Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (4 page)

One of the more unexpected findings of my fieldwork was the frequent criticism voiced by Hindi filmmakers concerning the industry’s work culture, production practices, and quality of filmmaking, as well as the disdain with which they viewed audiences. Throughout my fieldwork, I encountered filmmakers criticizing every aspect of the industry—from the working style to the sorts of films being made. For example, producer Firoz Nadiadwala, a third-generation member of the film industry, described Hindi filmmaking as being full of compromises and formulae, and the industry filled with people who were either incompetent or who lacked a proper filmmaking vision. Throughout our interview he periodically punctuated his statements by pronouncing that I would have nothing to write about. At one point, he asserted, “It’s such a sorry state of affairs. I don’t even think you’re going to get anything worthwhile writing this book.
Koi kuch nahi kar raha hai
.
Kuch nahi kar raha hai
. [No one is doing anything. They’re doing nothing.] All they’re interested in is, ‘
Bhai
artist
ko
sign
karo
,
aur itne mein itne bhej do, aur
picture
mein paisa kamao
.’ [Just hire an actor and sell this picture for this much and make money off the whole deal.] There’s no quality consciousness, there’s no forward thinking, save and except maybe for just three or four people, that’s it ” (Nadiadwala, interview, October 2000). Criticism of this nature comprises a popular genre of discourse within the film industry and serves as a form of “
boundary-work
, ” a concept articulated by Thomas Gieryn (1983) to discuss the ideological efforts by a profession or an occupation to delineate who is and is not a legitimate member. The Hindi film industry for much of its history has been characterized by porous boundaries and very few barriers to entry. Essentially, the “industry ” has been a very diffuse site where anyone with large sums of money and the right contacts has been able to make a film. The capacity for complete novices to enter film production has been a characteristic feature of filmmaking in India for decades—one that has been heavily criticized by the state and filmmakers alike (Karanth 1980; Patil 1951). This book examines the boundary-work indulged in by Hindi filmmakers in their efforts to recast filmmaking into the mold of a modern high-status profession.

Not only did I encounter complaints and criticism about films, filmmaking, and the workings of the industry, I discovered an inordinate amount of paternalism and condescension expressed toward audiences, specifically the “masses ”—the most common label for poor and workingclass audiences—who until the early 2000s were understood to comprise
the bulk of the film-viewing audience. For years, in media, state, and scholarly discourses, the masses were posited as the root cause of Hindi cinema’s narrative, thematic, and aesthetic deficiencies, and I discovered that the majority of filmmakers I met professed similar views.
¹⁶
One of my informants, a screenwriter who was one of the few members of the industry who did not share these views, was often critical of his colleagues’ representations
of
audiences. He related to me the advice he was given when he first began his career—the portions set off
in
em-dashes are his asides to me:

He went on to recount how filmmakers cited the high rates of illiteracy in India, which indexed a lack of formal education, as the root cause for the stunted intellectual development of the majority of audiences in India.

Such perceptions are rooted in the political discourse produced by the
postcolonial
Indian state, which has designated the vast majority of the population as “backward ” and in need of “upliftment ” or “improvement. ” Thomas Hansen points out that after Independence the national leadership produced a more openly paternalist discourse where the “ignorance and superstition ” of the masses were the main obstacles to national development (1999: 47). Therefore the responsibility of reforming social habits, of “civilizing ” the Indian masses, and inculcating the values of an Indian modernity became the task of state institutions, the political elite, and the social world of the
middle class
they represented (Hansen 1999).

The changes in filmmaking and film-viewing that I characterize as gentrification address the roots of these sentiments of disdain in both the production and consumption arenas. According to industry and media discourses, a more educated and socially elite class of people working in filmmaking has led the industry to become more respectable, producing a better caliber of films. These better films are being watched by a superior class of audiences, more commonly referred to as the “classes ”
or the “gentry ” in industry parlance, who are more amenable to experimentation and variety in cinema; therefore, according to industry discourses, elite producers and audiences engender better cinema. The process of rationalization also redresses the problem of disdain because with the entry of the Indian corporate sector and its attendant culture of written contracts, institutional finance, and standardized accounting practices, filmmaking begins to appear and operate more in line with dominant understandings of professional organization and discipline.

To state that large-scale commercial filmmaking is wracked with uncertainty may appear as an assertion of the obvious; however, how that uncertainty is experienced and managed varies across different film industries. While the “electronically mediated home ” is the most economically important site of film consumption for
Hollywood
(Caldwell 2008: 9), in India the movie theater is the most significant site of film consumption. Domestic theatrical box-office income provides the lion’s share of revenues— about 73 percent—in India (kpmg 2009); this is in contrast to Hollywood, where it is less than 15 percent (Caldwell 2008: 9). This reliance on the domestic box-office, however, is represented by the Indian financial sector as a problem that filmmaking in India must overcome in order to reduce the risks for investors (kpmg 2009). Reports by a variety of global consulting firms (Arthur Andersen 2000; kpmg 2009; Pricewaterhouse Coopers 2006a) keep touting the economic potential of alternate and ancillary “revenue streams ” such as home video, cable and satellite rights, and mobile telephony.

Although the driving force within the Bombay industry is box-office success, it is a difficult goal, achieved by few and pursued by many; the reported probability of a Hindi film achieving success at the box-office ranges from 10 to 15 percent every year—a figure calculated, for reasons that I explain in chapter five, from the point of view of the distributor and not the producer. One explanation filmmakers offer for this low success rate is that the majority of their audiences possess limited discretionary income and cannot afford to see each and every film in the cinema hall; another, more common, explanation is that such a low success rate is due to the poor quality of filmmaking. Additionally, until the advent of multiplexes, the economics of exhibition worked against films that explicitly catered to niche audiences, since single-screen theaters in India have very large capacities, ranging anywhere from 800 to 2,000 seats.

The process of gentrification, especially the growth of multiplexes, helps to reduce the perception of uncertainty associated with filmmaking by reducing the reliance on mass audiences and single-screen cinemas. Film exhibition practices in India are akin to theatrical or concert performance practices in the United States, with advance reservations, assigned seating, and differential rates of admission connected to seat location, so that most cinemas have two to four classes of
ticket prices
in ascending order: lower stalls, upper stalls, dress circle, and balcony. The discursive division of the viewing audience is integrally connected to the spatial hierarchies present inside the cinema hall; the “masses ” are those who sit in the cheaper seats located in the stalls, while the “classes ” occupy the more expensive balcony seats.

Multiplex theaters, the majority of which started being built from 2002 onward, have critically altered the film-viewing experience by charging very high rates of admission.
¹⁷
With their high ticket prices, social exclusivity, and material comforts, multiplexes have significantly transformed the economics of filmmaking. Despite constituting a small percentage of theaters in India, multiplexes account for a disproportionate share of reported box-office revenues. The importance of multiplexes within the
Hindi film industry
was highlighted further in 2009 when a dispute over revenue sharing between Hindi film producers, distributors and multiplex exhibitors resulted in a sixty-day moratorium on Hindi film releases. Although the conflict was with six national multiplex chains, the United Producer Distributors Forum—a coalition of the most powerful producers and distributors in the industry—withheld the release of their films throughout India and the world from April 4 until June 6, 2009, when the disputing parties finally reached a resolution.
¹⁸

Just as multiplexes have been represented within industry discourses as rescuing filmmaking from the poor and unpredictable mass audience, so too have international audiences, specifically within the South Asian diaspora, been touted as a route to rescue the industry from the overall vagaries of the domestic box-office. Since 1998, the international, or “overseas, ” territory has become one of the most profitable
markets for
Bombay filmmakers, with certain Hindi films enjoying greater commercial success in Great Britain and the United States than in India. For over a decade Hindi films have been appearing regularly in the United Kingdom’s weekly listing of the top-10 highest grossing films and in
Variety
’s weekly listing of the 60 highest grossing films in the United States. The success of Hindi cinema outside of India highlights the significance of
the South Asian diaspora as a market for the Bombay film industry, and certain filmmakers have explicitly articulated their desire to cater to
diasporic audiences
. Diasporic audiences especially in North America and the United Kingdom are perceived as more predictable than domestic audiences and, despite their smaller numbers, are attractive for filmmakers because of the disproportionate revenues generated by the sales of tickets in dollars and pounds.

While gentrification is a manifestation of the film industry’s quest to manage unpredictability in the arena of film consumption, the process of rationalization is its counterpart, addressing uncertainty in the
production process
. For decades, one of the main challenges faced by Hindi filmmakers was the high cost of capital to finance production. Since banks and other financial institutions shied away from funding filmmaking, due to the high-risk nature of the enterprise, capital had to be raised through an established network of financiers, who made money in a variety of other fields, such as construction, jewelry, diamond trading, real estate, or manufacturing. These private financiers charged from 36 to 48 percent interest annually, of which six months’ worth had to be paid on receipt of the loan. This funding setup resulted in a financially insecure and fragmented production scenario, in which films began production, but could take years to complete—while producers raised funds—or were sometimes abandoned altogether for lack of funding. There also was significant uncertainty within the production process concerning whether a film, once completed, actually got distributed.

The entry of the Indian corporate sector in the twenty-first century has infused previously unheard of amounts of capital into the Hindi film industry, making available consistent finance, so that the risk of a film not being completed has decreased drastically. Many of the new companies have integrated production and distribution, which reduces the uncertainties around the latter. Measures such as film insurance, coproductions, product placement, and marketing partnerships with highprofile consumer brands have also mitigated some of the financial uncertainties of filmmaking. Despite all of these new methods to rationalize the production process, the overall success-failure ratio of Hindi films at the box-office had not improved by the end of 2010. In fact, based on my analysis of the annual box-office overviews listed in the trade publication
Film Information
, the percentage of hits actually decreased over the fifteen-year period from 1995 to 2010. (See Table 6.) While the film industry has not necessarily improved the hit-flop ratio, it has been successful
in terms of attracting new
forms of
finance capital; this is due to efforts by its members to refashion the industry and filmmaking to target socially elite viewers domestically, and diasporic audiences internationally.

Given the highly unpredictable nature of filmmaking in India—from the uncertainty of audience response to the insecurity of finance for much of its history—the Hindi film industry has developed a variety of practices to manage the risks and uncertainty of filmmaking. Scholars have argued that “audience fictions, ” generated by producers to manage the inherent unpredictability of audience response, are an integral part of the media production process.
¹⁹
I contend that the uncertainty endemic in filmmaking also leads large media industries like the Hindi film industry to generate “
production fictions
, ” which are truisms, axioms, and structures of belief about what is necessary for commercial success. This book examines how both production fictions and audience fictions play an integral role in managing the uncertainty of Hindi filmmaking.