children also enter into filmmaking, so that, by the time I began my fieldwork in 1996, it seemed as if the Hindi film industry was physically reproducing itself in all spheres: production, distribution, and exhibition.

The dominance of families in the film industry fits in with the overall landscape of commerce in India where, according to financial journalist Sudipt Dutta, more than 99 percent of Indian companies are family firms, and about 75 percent of the 100 largest companies in India are family businesses (1997: 17). The apparent hereditary quality of filmmaking is also akin to much of the folk and classical performance traditions in India, which historically have been hereditary vocations. Filmmaking, however, is different in a few ways. First, for much of its history, filmmaking was not a hereditary occupation in India. The individuals hailed as the pioneers of Indian cinema in the early twentieth century did not establish filmmaking lineages or dynasties.
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In 1996, most of the senior producers, directors, composers, writers, and stars of the Hindi film industry were first-generation filmmakers, having had no family connections when they started their careers in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Unlike other performance traditions and commercial enterprises in India, which have historically been the sole preserve of a few caste communities, from its inception filmmaking has attracted a great diversity of individuals from all across India and beyond.
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Finally, narratives about the agentive power of innate talent feature prominently in filmmakers’ characterizations of stardom, which work to downplay the significance of kinship and social networks in enabling access to the profession. Industry lore is full of stories of outsiders who became superstars, along with the inverse: children of stars who, despite their family connections, could not achieve stardom.

Hindi filmmaking began to take on the characteristics of a hereditary vocation beginning in the early 1980s with the phenomenon of “star sons”—a term used by film journalists to refer to the sons of former actors—making their debut as actors, mainly in films produced by their fathers. This hereditary trend intensified from the mid-1990s and, by 2008, a little over 60 percent of the actors who appeared in leading roles hailed from film families; of the top-ten male stars in the industry— those actors who generated the biggest box-office revenues and were the most sought after by producers—eight were either second-or third-generation members of the film industry.
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Members of the film industry explain the consistent presence of second-and third-generation actors as a result of environment and habitus. In my conversations with
writers, distributors, and trade experts, many brought up the example of the actor Dharmendra and his sons. A very successful star in the 1970s, Dharmendra began his acting career in the 1960s. He started a production company, Vijayta Films, in the early 1980s to promote his elder son Sunny Deol as an actor. In 1994, he produced the debut film of his second son, Bobby. Screenwriter Sachin Bhaumick explained how natural it was that both of Dharmendra’s sons became actors: “From childhood, they are seeing Dharmendra acting and Dharmendra’s pictures. Because the atmosphere in the house is movie-oriented, they started knowing things. You can say they’re getting one type of education because they are star sons” (Bhaumick, interview, October 1996).

Aamir Khan, whose father and uncle were both producer/directors, affirmed this point when discussing the advantages he had by coming from a film family:
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“You see, I never had to learn films. These things I have been hearing all my life, so I knew the technicalities of filmmaking. A person who is not involved with films would have to start from scratch, you know. So in that sense there are advantages, you get to know how things work; you get to know how to deal with people; there are certain norms, perhaps, in the industry which you get to be aware of. Also, people give you a little more regard because you are from a film family.” When I asked him if understanding the technicalities of cinema helped him as an actor, he replied in the affirmative and elaborated:

Since the dominant mode of training within the industry is by apprenticeship, being the children of filmmakers is a process of training by immersion. Pamela Chopra, whose husband and two sons are involved in filmmaking, reiterated this point: “I’ve seen it with my children. . . From the time that they were born, they’ve not seen anything else! We literally live, breathe, eat, sleep films! How can they help but being influenced? They can’t help it. So when you’re brought up in an atmosphere like that,
you have. . . an advantage over others. You have certain knowledge that you have information that you have imbibed, without even realizing it, without knowing it, which is a very, very big advantage” (Pamela Chopra, interview, 26 March 1996).

Sutanu Gupta, a screenwriter who entered the industry via the Film and Television Institute of India (ftii), stated that the children of stars have an advantage over absolute outsiders because their parents can guide them through the pitfalls of the industry:

The social networks and specialized knowledge of the workings of the film industry to which industry offspring have access through their families is the
cultural capital
that contributes to their success. Gupta pointed out that a further advantage star children have is an ease and self-confidence arising from their life-long encounter with fame: “They are not overawed by
stardom
. They’ve not come through competitions, talent competitions. It’s not that they’re wanting—they’re dying—to become stars and they want to, and it suddenly changes them—it’s not that—because they have been stars from childhood. By being Dharamji’s son, Sunny was a star from childhood, or Bobby has been a star even before he hit the screen. . . At the same time. . . they don’t want to do just any film, because they’re not insecure” (Gupta, interview, 18 November 1996).

Others in the industry, especially those who control the financial side of the trade like producers and distributors, interpret this form of training by immersion and instant name recognition as a type of guarantee in a very uncertain business. Thus, the offspring of stars possess symbolic capital with distributors and producers that outsiders do not. Komal Nahta, the editor of
Film Information
, characterized the attitude producers and distributors have toward star children, which allow these men and women to charge—and receive—much higher compensations than others in the same stage of their careers:

Nahta’s statements reveal how kinship operates as a way of managing risk.

Shyam Shroff states how star offspring offer more assurance to distributors because their lineages are a known quantity, akin to thoroughbreds at a horse race:

Through Shroff’s remarks it is apparent that offspring of stars, because they are already celebrities before even starting their careers, are brands, which signifies their name recognition, reliability, and marketability to distributors.

It is not surprising that kinship networks have intensified
in
the Hindi film industry since the mid-1990s, following India’s policies of
economic liberalization
. Rather than being inimical to capitalism, scholars of family firms argue that kinship logics are operative in capitalism and that the spread and transformation of capitalism has made the family more economically essential.
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Many businesses become hereditary once there is something to inherit, and economic security results from consolidating one’s investment within the kin group.
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A consequence of the greater economic potential and increased cultural legitimacy of Hindi cinema since the mid-1990s has been the increasing attractiveness of filmmaking as a career option for filmmakers’ own children.

Kinship relations and networks, therefore, play a variety of roles within the industry: providing a source of personnel and a ground for training; operating as various forms of capital—social, symbolic, and cultural; and serving as a mode of risk management. In a business as unpredictable as filmmaking, working with family members serves to reduce risk—both in terms of hedging against the capriciousness of the boxoffice and countering the fragmented structure of the industry. A dependence on kin networks also functions as a method of gate keeping, however, since the extremely personalized nature of the film industry creates barriers for those individuals who have no family or social connections within it.