Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (39 page)

The initial response to the failure of companies like ABCL and Plus was the assertion, by some commentators, that attempts to corporatize the film industry were perhaps futile. Ashok Banker, a novelist, newspaper columnist, and television scriptwriter in Bombay, wrote an indepth three-part story about the ordeal of ABCL, for the Internet newsmagazine
rediff.com
in June 1999. In it he stated, “ABCL’s demise marks
not just the end of one company, but of a campaign to corporatise the socalled Indian entertainment ‘industry’ itself. While AB’s [Amitabh Bachchan] perennial high profile makes him an easy target for conjecture and controversy, the truth is, he’s not alone. Other attempts at corporatising and bringing professional management standards to the hitherto disorganised, financially and professionally indisciplined industry have met with similar failure” (Banker 1999). Of course, subsequent media commentators look back, reinterpreting efforts like Plus and ABCL as ahead of their time (Jha 2005). The examples of Plus and ABCL reinforce the necessity of theatrical box-office success for a company’s long-term existence within the film industry. These examples also reveal, especially in the case of Plus Channel and the sort of films it chose to produce, the significance of other structural factors—such as industry status, state policy, the advent of multiplexes, and the entry of entities with much greater capital reserves—to the larger project of rationalizing the film industry.

As discussed in chapter one, the granting of industry status in 1998, and the subsequent recognition of filmmaking as an approved industrial activity by the IDBI in 2000, precipitated a number of structural changes within the contemporary Hindi film industry, which have come to be referred to as “corporatization.” These changes ranged from the establishment of new production and distribution companies by high-profile Indian corporations and conglomerates, such as the Tata Group, Birla Group, and Reliance Industries, to the transformation of existing production, distribution, or exhibition companies into public limited companies— listed and traded in the Indian stock market—to the expansion of television production companies into film production, to the growing importance of private equity funds and venture capitalists as investors in the film industry.
²⁷
An important result of these changes is that capital to finance film production has become more abundant and is available at a lower cost for filmmakers.

Unlike the mid-1990s, where some members of the film industry expressed their reservations about corporatization, “corporate” had become an adjective of complete distinction within the industry in the following decade. I found that the term “corporate” was being used to describe any sort of production company that appeared organized and successful, including veteran private production companies like Yashraj Films—established by producer/director Yash Chopra in 1970, and man
aged by his oldest son, Aditya—which were kin-based and not listed on the stock exchange. During fieldwork in Bombay, in 2006, I asked Shravan Shroff what “corporate” meant within the film world, relaying my confusion at the wide-ranging use of the term. “Over here it’s being used interchangeably [with] transforming oneself from a sole proprietorship or partnership to a private limited company,” he said. “That’s what socalled ‘going corporate’ means—so that you can tap into organized funding” (Shravan Shroff, interview, May 2006). Shroff then discussed how his company, Shringar Films (founded by his uncle and father), was distinctive for its total transformation and reorganization: “When it comes to us, I think, we’ve gone the entire whole hog, from getting private equity money to going ipo, to having one of the best internal audit firms–kpmg does our audit—to having Temasek of Singapore as an investor. There are very few companies in the country that have done that” (Shravan Shroff, interview, May 2006). According to Shroff, one of the reasons so few film companies had fully refashioned themselves had to do with the overall inertia and sheer burden of the industry’s past structure: “For many people, they’re actually kind of grappling as to what it means, but I think we ought to be fair to them, because for 50 years the industry was disorganized; you can’t expect people to organize themselves in 5 years” (Shravan Shroff, interview, May 2006). Shroff’s statements once again point to how the term “corporate” is not simply about the structure or organization of a company, but also crucially represents a new way of being in the world, which became more apparent in his discussion of Yashraj Films: “I think Yashraj works as well as any other corporate in any other industry,” he said. “You don’t necessarily need to be a private limited company to be a corporately organized body.
²⁸
When I say they’re like a well-organized corporate, what I mean to say is that they put systems, people, processes, structures, the right way to do things, the right kind of audit processes, control systems, etc. That’s what I mean by being a corporately run, well-run company” (Shravan Shroff, interview, May 2006). In Shroff’s remarks, “corporate” operates as a normative category, signifying the right way of doing things; it is also a source of value when applied to entities that do not possess the requisite legal and administrative framework to be designated as a corporation.
²⁹

The new regimes of finance and organization within the film industry have transformed it from being a very undercapitalized enterprise to one where raising capital is not perceived as the main challenge or constraint. Shroff characterized the distinction between the present and the past: “Earlier, capital used to be the distinctive factor. If you had capital,
the other guy didn’t have capital. Today, capital is there in abundance” (Shravan Shroff, interview, May 2006). The easier availability of funds (at much more reasonable interest rates) has mitigated the financial uncertainties, which often resulted in a very fragmented and extended production schedule that plagued the production process. As a result, films are being made much more quickly, with many projects having their theatrical release within a year to fifteen months of the onset of production rather than the eighteen months to three years—or even longer—that it used to take when I first began my fieldwork. The increased availability of capital is also enabling greater integration between the production, distribution, and exhibition sectors within the industry. For example, established production companies have expanded into distribution (Yashraj Films, Mukta Arts), distribution companies into exhibition (Shringar Cinemas), or exhibition companies into production (pvr Cinemas). One noticeable impact of the above changes has been the dramatic rise in the number of films being produced in the Hindi film industry.
Table 4
shows the number of films produced and released theatrically between 1995 and 1999, as well as between 2005 and 2009, to depict the changes that have taken place over the span of a decade. While the total numbers of films being produced and released has increased, the percentage of films produced that are actually distributed has decreased, revealing that finding distribution, as in other film industries, continues to pose a challenge for new entrants into the field.

TABLE 4
CHALLENGES OF DISTRIBUTION

Source
: Based on data compiled from
Film Information
, January 6, 1996–January 5, 2002; January 7, 2006–January 2, 2010.

The entry of the “corporates,” as these new production companies— such as UTV, Percept Picture Company, PNC, Sahara One, and K Sera Sera Productions—are commonly referred to by Hindi filmmakers, has led to certain changes in the overall and everyday work culture of the industry. Director Vikram Bhatt related that, with the advent of corporatization, filmmaking was “becoming more organized and industrial.” He stated, “There used to be just one producer with production managers, and money was a big problem. . . you know every now and then there was some litigation or the other, but that is now more sorted out. It’s getting more and more professional” (Vikram Bhatt, interview, January 2006). He mentioned that filmmaking was becoming more systematized, with written contracts, prompt payments, film insurance, completion bonds, and the use of both executive and line producers. Speaking about the new financial scenario, Bhatt said, “The corporates don’t have problems with money . . . once they decide to allocate you a certain amount of money for a certain film, then that’s like money in the bank; because they’re playing with that amount of money, they have come into the business with that amount of money” (Vikram Bhatt, interview, January 2006).
³⁰
When I remarked that such a scenario must be more desirable for directors, as they are assured of being able to complete their films in a timely manner, Bhatt assented, but then pointed out the disadvantages of working with corporate production companies. Unlike the traditional production companies—more commonly referred to as “banners”—that were identified with an individual producer or a producer/director who was responsible for overseeing all aspects of a film’s making, corporate production companies had a greater number of people and multiple levels of procedure involved throughout the filmmaking process. Bhatt described his frustration:

Intrigued by Bhatt’s reference to an internal assessment that determines the commercial viability of a film’s star cast, I asked him to elaborate:

In the assessment that Bhatt outlines above, the “returns” are not boxoffice receipts, but revenues generated from a sale of distribution rights. The budget of the hypothetical film is not based on the potential revenues that the film could generate through the box-office, but on the revenues that could be earned from its theatrical distribution rights, based on the perceived marketability of a male star to distributors (signaled by the references to territories), and music, satellite, and overseas rights. In such a scenario, the male star takes on even more narrative and thematic significance than what was outlined in chapter five, for with the sort of budgetary constraints outlined above, certain stars can only result in certain genres of films. This form of assessment represents an attempt to systematize and concretize what essentially is subjective knowledge—for an actor’s marketability is subject to a variety of factors that are highly variable—and translate it into an algorithm that converts a star into his potential revenues, irrespective of the project. Within this equation, the quality or track record of the director, the script, or the genre of the film is subordinate to the purported marketability of the actor.

Bhatt’s description of the internal assessment is an example of how the new corporate production companies go about managing the commercial uncertainties associated with filmmaking. The other measures to
offset the costs of production or recoup revenues prior to a film’s theatrical release that have been instituted or have become more prominent since 2000 include product placement in films, merchandising tie-ups with Indian retailers, and co-branding with consumer products.
³¹
These practices are further highlighted for audiences, as a common feature of contemporary Hindi films since the mid-2000s are screens titled “Our Brand Partners,” “Our Marketing Partners,” and “Our Media Alliances” appearing prior to the opening credits or sequence of a film. The increase in marketing budgets for films, coupled with the explosion in satellite television channels and fm radio in India from the mid-2000s, has resulted in more elaborate and sustained marketing and promotion campaigns for films, which can be understood as practices that seek to reduce the risk of a poor opening weekend at the box-office.