Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (49 page)

In addition to higher ticket rates allowing filmmakers to reap profits from smaller numbers, multiplexes have also introduced a level of transparency in the measurement and tabulation of commercial outcome that had not existed earlier. When I began my fieldwork, I encountered a great deal of criticism and resignation about the lack of reliable empirical knowledge regarding a film’s fate at the box-office. Rajjat Barjatya of Rajshri Films asserted, “Basically, nobody knows how much business a film has done. Under-reporting? There is no reporting. What is reported is just the box-office collections of the film, that too at the main stations of India, maybe that would be 10 percent or 20 percent of the total. Nobody knows how much the film has done, and because a normal film is sold to different distributors in different parts of the country, you can
never come to know” (Barjatya, interview, April 1996). The problem of verifiable data was connected to the undercapitalized nature of the film industry prior to the early 2000s, the fragmented relationship between the production, distribution, and exhibition sectors, and the high rates of entertainment tax borne by exhibitors. Such a production-distribution scenario presented numerous incentives for various agents located at different points in the circulation of a film to under-report or misrepresent the amount of revenue a film had earned. For example, the exhibitor had an incentive to under-report box-office receipts to evade paying entertainment tax. The distributor had an incentive to under-report a film’s earnings and not share it with the producer, as per the arrangement of the mg system. A producer had an incentive to downplay his profits in order to pay lower salaries. Producers and distributors were very matterof-fact about the deception and characterized it as the nature of the film business. Shyam Shroff asserted humorously in 1996, “You see there is cheating from stage one to stage last. You cheat producers; you cheat the government; you don’t pay taxes. There are no figures anywhere, and Indians are masters at cheating others” (Shyam Shroff, interview, April 1996). He pointed out that the only way to ascertain information about a film’s business was by constant personal interaction and monitoring, “I don’t sit down here with my computers and start getting figures. Nobody sends figures over here. I don’t know what is happening unless I go there. If I’m not on the spot, people take you for a big ride here” (Shyam Shroff, interview, April 1996).

Multiplexes represent the entry of organized industrial and finance capital, with its associated regimes of financial transparency and accountability, into the film industry. Either as divisions of larger conglomerates (BIG Cinemas), or as autonomous companies whose shares are listed and traded on the Bombay Stock Exchange (pvr Cinemas), multiplexes are located within a political economic framework where the visibility of revenue is privileged and rewarded. In fact, if the earlier structure of distribution and exhibition encouraged under-reporting of revenue, the current conjuncture offers incentives to show profit and growth, which are prized attributes of companies listed on stock markets. With computerized systems of ticketing and data collection, multiplexes enable a monitoring of a film’s business that is not solely dependent upon face-to-face interaction and social relations. This financial transparency works to the advantage of producers who are able to recover revenues due them from distributors, or in many cases by the exhibitors, because several commer
cially powerful producers have forgone the distributor and dealt directly with the multiplex chains since 2005.

The figures generated by these systems represent a form
of
concrete and verifiable knowledge contrasted with the ambiguity associated with single-screen theaters in regions outside large urban centers.
¹⁹
Shroff characterized the issue of data collection in large cities as one of utmost ease as a result of multiplexes: “Everything is computerized, you punch in a button and you get all the information out” (Shyam Shroff, interview, January 2005). While he asserted the complete veracity of data from multiplexes, stating that “you can take the figures blindfolded,” he also acknowledged that accurate information was still difficult to obtain from certain parts of India: “Certain cities, certain states, like
Bihar
. . . don’t disclose correct figures. It’s a vast country. You can’t just keep on tracking each and every cinema and each and every exhibitor” (Shyam Shroff, interview, May 2006). This inability to ascertain a comprehensive picture was a point of frustration for Shroff’s son, Shravan, who complained about the dearth of data regarding the entire exhibition sector: “Unfortunately what’s not happening in India up till now is that you don’t have an agency which is actually collecting all the information from the theaters. They are actually collecting all the information from the multiplexes, but they aren’t collecting the information from the rest of the theaters” (Shravan Shroff, interview, May 2006). This lack of data was framed as a problem of technology, anachronistic attitudes, and disorganization, where the fault lay squarely with the single-screen theaters. He continued, “Now the problem is that the rest of the theaters are manual, so an agency can’t sign off till the time they organize themselves. It’s a classic problem of being in the twenty-first century, but with many of the old screens being back in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. That’s going to continue being a problem till the older guys organize themselves or the number of newer guys is much more than the older guys. That’s the reason that all the multiplex data is publicly available and that’s what the Yes Bank reports and the ficci reports actually base themselves on, but unfortunately for the older screens we don’t have that data” (Shravan Shroff, interview, May 2006).

Set against the backdrop of the difficulty of data collection and the dearth of accurate empirical knowledge about aggregate box-office outcome in India, multiplexes operate as sites of financial discipline and empirical visibility. I contend that the economic and symbolic value of multiplexes and their audiences arise from their position within new regimes
of accounting and data production, which impart the semblance of objectivity, rationality, and modernity. Multiplex audiences are important to the film industry not simply because they represent higher revenues, but because they can be
counted accurately
; the ability to be enumerated is converted into knowledge that operates as a form of capital within the world of organized corporate finance and its discursive production of company annual reports, red herring prospectuses, and investment analyses. This knowledge capital is then used to attract investment capital into the film industry through the media of formal research reports prepared by investment banks and consulting firms, which since 2000 have been projecting the immense economic potential of filmmaking in India.
²⁰

Not only have multiplexes made it easier for producers and distributors to monitor box-office earnings, they have also restructured the relationship between distributors and exhibitors for the former’s benefit. Until the advent of multiplexes, the dominant exhibition arrangement was the practice of fixed theater rental. Due to a shortage of screens, exhibitors had the upper hand, and regardless of occupancy rates they charged distributors a fixed rent. This practice was cited by filmmakers in my early fieldwork as one of the reasons that films had to be successful outside of large urban centers like Bombay, where onerous theater rentals limited the revenues accruing to distributors and producers. Producer/ director Rakesh Roshan declared, “A movie that just does well in Bombay is not a hit. If a movie does well even 100 percent, 70 to 80 percent goes in the theater hall. What you get is nothing—moneywise. You only get a reputation in Bombay. It’s in those places where the theater rate is 10,000 rupees, and the collection is 1
lakh
[100,000 rupees]. Here it’s reverse. The theater rate is 90,000 rupees; collection is 10,000 rupees” (Roshan, interview, May 1996). With the emergence of multiplexes, the expansion of screens in urban centers recast the supply and demand equation in favor of distributors and producers, leading to a system of percentage-based revenue sharing with exhibitors. This has had a major impact
on
distributors’ and producers’ earnings, because it enables them to recoup revenues even in situations of low theater occupancies, which they were unable to do earlier. Shyam Shroff asserted, “Even if your movie is flopping, you’re getting something out of it.” The idea that a “flopping” film—which in this context refers to lower than expected audience turnout—could still garner revenues for the distributor, demonstrates how multiplexes have crucially recalibrated notions of commercial viability within the film in
dustry. These altered understandings have an impact on how filmmakers regard the necessity and attainability of universal hits, which I address in the next section.

A small editorial titled “Why No Universally Appealing Film?” appearing in an issue of
Film Information
from October 10, 2009, discussed the divergent fate of several films of that year, noting that the films that succeeded with multiplex audiences did not succeed with single-screen audiences and vice versa. It ended by posing the following questions: “With the tastes of the two kinds of audience being very different, and the difference seeming to be only growing with each passing week, is it becoming difficult for filmmakers to make a universal hit—a film which appeals to every class and section of the audience? Or is it that nobody is trying hard enough?” (“Why No Universally Appealing Film?” 2009). The contrast with the January 2000 editorial, discussed at the beginning of the chapter, is telling: while the earlier editorial predicted dire consequences for the health of the film industry if filmmakers did not work harder to try to make more universally appealing films, the comments from 2009 pose the issue as a set of rhetorical questions rather than as an imperative. The reasons for the remarkable change in tone has to do with the restructured relationships between production, distribution, and exhibition within the Hindi film industry, which in turn have redefined notions of success within the industry.

Just as the growing importance of overseas markets and increased revenue potential of satellite and music rights had reduced the value of certain distribution territories within India, the multiplex has diminished the significance of the mass audience in filmmakers’ imaginations. With the multiplex’s skewed economics, filmmakers do not even have to attempt to appeal to the “masses.” Screenwriter Anjum Rajabali affirmed my hunch that filmmakers appeared unconcerned with the majority of audiences in India. As I was starting to ask a question about this, Rajabali jumped in:

In addition to reproaching producers and directors for narrowing their target audience, Rajabali is also critical of how filmmakers regard territorial distributors as metonyms for specific audiences. He continued to discuss how most filmmakers had become concerned with what he termed “a very narrow band of the audience,” and did not attempt to think about what it entailed to appeal broadly across India. With the advent of multiplexes, he felt what was previously regarded as a limitation—the inability to make films that appealed to diverse audiences across India—had been turned into a virtue: “Okay, what is the Indian script? What is a pan-Indian script? Can we at least think of that? Instead of doing that, they said, ‘Let’s work out a way where we don’t need to think about it,’ you see, and the multiplex culture lent itself very, very admirably and very eagerly to that and they grasped it. . . Your observation is absolutely spot-on that they don’t feel the need to do that and they feel very relaxed about it” (Rajabali, interview, May 2006).

The marginal nature of mass audiences in filmmakers’ imaginations corresponded with the reduced aspiration for universal hits as the penultimate criterion of success. When I asked Vikram Bhatt whether a universal hit was desirable or possible, he replied in the affirmative, but then qualified the idea of a universal hit by differentiating between an “all-India hit” and an “A-B-C center hit.” The A-B-C classification of regions within distribution territories refers to the revenue earning and revenue-collection potential of particular areas, as well as an audience category within the film industry’s taxonomy. He explained that while an all-India hit was still possible, the A-B-C center hit was nearly impossible, because of the vastly different taste cultures between audiences who frequent multiplexes in the A-class centers versus those audiences in the other two centers, who are mired in the past—as evident from their taste in films. Bhatt stated, “It is more difficult to make it an A-B-C center hit. An all-India hit would also include Patna, which is now a multiplex center. But to make an A-B-C center hit is very difficult. I mean look at the films that Suneel Darshan makes—
Dosti
[Friendship] and all these kinds of films, they do well in the Hindi belt, North belt, but then they completely miss out on the multiplex, because the multiplex audience thinks these are some films from the ’70s or ’80s, which has an old conno
tation” ( Vikram Bhatt, interview, January 2006). In Bhatt’s statements, the advent of multiplexes in Patna, the capital city of the state of Bihar, upgrades and recasts at least one site in this most reviled and belittled region into a valued entity.