Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (41 page)

A feature titled “Are Corporates Helping the Film Industry or Harming It?” written by Komal Nahta for the Diwali special issue of
Film Information
in 2007, articulates these new
production fictions
. While pointing out the benefits that have accrued to the film industry because of corporatization, namely the large infusions of capital—or “money power” in Nahta’s words—which have enabled production to be more streamlined, post-production technology to be improved, and exhibition infra
structure to be upgraded, Nahta also asserts that money corrupts and leads to substandard filmmaking. “Corporatisation has also resulted in the content of films taking a backseat,” Nahta claims. “Excess money has made several creative people lax, and secondly money is being thrown around for anybody and everybody to make films, as a result of which even mediocre and below-average directors and writers are churning out films which are sub-standard” (2007: 31). Thus, too much money can be as much of a reason for box-office failure as too little money, which was the scenario in the past. The second criticism of the corporates has to do with their lack of knowledge and experience with filmmaking, apparent from statements like, “Most of the corporate houses don’t have the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff”; or “The problem with corporates is that they’ve appointed outsiders in top creative posts” (2007: 31). In pointing out that the “film business is not so easy that rank newcomers can learn it,” Nahta indulges in the longstanding practice of boundarywork discussed in chapter five.

Perhaps the most intriguing criticism has to do with the corporates’ lack of passion and their excessive commercialism: “The greatest harm the corporate culture has done to the film industry is to have made film production and distribution a trading business. Of course film production and distribution are commercial businesses, but there’s art involved, at least in production. Where there’s art, there must be passion. But passion has gone out of the window after corporates have made an entry into Bollywood. With an eye on profits and only on turnovers and top lines, corporates are trying to make more money by trading in films rather than by making and releasing films” (Nahta 2007: 32). The “trading” that Nahta is referring to is the practice of buying and selling distribution rights as a profit-generating enterprise on its own: that is, a company buys the distribution rights for a film and then sells it to another company for a profit, rather than undertaking the logistics of distributing the film itself. This sort of buying and selling of rights is a well-established practice within the film industry, but in the past these transactions were undertaken to generate working capital rather than profit.
³⁶

According to Nahta, the corporate trading in films is a major reason for the departure of passion from filmmaking. He does not, however, single out corporate producers, but holds others accountable as well: “For the corporate producer, the lack of passion is still somewhat understandable, but what is unpardonable is the missing passion of the creator or the director, and also the actor. Directors these days are trying to amass as much wealth as possible, actors are busy running to the bank with fat pay
cheques, and producers whose films are acquired by corporates are only interested in wrapping up their projects so that they can plunder another corporate for their next film” (Nahta 2007: 32). As an analyst of what is most commonly referred to as “commercial cinema,” Nahta’s criticisms are curious, for they in essence argue that the reason for commercial failure is excessive commercialism, that is, films are not making money at the box-office because filmmakers are only interested in making money. If more films were deemed as hits, then these very attributes would be celebrated as legitimate modi operandi, for they would be interpreted as signs of filmmakers’ commitment or “passion.”

Such assertions about passion, knowledge, experience, and quality are all ways that members of the film industry attempt to make sense of the uncertainty of the film business—to impose some meaning and order on the highly unpredictable and disorderly commercial universe in which they operate. These production fictions enable filmmakers to continue with their enterprise, for they provide a way to explain the randomness that marks commercial filmmaking. While the insecurities around finance capital and distribution outlets have been resolved in the Hindi film industry, due to the phenomena of corporatization and growth of multiplexes, the ultimate site of unpredictability, which continues to vex filmmakers, is that of the audience. From a discussion of the Hindi film industry’s production fictions and its practices of managing uncertainty, I now turn to an examination of the industry’s audience fictions and practices of audience-making in the following two chapters.

In October 2000, during one of my visits to Bombay, I dropped by an editing studio to watch Tarun Kumar put together television trailers, referred to as “TV promos,” for his upcoming film. The film was a sexually charged thriller/murder mystery, which Tarun kept referring to as his “
Last Tango in Paris
.” Discussing the commercial prospects of his film, he declared, “You know this
Last Tango in Paris
; I know
Bihar
will get sold immediately.”
¹
The 30-second spot Tarun was editing was a provocative one, where it was clear that the lead characters were engaged in sexual activity, though nothing explicit was being depicted.

Tarun then seemed to have second thoughts about how he had cut the spot: “You know, I think the family audience is not going to go for this. What will happen to my family audience with this kind of trailer?”

He turned to one of his assistants and asked, “What would your mom think about this film if she saw this promo?”

The assistant said, “I don’t know, but she’ll definitely raise one of her eyebrows.”

Tarun responded, “I know my servant will definitely want to go see this. You know, if I try to please the aunties, I’ll end up disappointing the servants.”

In this chapter and the next, I examine how Hindi filmmakers imagine, classify, and discuss their audiences as an essential manifestation of all three features of the film industry’s produc
tion culture: sentiments of disdain, practices of distinction, and efforts to manage uncertainty. Peppered with references to distinct audiences with distinct taste cultures (Bihar, family audience, aunties, and servants), Tarun Kumar’s conversation in the editing studio illustrates the relevance of social categories, such as region, generation, gender, and class, as well as the dominance of binary oppositions—Bihar vs. family audience, aunties vs. servants—in the Hindi film industry’s creation of a taxonomy of the film-viewing public. Rather than originating from the well-established tradition of market research utilized by the print media, television, advertising, and consumer product industries in India, the film industry’s audience classifications, which are broadly encompassing and highly imprecise, emerge from a combination of intuition, regional sterotypes, and developmentalist perceptions of how education, occupation, and residence shape subjectivities and thus taste cultures.
²
All of the various fragmentations of the audience reproduce a larger and more enduring binary of the “masses” and the “classes” as the two main audiences of Hindi cinema. Filmmakers regard these constituencies as fundamentally in opposition, with completely incommensurable tastes and worldviews, which is the basis of Kumar’s frustration in the editing studio. Despite this great divide between its audiences, for most of its history the Hindi film industry has aimed to bridge or transcend these gaps, rather than exclusively target any particular audience category.

Underlying the film industry’s audience classifications is a theory of film spectatorship, which is intimately associated with commercial outcome. Commercial outcome is regarded as an accurate barometer of social attitudes, norms, and sensibilities, and therefore serves as a source of knowledge to filmmakers about audiences. Box-office success or failure either reinforces or revises filmmakers’ assumptions about audiences— from their composition and tastes, to intellectual abilities and codes of morality; therefore, I argue that for Hindi filmmakers the box-office serves as a metonym for the practice of film consumption and operates as a technology of “social envisioning”—a phrase coined by John Durham Peters to refer to modern mass media’s promise of representing unseeable social totalities, which “make society imaginable to itself” (1997). Box-office figures represent the unseeable totality that is the cinemagoing audience, and thus mediate Hindi filmmakers’ relationship to abstract collectivities such as “Indian society.”
³
This view is manifest in the industry both in the way that commercial outcome produces a sociology of the viewing audience, and in the manner in which that outcome is consistently interpreted through culturalist, rather than economic, logics.

An important site for the operation of culturalist logics is the category of commercial success known as the “
universal hit
,” which refers to a film understood to have had broad audience appeal based on its uniform box-office performance throughout India. Rather than a transparent economic classification, however, the category serves as a social index for Hindi filmmakers—signifying a collective experience rooted in a shared, essential identity that transcends differences of class, region, gender, and generation; yet the ideal of a universal hit is very difficult to achieve in practice, and I detail filmmakers’ discourses about the challenges and obstacles involved in attaining such a hit. The challenges articulated by filmmakers reveal their understandings about the relationship between film consumption and subjectivity, demonstrating their role as cultural theorists producing “neighboring epistemologies” to anthropologists;
⁴
even though their pronouncements about audiences appear paternalistic and reductive, the underlying premise (rather than the conclusions)— interpreting film consumption as an expression of subjectivity or identity— is not dissimilar from the scholarship on audiences and media consumption.
⁵

This chapter begins with an elaboration of the film industry’s theories of
spectatorship
. My use of the term “spectatorship,” which has been closely associated with the discipline of film studies and a particular mode of formal textual analysis, is intentional—just as the construction of the spectator in classical film theory bears little resemblance to the actual viewers of films (Hansen 1991; Mayne 1993; Willemen 1994), Hindi filmmakers’ ideas about audiences are equally distant.
⁶
Whereas the former analyzes the formal and narrative properties of a film text to delineate an ideal type or imagined spectator, the latter analyzes box-office outcome to construct particular spectators. After discussing how filmmakers theorize spectatorship and interpret commercial outcome through culturalist logics, I detail the various modes of classifying and categorizing the audience for Hindi cinema. Finally, I describe the desire expressed by filmmakers in the late 1990s, both to make a film that resonated with diverse audiences and the constraints they faced in trying to achieve a universal hit. In addition to describing the dominant assumptions and beliefs Hindi filmmakers hold about their audiences, this chapter also lays the foundation to comprehend the full impact of the discussion in the following chapter on the shift in audience imaginaries that occurs after 2000, including the changing significance of the universal hit.

Members of the industry discuss viewers’ relationship to, and engagement with, cinema through the related concepts of identification and acceptance. While identification encompasses a range of meanings, from literal similarities between audiences and the characters onscreen to a familiarity with the circumstances, scenarios, and conflicts depicted in the film, it is represented as the basis of audience pleasure; therefore it is integral to commercial success. Javed Akhtar, a highly successful screenwriter, lyricist, and poet, explained the concept as a delicate balance of the familiar and the fantastic: “Whatever is happening on the screen should make him laugh, should make him cry; he should be able to identify with it. He should be able to fantasize and at the same time: if it is too real, then he won’t like it. If it has nothing to do with reality, then too he won’t like it!” (Akhtar, interview, November 1996). From a Hindi filmmaker’s point of view, identification is not dependent upon an aesthetic of social realism—or even a realistic mise-en-scène—which could impede pleasure according to Akhtar; it is more dependent on whether the portrayal of the joys, sorrows, and dilemmas faced by the characters are able to resonate with—rather than replicate—audiences’ own experiences.

The concept of acceptance, despite being located more in the realm of moral codes and kinship norms, is related in that it is often the precondition for identification. As apparent from Tarun Kumar’s comments about the family audience and “aunties,” filmmakers operate with a distinct and internalized sense of boundaries and limits to what is and is not permissible.
⁷
Acceptance, by which filmmakers mean audiences’ lack of objection to a film’s plot, theme, or characterizations, is most palpable and salient when it appears to be absent, signified by a film’s poor showing at the box-office. Pamela Chopra discussed the disappointing commercial performance of
Silsila
(Affair) and
Lamhe
, directed by her husband, Yash, in these terms. Characterizing both as “good films,” Chopra surmised that they were not successful because they were a “tad bit extra different.” She asserted that one had to be very careful with, and sensitive to, dominant codes of
morality
. Referring to
Silsila
, which was about an extramarital affair, Chopra said, “You cannot afford to ride roughshod over very, very basic emotions. The marriage is a very, very sacred institution in India, and when the director created sympathy for the two lovers who were willing to go outside their marriage and continue their love affair, he didn’t carry the audience with him” (Pamela Chopra, interview, 26 March 1996). She speculated that those audiences who did feel sympathy for the pro
tagonists would still not accept the film, because their potential identification made them feel guilty and uncomfortable. She offered a similar reasoning for
Lamhe
where the plot of a much older man falling in love with a much younger woman was posed as another morally uncomfortable situation for audiences.

Both forms of engagement with a film are therefore understood and measured by members of the industry in terms of the commercial performance of films; commercial success (“hit”) or failure (“flop”) is read as evidence of viewers’ propensity to accept, or identify with, a particular film. Director Vikram Bhatt elaborated on how commercial outcome provides filmmakers with the necessary feedback about audience likes and dislikes: “They constantly reject what they don’t want, till they accept that one film, and the filmmakers understand—‘Oh so this is what they want.’ And that’s why every Hindi film that becomes a hit . . . is a pointer in the right direction that tells you—‘Oh this is what they want; this is what they’re feeling right now,’ which doesn’t mean that the repetition of the same thing will work, but at least it’s a step in the right direction” (Vikram Bhatt, interview, January 2006). Bhatt’s remarks reveal how hits and flops are the main way that Hindi filmmakers know, understand, and relate to their audiences.

Commercial outcome carries such heavy social significance because the ratio of hits to flops is very low, and members of the industry until the early 2000s acknowledged that the majority of viewers could not afford to see each and every film in the theater. Komal Nahta, the editor of the trade weekly
Film Information
, stated bluntly, “India is basically a poor country. Everybody has limited purchasing power—especially the worker category: they cannot be expected to see every film” (Nahta, interview, September 1996). While film viewing is represented as entertainment, the decision to see a particular film is not viewed as frivolous. Since going to see a film in a theater involves an investment of time and money, the act of choosing a film is accorded tremendous agentive power and symbolic significance by filmmakers. Producer/director Aditya Chopra characterized how movie-going in India, in contrast to the United States, was not a trivial matter, due to the limited discretionary income most Indians possessed:

The most noticeable manifestation of this serious attention to commercial outcome is that filmmakers interpret film consumption through culturalist rather than economic logics. The act of purchasing a ticket is understood as an endorsement or appreciation of that particular film and its stars. For example, in an interview published in
Film Information
, Shah Rukh Khan related that a director had once told him, “As soon as someone has bought a ticket to see your film, he has already treated you as a god, he has put you on a very, very high pedestal” (Nahta 2000b: 32); therefore, a film designated as a hit signifies that it enjoys wide-ranging popularity and adulation, while a flop signifies broad displeasure and censure on the part of viewers. Producer/director/star Aamir Khan discussed how commercial outcome operated as a form of imperfect communication between audiences and filmmakers:

However, as I discussed in chapter five, the classification of commercial outcome and the determination of box-office success is entangled with the distributor and his pricing decisions rather than gross box-office receipts or number of tickets sold. The categories of hit and flop are generated when distributors’ expectations are disrupted. High expectations can yield a flop, while low expectations can yield a hit. The issue of
mismatched expectations is very common in the case of stars, as Taran Adarsh, the editor of
Trade Guide
, made explicit, “If a big star cast film fetches 75 percent [occupancies in a cinema] in the first week, it’s termed disaster. You have to have 95 percent. . . to have the hit category. On the other hand, a small picture, if it fetches 80 percent, it is considered good, but for a big film to fetch 75 percent or 85 percent is very bad!” (Adarsh, interview, September 1996).

By highlighting the distributor’s role in order to question the avowed transparency and the culturally indexical interpretation of commercial outcome, my intention is not to imply that a different mechanism to measure commercial outcome would somehow yield truer insights or more accurate knowledge about film audiences. Media scholars have long pointed out that audiences for large-scale culture industries such as television are literally unknowable (Ang 1991; Hartley 1987), and the same conclusions can be applied to film audiences. Even if aggregate tickets sold or gross box-office receipts are the criteria for categorizing commercial outcome, all that they quantify is the act of purchasing a ticket, which at the most measures awareness and interest in a film, but not the more complex processes of reception. Box-office data does not yield information about viewers’ intentions, perceptions, experiences, likes, or dislikes; in fact, displeasure with a film, once it has been viewed in a theater, can never really be quantified, since the action of purchasing a ticket gets registered and interpreted as audience approval.
⁸
While box-office outcome at best can be understood as an index of a commercial transaction, Hindi filmmakers interpret it as an indexical expression of social identity and subjectivity.

The case of
Hum Aapke Hain Koun!
(HAHK) and its success offers a good example of this sort of socially indexical interpretation. As discussed in chapter two, the film’s stupendous success took the industry by surprise. I asked members of the industry about why they thought the film did so well, especially since it had initially been dismissed as a “wedding video,” by many filmmakers and commentators. Rather than focusing on the carefully planned release
strategy of
the producers, who were also the film’s distributors, everyone I spoke with explained the film’s success in culturalist logics. For example, screenwriter Sachin Bhaumick asserted, “We’ve progressed so much; we’re sending rockets in the sky, but still a family picture like
Hum Aapke Hain Koun!
is doing very well, because audiences still value these things” (Bhaumick, interview, October 1996).

The fact that the producer/distributors released a limited number of film prints, introduced a new form of television publicity, were allowed
to raise ticket prices significantly, went against the prevailing norms of the time by withholding the videocassettes, and instituted safeguards to curb video piracy, were not as relevant to filmmakers’ explanations for the film’s success as the discourse of “Indian values and emotions.”
⁹
For members of the film industry, the overwhelming success of HAHK demonstrated an affirmation of traditional Indian values—that despite all of the changes occurring in post-liberalization India, certain core values about the importance of the extended family—as well as traditional gender and filial roles—remained the same.

Although the unique release strategy of HAHK was remarked upon, it was never put forth as the central explanation in the film’s overall success, and neither was the fact that the film’s producers, Rajshri Productions, also happened to be its India-wide distributors. According to Komal Nahta of
Film Information
, HAHK was a “slow starter” and written off by the industry as a flop in the first week, but gradually its business picked up and screenings were running at full capacity. Nahta explained how, despite a disappointing opening, the film remained in theaters because, “Rajshris are the distributors themselves; they don’t sell their film to anybody, so they had the holding capacity. They were so confident: they couldn’t care less what people were saying” (Nahta, interview, September 1996). While the example of HAHK demonstrates the commercial advantage achieved by integrating production with distribution when feasible (not all production companies have the necessary access to, or reserves of, finance capital to self-distribute their films), it did not set a precedent in restructuring the relationship between production and distribution, nor did it initiate a wide-scale discussion about the importance of release and marketing strategies within the industry. Although certain practices associated with the film’s distribution and publicity, such as delaying the release of videocassettes and new types of television trailers, became the norm within the industry, the main impact of HAHK was at the thematic, narrative, and aesthetic level.

The discussion precipitated by hahk’s success was mainly carried out in a cultural and social register, revising ideas about audience tastes, preferences, and demands. Several filmmakers related to me that the success of HAHK communicated that audiences were fed up with the standard fare of sex, violence, vendetta, and action. Although Komal Nahta mentioned the importance of the Rajshri’s persistence in keeping the film in theaters, despite its weak opening, he explained the film’s success by stating, “
Hum Aapke Hain Koun!
: it was just our roots, Indian weddings, and plain emotions that made it a big hit” (Nahta, interview, September
1996). I argue that this reliance on culturalist explanations is linked to the tremendous uncertainty of the business of cinema, where it is nearly impossible for the film industry (and others) to predict box-office outcome. This very uncertainty can also entice individuals into the film industry, like R. Mohan, the entrepreneur introduced in chapter five, who decided to dabble in film production after making his fortunes in paper goods and mosquito repellent. Mohan explained that unlike other businesses, filmmaking had the potential for incomparably high returns: “One
Dilwale
Dulhaniya
can get 200
crores
[2 billion rupees] or something. . . that’s the figure they’re talking about, which happens in no other business. There, input is fixed; return is also fixed. We know that from one kilo of paper how much we make, so in order to break even, we know this many kilos have to be sold. You won’t get returns like a
Dilwale—
you’ll not get a jackpot out of that. Only Hindi films are jackpots” (Mohan, interview, May 1996).