Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (40 page)

Finally, since 2000, established and successful producers have been able to offset the risk of financial loss by pricing the distribution, satellite, and music rights for their films in such a manner as to earn a profit prior to the film’s release. These “table profits,” as they are referred to in the industry, have reached significant proportions because the corporates who have entered distribution are willing to pay enormous sums for a film’s rights; these corporate distributors often recover—and profit from—their investment by selling the rights they have acquired from the producer to the independent territorial distributor, who is still necessary to implement the actual release of a film, especially in regions far from Bombay or other major urban centers. Despite all of these measures, a film’s performance at the box-office continues to play a crucial role in determining future commercial transactions within the industry. A producer with a poor track record at the box-office will be unable to find distributors or unable to negotiate favorable terms for himself regarding the sale of his film’s rights. One example that is being characterized as unprecedented by the trade press has to do with
Kites
. Its disappointing fate at the box-office prompted the satellite television channel that had bought the telecast rights of the film from its worldwide distributor to renegotiate the terms of its sale: the channel insisted on reducing the price by 33 percent or it threatened to back out of the sale completely (“Kites Satellite Deal Renegotiated” 2010).

The advent of corporatization has either brought about or coincided with other changes in the working style of the Hindi film industry, such as the presence of more women in the spaces of production, more upscale and
clearly delineated office spaces, and a greater attention to post-production and special effects. Efforts to represent filmmaking in India as akin to global norms is apparent in the shifts that have occurred in the job titles, noticeable in the opening and closing credit sequences: art director has become production designer; dance director has become choreographer; cinematographer has become director of photography; and spot boys have become production boys or “valets.” Kinship and social networks, however, continue to remain strong in the corporatized scenario, extending beyond the creative sectors of filmmaking. Many publicly listed production, distribution, and exhibition companies have their founders’ children or other family members working in key executive positions.
³²
The family business quality of many of the companies involved in filmmaking is a phenomenon that continues to transcend the film industry and is part of the larger landscape of commercial activity in India.

Another feature of the industry that has not changed is the importance attributed to stars as a mode of risk management. When asked about the challenges that the film industry continued to face, Shravan Shroff responded, “The number of big actors that we have is very limited and those actors don’t do too much work. So when you come down to the second rung of actors, unfortunately, those guys don’t guarantee you a big box-office hit or opening. So you know you might pay a lot of money, but you are not guaranteed a sale of the movie or alternatively a big opening. So that’s unfortunate, because there aren’t too many big actors. So that’s a constant challenge, about going after those—the big ones” (Shravan Shroff, interview, May 2006). Since the inception of my fieldwork, at any given point of time only about five or six actors are deemed top stars by the industry—“ big actors,” in Shroff’s terms—based on their box-office draw and performance.
³³
The “shortage” of top male stars was a lament that I heard, even in 1996, and appeared to contradict the assertion, repeated ad nauseum by industry members and journalists in the general and trade press as well as in conversations with me, that stars do not guarantee commercial success.
Film Information
editor Komal Nahta qualified the ubiquitous self-criticism within the industry about the undue prominence granted to male stars—signified by their power to green-light a project and the high remunerations they command—against the relative neglect of the script.

Unlike Plus Channel in the mid-1990s, which explicitly articulated its identity as a production company that would focus on narrative content rather than spending money on stars, the current crop of corporate producers are not interested in bypassing or undercutting the dominance of stars within the industry.

The greater financial resources of the corporate producers, and their ability to withstand some loss, are not being deployed to cultivate new acting talent, but to attract existing male stars with multiple film contracts promising unprecedented remunerations—anywhere from 100 to 350 million rupees per film, in contrast to rates in the early 2000s, which ranged between 10 and 30 million rupees per film for top male stars.
³⁴
The “prices”—remunerations in industry parlance—paid to leading stars by corporate producers, are a constant object of criticism within the trade press. For example, an issue of
Film Information
had a special feature article detailing the experiences of two actors and how their fees skyrocketed after their interaction with corporate producers who were willing to pay any price the stars quoted. The article concluded with the following statements:

• —
  Corporates are desperate to get the top-of-the-line actors to work in their films.
  
• —
  Stars can demand any fancy price without being questioned. There’s nothing [such] as his last price or [a] basis [for] his new price.
  
• —
  Like there used to be music companies in the late-80s and early and mid-90s, there are corporates now [who] are offering highly skewed prices to actors. The difference is that audio companies never spoilt the market half as much as the corporates are doing today. (“A Tale of Akshay and Akshaye” 2008)
  

The criticism that corporates are “spoiling” the market harkens back to criticisms of “proposal-makers” and neophyte producers, who destabilized the social and economic structures of the film industry by wooing stars for their projects with large sums of money.

In fact, the representation of corporate production companies as agents that would radically revolutionize Hindi filmmaking, so rife in the international and Indian press between 2002 and 2004, was quickly revised by 2005, after the films produced by these new companies did not fare too well at the box-office. An article in
Variety
titled “Suits stumble at B.O.” asserted, “Corporate is still a Bollywood buzzword, but the transformation hasn’t produced bigger grosses or better movies. . . despite the big bucks, streamlined operations, and nattily dressed execs, corporate entities have still not managed to bowl over the box-office. The blockbuster remains the property of Bollywood’s old guard” (Chopra 2005).
Table 5
lists the top box-office hits from 2003 to 2010, along with their producers and banners; among these 33 films, only 3—listed in bold— have been solo productions by the new corporate production companies that entered the industry in the early 2000s. The rest of the films have been made by individual producers or producer/directors with many years of experience within the film industry many of whom are secondor third-generation filmmakers (the names marked by an asterisk in the table).

Rather than a lack of organization, professionalism, or discipline, the corporates’ commercial failures were attributed to bad judgment and inexperience. In this manner, there was a remarkable similarity with the criticisms, leveled in an earlier era, about the ease with which individuals became producers. In 1996, the first attempts at corporatization were hailed as transforming filmmaking into a properly exclusive activity that would rightfully be the domain of the truly competent and knowledgeable. For example, Sunil Manchanda, a joint managing director of mad Entertainment, asserted in
Outlook
’s feature about the corporatization of the film industry, “No longer is it viable for a rich farmer from Punjab to produce a film at random and partake in the glamour world of films”

(in Annuncio 1996). Nearly a decade later, Indu Mirani, a trade magazine journalist, asserted in an international wire-service story about the poor rate of success of corporate producers: “These companies were worse than some of those truck transporters who put their surplus money into films” (“Bollywood’s attempt to escape murky past” 2005). Such criticisms are completely connected to commercial outcome, for if the films made by these new companies had succeeded at the box-office, then these companies would have been lauded for transforming filmmaking, along with their organizational structure and working style, as the reason for their success. A text box appeared in the issue of
Film Information
from June 19, 2010, which offers a snide and critical commentary about the
corporate production/distribution houses, asserting that those working in these new companies do not have the requisite knowledge or experience of filmmaking (statements ii and iii) and are culturally alienated (statement xii). Asserting that it “comes from a keen observer of the corporate culture in the film industry,” the text box stated:

TABLE 5
TOP BOX-OFFICE SUCCESSES 2003–2010

As the overall hit-flop ratio
has not improved since the advent of corporatization, illustrated by
Table 6
, and in fact, with more films produced the percentage of hits has actually decreased, certain production fictions
have remained resilient within the industry: stars alone cannot guarantee hits; the script is “king”; proper marketing is necessary for a film; or too much promotion can ruin a film’s chances at the box-office. Since corporate producers have not been more successful in their ventures than independent producers, some new production fictions have been articulated to make sense of this scenario. While industry members asserted, in the late 1990s, that poor planning and the haphazard way of making films were the reasons for the poor rates of commercial success in the industry,
³⁵
since the mid-2000s, the lack of knowledge and absence of “passion” have been offered as the reasons for the continued commercial disappointments, despite the introduction of organization, discipline, and professionalism into the industry.

TABLE 6
RATIO OF HITS TO FLOPS, 1995–2000, 2005–2010

Source
: Based on data compiled from
Film Information
, January 6, 1996–January 5, 2002; January 7, 2006–January 7, 2011.