May 25, 2008

Scene Stealer

Indie Films, Coming to a Small Screen Near You

By BROOKS BARNES

MORE than 3,600 independent features were submitted to the Sundance Film Festival this year, a record driven by inexpensive digital equipment and an abundance of film financing. But only a couple hundred of those movies will ever be distributed in theaters. Does that mean that almost 90 percent of indies have zero value?

The movie business has been grappling with that question as the number of specialty films soars but the number of screens stays roughly the same. The two big puzzles nobody seems able to solve are how to have more of these films seen and how to make money doing it. As it is, several thousand films produced each year — ranging in cost from a few thousand dollars to a few million — are just eating capital.

One of moviedom’s savviest executives thinks he has a solution.

John Sloss is one of the top sales agents for independent films. Mr. Sloss, 52, has handled the sale of such diamonds in the rough as “Little Miss Sunshine,” the perky 2006 film about a family traveling to a children’s beauty pageant. He sold the $8 million project to Fox Searchlight for $10.5 million, setting a festival price record that still holds.

Now Mr. Sloss and his New York company, Cinetic Media, are rolling out a new business called Cinetic Rights Management. The executive and his team — he just hired Matt Dentler, the highly regarded director of the South by Southwest film festival — will act as sales agents for filmmakers who have been left on the sidelines. And here is the twist: The goal is not exhibition in theaters but rather distribution via the Internet and other growing delivery routes like cable on-demand services.

The idea is to create value for that other 90 percent of independent movies, or at least for a good chunk of them.

“We’re going to make it our business to go to every portal, every mobile provider, every video-on-demand service and make the most aggressive deals we can,” Mr. Sloss said last week in a telephone interview from France, where he was working the Cannes International Film Festival.

The company will charge a commission that will vary depending on the type of film. (Mr. Sloss would not reveal his planned cut, but Cinetec takes between 7.5 percent and 15 percent on traditional deals.) While no single title is likely to deliver a windfall — unless it breaks through as an unexpected hit — the company is betting that the “long tail” of niche content on the Internet will, in aggregate, produce meaningful income.

The company has raised outside capital to help pay for the venture. To sign up clients, it has already gone back through five years’ worth of films that did not make it to theaters.

His new unit won’t focus only on cinematic obscurities. Distribution in new media is equally important for the upper echelon of indies — Cinetic’s primary business — and companies or individuals with film libraries, Mr. Sloss said. For instance, the company will shop the 1994 movie “Hoop Dreams” to Internet portals. “This will appeal to library holders who don’t want to employ a legion of people to go out and make deals with the 100, 200, 300 portals,” he said.

It’s an idea loaded with challenges, starting with how films deemed unsuitable for an art-house theater will gain notice online. Standing out among the hundreds of options on an on-demand menu won’t be much easier. So far, Web sites that offer movies have failed to gain much traction with consumers. And do people really want to watch an arty movie on a cellphone?

Cinetic Rights Management also isn’t the only game in town. Other players are sniffing around the area, including a couple of major Hollywood talent agencies. Niche companies like Without a Box, a Web-based service intended to help independent filmmakers submit their work to festivals, are also trying to change the way people obtain movies.

Mr. Sloss and his lieutenants also intend to help market the films that they sell to portals like Movielink.com. But Mr. Dentler, who will oversee this effort, gave few specifics.

“There are viral ideas and more traditional marketing ideas, tapping into the blogosphere and navigating traditional media,” he said.

The approach may sound sprawling, but some experts in online distribution think that the company may be onto something. Amazon figured out a way to bypass stores and take a boatload of books — some good, many awful — to the masses, letting consumers hunt and peck for what they wanted. Film snobs may hold their noses at “The Hamster Movie: The Director’s Cut,” but as YouTube has shown, the interest in such offerings can be shockingly high.

“Some films that didn’t get entry into the marketplace the traditional way might turn out to have some real artistic and commercial value,” said Brent Weinstein, a former talent agent who is chief of 60Frames Entertainment, a studio that focuses on short videos. “I suspect a good number of films that didn’t find fans in the community of cinema experts would be able to find an audience in this new digital media world.”

A shift in the way people consume media is forcing Hollywood to evolve. As more people have high-speed Internet access, and as technology companies like Apple work to make it easier to watch video on phones, and as cable giants like Comcast roll out elaborate on-demand services, movie theaters and DVDs are increasingly looking like just two of the many niches.

“Delivery is changing very rapidly,” said Robert Nathan, a Cinetic partner.

At the same time, the machinery behind the two-decade boom in independent film is starting to break down. Breaking through has become harder as more independent films are made and distributed. In 2002, about 450 films were released theatrically. Last year, the total jumped to 600, mostly because of independent films.

More films are making it onto a limited number of screens because their total time on the marquee is shorter than ever. This means that independent films must find an audience at lightning speed, which requires heavier marketing. In March, the Motion Picture Association of America said the average cost of advertising a specialty film in 2007 had risen 44 percent over the previous year, to $25.7 million.

ALL of that marketing overhead makes studio specialty divisions look a lot like the mainstream divisions, prompting some companies to retrench. Earlier this month, for example, Warner Brothers shut down two of its specialty divisions, Warner Independent Pictures (“Good Night and Good Luck”) and Picturehouse Entertainment (“Pan’s Labyrinth”).

But Mr. Sloss is sticking with his trademark confidence. “This is going to be a very labor-intensive business,” he said, “but we think that in 5 to 10 years it could be the most significant revenue source of all.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/business/media/25steal.html?ref=business&pagewanted=print

At Cannes, a mix of high expectations and inevitable frustrations

By A. O. Scott

Saturday, May 24, 2008

CANNES: On Wednesday morning festivalgoers - or at least the hordes of journalists who stumble into the Salle Lumière every day at 8:30 after a few hours' sleep and a hasty café au lait - were given a bit of a break. In a departure, there was no competition press screening on the schedule, which provided some of us with an opportunity to glance at the trades, have a second café au lait and rest our eyes in anticipation of a long night of revolutionary struggle.

Starting at 6:30 in the evening there would be two almost simultaneous screenings of "Che," Steven Soderbergh's nearly four-and-a-half-hour exploration of the life of Ernesto Guevara, the asthmatic Argentine doctor who became a leader of Castro's revolution and, posthumously, a boon to the T-shirt vendors of the world.

The expectations surrounding "Che" could hardly have been higher. Soderbergh, surprise winner of the Palme d'Or in 1989 for "Sex, Lies and Videotape," has emerged since then as one of the most protean and interesting of American filmmakers, exploring an astonishing range of genres and styles with consistent skill, intelligence and audacity. Not every movie has been great, but they have all been different. And not many directors would follow commercial froth like "Oceans Thirteen" with a digitally shot, Spanish-language epic about a Marxist militant.

In the weeks before this year's competition slate was announced, "Che" was the center of much speculation. It was in; it was out; it wasn't finished; it was two pictures; it was one. The version shown in the Lumière was a single movie, without opening titles or closing credits (so maybe not quite finished). There was an intermission, during which sandwiches were passed out to the hungry audience.

The halves of "Che" are mirror images. The first, though it flashes back to Guevara's early acquaintance with Castro in Mexico and forward to his visit to New York for an appearance at the United Nations in 1964, is essentially the chronicle of a successful insurgency. It follows Castro, Guevara and their comrades from 1956 to 1959, through the stages of their war to overthrow the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, and it dwells less on their motives and personalities than on matters of military procedure. With impressive coherence and attention to tactical detail, Soderbergh shows how Castro's initially tiny army fought its way down from the mountains of the Sierra Maestra and ultimately routed Batista's forces.

The second half, devoted to the guerrilla campaign in Bolivia in 1967 that ended in Guevara's death, is equally rigorous in its depiction of a failed revolt. Though Guevara tried, in a new context, to apply the strategic lessons of the Cuban revolution - concentrate on the countryside; cultivate popular support; maintain discipline and cohesion in the ranks - everything went wrong. And it turned out that Guevara's adversaries, the Bolivian Army and its U.S. advisers, had learned a thing or two about how to wage an effective counterinsurgency.

There is a lot, however, that the audience will not learn from this big movie, which has some big problems as well as major virtues. In between the two periods covered in "Che," Guevara was an important player in the Castro government, but his brutal role in turning a revolutionary movement into a dictatorship goes virtually unmentioned. This, along with Benicio Del Toro's soulful and charismatic performance, allows Soderbergh to preserve the romantic notion of Guevara as a martyr and an iconic figure, an idealistic champion of the poor and oppressed. By now, though, this image seems at best naïve and incomplete, at worst sentimental and dishonest. More to the point, perhaps, it is not very interesting.

But "Che" itself is interesting, partly because it has the power to provoke some serious argument - about its own tactics and methods, as well as those of its subject. Whether American audiences will have a chance to participate in that argument is, for the moment, an open question. The mood here among buyers has been extremely cautious, and as of this writing, distributors have balked at spending $8 million to $10 million (the reported asking price for "Che") on a 258-minute movie to be released in two parts, with subtitles.

This is one of the frustrations of Cannes, for American critics at least. We see lots of fascinating movies - not all good, but very few completely worthless - and then wonder if we, or our readers, will ever see them again. I'm not in the movie business, and not inclined to speculate with someone else's money. I do hope, however, that sometime in the near future I can take part in the long and contentious conversation that "Che" deserves, and also see how my own initial ambivalence about the film resolves itself.

I have a similar hope for Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York," a movie about which I am not ambivalent at all. Puzzled? Yes. Unsure of its commercial prospects? As I said, that's none of my business. ("Synecdoche" is another competition entry looking for love in a marketplace of commitment-shy distributors.)

But Kaufman, the wildly inventive screenwriter of "Being John Malkovich" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," has, in his first film as a director, made those efforts look almost conventional. Like his protagonist, a beleaguered theater director played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, he has created a seamless and complicated alternate reality, unsettling nearly every expectation a moviegoer might have about time, psychology and narrative structure.

But though the ideas that drive "Synecdoche, New York" are difficult and sometimes abstruse, the feelings it explores are clear and accessible. These include the anxiety of artistic creation, the fear of love and the dread of its loss, and the desperate sense that your life is rushing by faster than you can make sense of it. A sad story, yes, but fittingly for a movie bristling with paradoxes and conundrums, also extremely funny.

Nothing in Kaufman's film happens as you might expect it to, even if his previous work had conditioned you to expect surprises. Cannes, meanwhile, has a way of disappointing expectations even as it confirms them. After last year's robust 60th anniversary edition of the festival, which yielded so many great movies (and quite a few sales), this one feels like a bit of a letdown.

It's not that the films are bad, but rather that many of the directors in competition have, with their previous work, set such a high standard. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, with two Palmes d'Or already on their résumés, arrived this year with "Le Silence de Lorna," an engrossing movie about the moral struggle of a young Albanian immigrant in Belgium. It's very good. Not a masterpiece, though, which is what the Dardenne brothers have conditioned us to expect.

And many of us were anticipating masterpieces from the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan and from the Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, whose second feature, "The Holy Girl," was a discovery of the 2004 festival. Many critics insist that "Three Monkeys," Ceylan's new film (acquired for U.S. release by New Yorker Films), fulfills the promise of his earlier work, which includes "Distant" and "Climates." But in trying something new - using his austere, exacting sense of form to tell a ripely melodramatic story - he seems to have sacrificed some of the wit that made those earlier films so memorable.

Martel, in contrast, errs on the side of consistency. The obliqueness that made "The Holy Girl" so haunting feels coy and mannered in her new film, "The Headless Woman," the point of which seems to be to pass the mental dissociation of its main character on to the audience. But if Martel is in a rut, she may be planning to break out of it. An announcement came earlier this week that her next project, "L'Eternauta," will be a science-fiction movie involving an invasion of Earth by aliens.

If it comes to Cannes, such a radical departure will surely encounter some grumbling. How come these filmmakers can't stick to what they're good at? But then again: Why don't they ever try something new? You may get the Palme d'Or, but you still can't win. There's no pleasing some people. Which may be why we keep coming back.

Source: http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=13179125

All You wanted to Know About Bheja Fry! (and its technicalities)..

Ranjeet Thadani (Rajat Kapoor), a bored, arrogant music company executive hurts his back the night he has found a prize catch for a weekly bring- your-idiot talent dinner hosted by his friends and him. He ends up spending the evening with this idiot, Bharat Bhushan (Vinay Pathak) who tries to help him get his wife (Sarika) back who left him earlier that day. The result is utter chaos let loose by the idiot, who cannot do a single thing without messing it up further. The plot turns around to be a series of mini disasters that leave Ranjeet's comfortable life in ruins. Call it the idiot's revenge!

From the Director Sagar Bellary

I watched The Dinner Game by Francois Weber at an international film festival in the year 1999 and I was floored by its dry wit and exemplary story of an idiot. I was quite impressed with the contemporary French cinema standards and felt ashamed at the level of comedies that were being made in the Hindi film industry. Little did I know at that time that my debut film would be majorly inspired by it! After working on two low budget films like Raghu Romeo and Mixed Doubles both directed by Rajat Kapoor, I was quite convinced that the only way to make a film without any strings attached is to make it within an amount which the producer is confident of recovering, irrespective of the commercial success the film enjoys in the cinema halls. With Rajat I had learnt the art of executing low budget films without compromising much on technical quality. To make a film as such you need a fine screenplay that justifiedsthe money rather than money justifying the screenplay. And yes, a good film needs great technicians and great performers, who would be ready to work for peanuts! Fortunately I was breeding in an environment where many talented people - actors and technicians really wanted to do something different! Thus interacting with marvelous actors like Vijay Raaz, Sadiya Siddiqui, Saurabh Shukla, Ranvir Shorey, Konkona Sen, Vinay Pathak, Rajat Kapoor and great technicians like cinematographer Rafey Mahmood, audiographer Resul Pookutty and editor Suresh Pai, I realized I would be a fool not to utilize this pool of talent. Mixed Doubles was a great hit and it was very close to my heart as I have worked on every little stage of its making. While watching it in with an audience, the experience of people laughing at exactly the right points as planned by the director mesmerized me. I knew that people just wanted to laugh. Everybody was too stressed out and they needed a vent. It was also that time of the year when the Indian Idol singing competition had reached a new crescendo. Anybody and everybody was a singer! Even the Hindi film industry was only churning out sex comedies or “bhankas” genre films that relied on slapstick humour, double entendres and flesh show. It was also that time of the year when many new directors made their debut films which were really bad. It was as if art had been held hostage by media savvy individuals wanting to be celebrities using the power of a medium. I was burning to make my film as somewhere I had this idealistic belief that I would set things right!When we decided to adapt the French story I was looked down upon by everybody with the same contempt that I carried for DVD-directors. My task was uphill! Thankfully Sunil Doshi, the producer was quite convinced. But he was more convinced with me rather than the screenplay. He told me that he is putting his money on the jockey not the horse! Bheja Fry was originally called Ding Dong Baby Sing a Song and was initially conceptualized and planned for television and to be shot on 16mm but I am happy that finally not only could I make it on 35 mm but also the film is soon to get a full-fledged theatrical release. Suresh Pai the editor was the first person to receive the concept note in order to get a reaction. He was quite impressed and that encouraged me that I was on the right track. I really wanted to adapt the story rather than copy a film. A few understood me, the others, well I simply did not let them bother me. I had a film to make!I always knew that my idiot was a singer and that his name was Bharat Bhushan. I had a friend in college who was a bad singer but always broke out into a song without realizing that he is making a fool of himself. Also, in Raghu Romeo, Vijay Raaz sings a song looking at the moon while Maria has gone to the toilet. All these factors assimilated to create Bharat Bhushan who was planted in the plot of the French story. Situations changed and so did the dialogues. Of course, the French story did not cater to Indian sensibilities. So we doctored the entire plot and began to weed out the weak links the story had. Arpita Chatterjee and me would have hours of telephonic conversations on the screenplay. She wrote the initial draft which became the basis of all method. Initially Anurag Kashyap was supposed to write the dialogues but he was burdened with Guru and his own films. He did not manage to find time. But I did have a great session with him and was enlightened by many of his perspectives to the story. He liked my choice of cast and it was he who suggested me to think of Sarika as Rajat’s wife, a masterstroke in retrospect. Anurag also contributed a few brilliant script based nuts and bolts that enriched Bheja Fry. But the credit of the actual mad dialogues must go to first timer Sharat Kataria – also assistant to Rajat on Raghu Romeo, a Jamia graduate. He brought in much of the whacky humour of words and turned around a few situations to new scenes. A lot of contribution also came from Vinay Pathak and Rajat Kapoor. So each shooting day was a workshop where everything was assessed to as it is basis and scenes were rewritten keeping in mind the improvisations. The assistants had a tough task. I was always at top of the things and not even a single word could be altered without my consent. I was very sure of what I wanted. I was very clear of the rhythm of my shots, where to pause and hold and when to speed it up. Sharat came to the shoot everyday. That made things a little easier. All my actors were such good performers that I never went more than three takes. But I shot extensively. I covered the same scene from various perspectives and camera angles almost making it a two camera shoot setup. Many mistook that for my insecurity of being a first time director. Parixit Warrier the director Of Photography who is also a batch mate from the film school and a very good friend made this magic possible for me in the shoot. Every shot was ready in 20 minutes. Gauging the amount of time given to him and the results delivered I am amazed at his craft. I wanted to get out of the gamut of Long shot, mid-shot and close-up and was tired of the usual boring over the shoulder shots. So we created a different pattern of lensing and extensively covered the scenes, gave full freedom to actors and devised shots according to their movements rather than make them move according to the shots. The result as expected was very good.

Bheja Fry was shot within seven days, twelve nights over sixteen locations consuming exactly just 101 cans of 35mm raw stock. Though the film was shot with an extremely, extremely modest budget, its major challenge was being not looking like one that was! Which I would like to say, we have achieved.
When Suresh Pai edited the film the first cut was 95 minutes and he was extremely happy because the film had 'arrived' in its totality correctly. Suresh has always apprehensive about overly shot films which are butchered at the editing table to chart out a meaning. So in short, he felt that Bheja Fry had utilized its resources correctly! I met Sagar Desai when we were desperately looking for a good music director for Mixed Doubles. I have been actively involved in the production of the entire music score of Mixed Doubles. Sagar Desai is a genius. He has been there throughout the conception of Bheja Fry and through most of the screenplay discussions because screenplay writer Arpita Chaterjee is his wife. He knew the story well and had an excellent rapport with me knowing just knew what I like and what I wanted. The entire film was dubbed in Mumbai at Aradhana studios. But the entire sound post-production happened at Real Image Studios in Chennai. Tapas Nayak, the audiographer of the film, was a batch senior to me at SRFTI and had a great understanding of his medium. In the given budget we just could not afford Dolby surround. DTS offered us an excellent package deal and the dream of having 5.1 sound materialized. All the sound tracks were sent over to Chennai and the film was finally mixed and the exposed sound negatives and DTS discs were dispatched to Adlabs, where the film was finally printed. Bheja Fry is today ready to be served!A cinematographer friend and guide - Sanjay Kapoor told me right at the start of my film that it was going to be a journey of discoveries on every level – mental, emotional, physical and spiritual. It did sound like a platitude then but now that the film is ready I can surely say that it has been one hell of a bheja fry and yes, I have thoroughly enjoyed getting my brains fried making my first film!

Sagar Bellary is an alumnus of the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI), Kolkata with specialization in Screenplay Writing and Direction. He has directed a short film X and Y, been Chief Assistant Director on the feature film Raghu Romeo and Associate Director on the featurefilms Mixed Doubles and Mithya. Bheja Fry is his first feature film

Source: http://www.upperstall.com/bheja_fry.html

From the Official blog of Photographer & Artist Dave Thompson

Friday, May 2, 2008

A rant
I’ve got to address this.
I hear way too many people mis-using the term "Footage" when talking about video. The term “Footage” when applied to digital stock video is wrong. “Footage” as it is properly used, applies to film, usually 16mm or 35mm, and is expressed in lengths, eg. 10 feet, 50 feet, one reel or two reels, etc. A reel of film is 1000 feet, or 11 minutes. Older movies, made from the beginning to the 50s, were timed in reels. If a movie was released at 10 reels, it was about 110 minutes long. I know this because I not only worked in film during the 80s, I also have a degree in film making. Video, either analog or digital, is expressed in units of time. Such as Hours:minutes:seconds:frames (Hence the term, SMTP Time Code for video editing) Film is expressed as footage, in the following units, reel:feet:frames For example, a film clip in 35mm, running 33 seconds at 24 frames per second, is 50 feet. A video clip of 30 seconds is just that, 30 seconds. When I took a video class in college, we were fined each time we used the term “footage” when we referred to tape. When shooting film, the camera operator advises the director he has 120 feet left, this means the director can only shoot up to a minute and 20 seconds of the next scene. If they’re shooting HDTV, the camera operator can report “only a minute left on the tape”. I just had to address this….

Source: http://dtphoto12.blogspot.com/2008/05/rant.html

OLD PEOPLE MAKING FILMS

Film making is no big deal in our generation. Pensioners learn how to make movies in community centers. There are high schools where the art of communication skills are taught. Everyone with a digital movie camera can produce a film for a birthday party, an anniversary or a memorial service.

But frail elderly people making films in a nursing ward ??—that sounds like fiction. Nevertheless for the last eight years Miri Boker, an enterprising occupational therapist who also learned filming, has been producing movies with the patients in the chronic ward at Neve Horim in Jerusalem. Miri sees this activity as a therapeutic venture; the product (a completed film written and produced by the residents) is not the most important thing—“it’s the process that counts.”

However the seven films that have already been produced in this ward, as well as 23 other films that Miri has supervised in nursing homes all over Israel, are entertaining, enlightening and heart warming in their own right. Both the staff who are heavily involved in the production, as well as the family and friends who are invited to see the films are most impressed.

The procedure to produce a film usually takes months. The residents who are interested meet to plan out the various aspects of film making. The first step, according to Miri, is choosing a story, a plot and then writing the script together. For instance the first film ever produced involved someone who had lost the picture of her beloved husband. Instead of turning to the staff of the ward, she asked other inmates to help her find it. Along the way the actors/patients find love, friendship and other lost items.

There are often arguments about the theme of the film and how it should be presented. The members of the group all express their views, sometimes in very strong terms. In the end, however, they have to reach a decision, and this process is already an example of how the project is empowering. “Very few matters in an institution for chronic patients are left to their decision,” says Miri. Here they have the opportunity to determine something substantial and important.

Next Miri or another member of the staff (usually another O.T. or a social worker) writes the story as a play. She presents the finished product and again after much discussion a final version is reached by common consent. “The second step involves auditions for the various parts,” says the organizer. Once again it is the elderly who decide who gets which part. Once again there is potential for being hurt or resentful, but in the final analysis the group decides.

Rehearsals can take many weeks. Sometimes an “actor” gets sick or even dies and has to be replaced. That is always a difficult moment. The staff have to cooperate, and sometimes are even “roped in” to take a part. “Actually, the whole Home was involved in the excitement,” says Ronit, a worker at Ganei Ye-elim in Beer Sheva. There the patients in the chronic ward produced a film called “Chag Sameach” and it involved the question of where it’s better spend the holidays—at the children’s home or in the Home. They weighed the fact that at their offspring’s home there’s often a lot of noise and they feel that they’re intruding; but in the ward the atmosphere isn’t holiday-like. “We don’t push a particular view,” says Ronit. “We let the story unfold and everyone can learn from the film what they think suits them. It shows them that they have choices.”

Once rehearsals have gotten the performance down pat, the big day (or days) of actual filming arrives. A professional photographer is on hand from 9:00 A.M. in the morning until 7:00 P.M. at night. The filming is done as a marathon for three or four consecutive days. Yet Miri points out the frail elderly are often up to the challenge and long hours more than the overworked staff who have to adjust to three days of tumult and upset schedules. “It’s like a happening; it’s exciting; everyone feels the electricity in the air,” says Ronit. Editing is also performed by a professional, and then the finished product is shown, first to the participants, and then to the staff, friends and relatives of the whole institution.

“This is always a very big event,” says Miri. The elderly performers’ self image is magnified, their families look at them in a new light, and the medical staff claim that the experience has real therapeutic value. “I didn’t believe that I could do it,” said one matron of 80 whom despite the fact that she is wheelchair bound, was one of the main actresses in a play about loneliness.

“The movie fights our battle,” said another participant who took part in a rather controversial film on the “Bad Caretaker”. “We didn’t mean a “metapel” who hits people or is cruel to them; but we showed up those who take a long time in answering our call or who act callously to our needs.” Miri thought it was very brave of them to choose this subject. Individually they would have been afraid to bring it up, but they found that “in numbers there is strength”, and they backed each other up on what is a very pertinent subject to patients in a nursing home.

With the help of ESHEL, the branch of the Joint Distribution Committee which deals with services for the elderly, the movie making project has spread throughout the land. Miri is kept busy running from project to project in Dimona, Tel Aviv, Beer Sheva and elsewhere. The idea has been taken up by Sheltered Housing Homes and Day Care Centers where the elderly are more independent. The subjects they have chosen for their movies indicate the different stage of their lives: Coping with Widowhood, Intergenerational Relationships; Romance in Old Age, etc. In one lovely story a man who always dreamt of being a writer but never revealed his talents to anyone, takes over the program at a senior citizen club when the leader is sick. He tells a story that he himself wrote. More and more people wander into the room to listen and stay fascinated. In the end he becomes a professional story teller and the group members encourage him to develop his skill.

A number of the movies that have been produced are now used as educational tools in community centers, staff training workshops, support groups for family members and even in schools. The patients in Beit Shirley in Dimona produced a film on “Will He Visit Today or Won’t He.” It shows a lobby full of old people, many in wheelchairs, sitting around, waiting to see who will visit their aged parents during visiting hours. One old man’s son never comes but the father still sits waiting. One of the old guys asks, “Why don’t you call him and tell him to come?” Miri thought that was a legitimate question, but as in so many instances, she learned much more than she taught. In the discussion leading up to this scene, one of the women insisted, “No, don’t you understand; it’s not the same if he comes because his father asks him. He has to want to come on his own accord.” The others accepted her view, and this exchange is in the film.

“The hardest thing in a nursing home is fighting apathy,” says Miri Boker. When we include someone who’s not involved, who claims she or he doesn’t have any talent, or worse still, doesn’t have the motivation to join in making a film, and then over time get them to join, and they develop, and gradually show an interest, and also begin to open up like a flower in the spring sunshine,-- that’s the best part of this job”. The film maker/ therapist continues, “It’s wonderful to see the interaction, the friendships that are formed, the creativity that comes to the fore at the age of 85 or 90 and the way they learn to express what they really feel.” Both producers and participants share in a comment heard in Neve Horim, “This is one of the best periods in my life.”

Source: http://www.ou.org/index.php/shabbat_shalom/article/34838/

Bollywood extra large

Kaveree Bamzai

April 4, 2008

There’s a lot of action in Bollywood this season and not all of it onscreen. Actor Akshay Kumar is celebrating his Rs 20-crore price tag by buying a three-acre Portuguese heritage bungalow on Goa’s Anjuna beach. Kareena Kapoor has just bought herself an apartment in Bandra but is too busy to move. Apoorva Lakhia, a director, who is still owed Rs 11 lakh by his last producer, has just ordered a BMW on the basis of the signing amount for his next movie. And actor-director Rajat Kapoor, who spent seven years struggling to raise Rs 30 lakh for his second film, now has a blank cheque to make five films for Pritish Nandy Communications (PNC). He’s marking the occasion by working out for a towel scene written into the Rs 5-crore movie his friend is directing. From corporates in Hugo Boss suits to independent producers in Gucci T-shirts, there’s a new buzz in town. It’s the new economy of Bollywood and it’s extra large. Everyone’s speaking a new language. Stars are called talent, movies are projects, selling films is de-risking and buying them is building intellectual property rights. Over the next 15 months, even the sceptics will start using the jargon as listed companies and private producers proceed to spend Rs 3,000 crore on making movies. Reliance alone has an intended fund of $1 billion (Rs 4,000 crore), of which it has committed Rs 500 crore. Between them, Eros, United Television (UTV) and Indian Films, an affiliate of TV18, have raised $45 million, $70 million and $110 million, respectively, from the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) in London, which will soon find their way to starry back pockets and busy studio floors. Then there are companies that have gone public, 12 since 2000, which have raised another Rs 1,000-odd crore through their IPOs. The number of releases has gone up—the average number of what are known as high grade Hindi film releases has risen from 1.15 per week in 2001 to 1.71 in 2004—as has the number of prints. Everyone’s earning more. Aamir Khan has just been paid Rs 20 crore plus a share of the overseas profits for the remake of the Tamil hit, Ghajini. Anees Bazmee, who charged Boney Kapoor Rs 1.5 crore just three years ago for writing and directing No Entry, is now asking for Rs 10 crore a film. Katrina Kaif who thought she got lucky when Vipul Shah paid her under Rs 1 crore for Namastey London has just signed a Rs 6-crore two-film deal with Indian Films. Priyanka Chopra has a two-film deal with UTV for Rs 4 crore. The scale has magnified. Last year, when Eros bought the world rights of Om Shanti Om from Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment for Rs 73 crore, it looked like the final frontier had been crossed. This year just the domestic theatrical rights of Ghajini have been sold for Rs 53 crore—all the rights put together add up to Rs 93 crore, with the highest bid for worldwide satellite rights at Rs 21 crore. Last fortnight when Race released worldwide with 1,600 prints, the industry rejoiced at its new proportions. But already Ghajini, for which shooting will go on till May, and Singh is Kinng, which has days in Egypt left, are planning to release across 2,000 screens worldwide. It’s a function of growth in attendance, rise in the number of exhibition centres and simply, much better marketing. Take an example. Last year, Saawariya and Om Shanti Om released on the same day, each threatening to undercut the other’s business. It didn’t happen. While the Rs 36-crore Saawariya made Rs 57 crore, the Rs 25-crore Om Shanti Om made Rs 110 crore. It is no surprise. Multiplexes, with their higher priced tickets, are booming—while 33 were added in 2006, 41 were built in 2007. It’s a great time to be the “talent”. Neil Nitin Mukesh, star of Johnny Gaddar, a Rs 10-crore film that few managed to watch, is demanding Rs 1.5 crore. Sagar Bellary, who made his first film, Bheja Fry, for Rs 60 lakh, which went on to make Rs 12 crore at the boxoffice is making his next film, Kachcha Limboo, with Sahara at a budget of Rs 5 crore. Madhur Bhandarkar who thought he had arrived when he could make both Corporate and Traffic Signal for Rs 3.5 crore each is now helming the Rs 18-crore Fashion for UTV. Even directors who’ve had mixed box-office results have their hands full. Sujoy Ghosh whose second film Home Delivery was a spectacular failure, is now directing Alladin with a budget of Rs 60 crore for Eros, while Vivek Agnihotri, the director of the middling Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal and Chocolate, has a Rs 3.5 crore contract from Reliance. Even the suits have benefited. Two years ago Sandeep Bhargava had quit advertising and was just one man working from his Pali Hill home on a Dell laptop. Today, as Indian Films CEO, he sits in a 5,000-sq ft office overlooking the Mahalaxmi Race Course. Five years ago, Ronnie Screwvala would wait outside the Doordarshan director-general’s office for an appointment. Today, as the UTV Group CEO he can greenlight a 16th century romance between Akbar and a creatively imagined princess for Rs 33 crore and come out smelling of roses with the box-office delivering Rs 120 crore in 51 days. Two years ago, Ritesh Sidhwani was just a smart young man who made one film in two years with his Maneckji Cooper school friend Farhan Akhtar. Now their Excel Entertainment has a five-film Rs 250-crore deal with Reliance, which has enabled him to make three films a year. Simply put, Bollywood has grown because more people are watching its films. If admissions in 2001 were 2.8 billion, in 2006, the figure went up to over 3.9 billion (compared to just 1.7 billion for the US). Similarly ticket sales too have grown, from $593 million in 2001 to $1.4 billion (Rs 5,600 crore) in 2006, pygmy like when compared to the 2007 US box-office revenue of $26.7 billion but, still significant. And the audience has grown because avenues have. Take a look. The domestic theatrical division which was just 12,000 single screens earlier, now encompasses multiplexes (660 screens, set to grow to 1,800 by 2012-13). There is an Adlabs in Pathankot and a PVR in Latur. The number may be tiny compared to even other Asian nations—in 2004, multiplex penetration in India was just 1.6 per cent, compared to 62.5 per cent in Japan and 70 per cent in Thailand—but even the format has expanded, from print to include digital cinemas as well. Similarly overseas. Not only have the number of prints expanded but also the format, with digital screens in 50 territories now. Home video now includes VCDSand DVDs. Music now includes the physical as well as the digital format with songs being downloaded on the mobile and Internet. Television rights include satellite rights to multiple broadcasters with a cap on airings, DTH, and inflight rights. Now, movies can be extended with infilm placements and merchandising. Also there is a reduction of the time window for each format—even a successful movie such as Jab We Met was out on home video in less than three months. The market has expanded geographically as well. Sidhwani for instance has just sold Don for 150,000 (Rs 93 lakh) to a distributor in Germany, where Shah Rukh mania is at its peak. Pakistan is slowly showing signs of releasing Indian films legitimately. UTV’s Goal has already made $500,000 (Rs 2 crore). Race had a 15-print release across nine Pakistani cities, while Taare Zameen Par will also have a 15 print release there. Even in traditional markets such as the UK, the scale has gone up. In 1989, Kishore Lulla of Eros released Sanam Bewafa in one theatre in London. Last year, he had a grand premiere of Om Shanti Om at West End’s Empire cinema, apart from releasing it in 51 theatres in England. With corporates insisting on electronic ticketing in even territories such as north Bihar now, greater transparency is showing real returns, which stars now have access to. Which is why all stars are either turning to co-productions or demanding a fee plus a share of the revenues. Take the example of Rajkumar Hirani’s film, tentatively titled Idiots, which he wanted to do with Shah Rukh. The mere suggestion from the actor that he could co-produce the film led to an exchange of letters between him and Hirani’s long-time producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra. For many, becoming an actor is a smart career move. Take Akhtar. Instead of sitting around twiddling his thumbs for his sequel to Don to materialise with Shah Rukh—now slated for April next year—he has turned actor for his production company. The first of the movies, Rock On, directed by Abhishek Kapoor, about a band is almost complete while he is getting ready to start shooting for sister Zoya Akhtar’s long-pending project, Luck By Chance, and then begins directing Voice from the Sky in September. Luck By Chance perhaps typifies the importance of stars more than anything else. Its script has been ready for four years now, but has hung fire because of casting problems—at one time it was supposed to star Vivek Oberoi and Tabu. Not surprisingly, several deals are being re-negotiated. When Soundarya Rajnikant and Pooja Shetty first agreed to co-produce the multi-lingual animated feature Sultan The Warrior, starring Rajnikant, the budget was agreed at Rs 8 crore. By the time they signed on the dotted line, Soundarya as head of Ochre Productions and Shetty as director of Adlabs, the budget moved up to Rs 22 crore. Within a year, by which time Shetty had exited from Adlabs, Soundarya has not only managed to escalate the budget of the digital film to Rs 60 crore but has also wrested total creative control. She’s all of 23 and calculates that her earnings from the film will vary between Rs 225 and Rs 275 crore. Take the buffoonery over Welcome, which almost matched its onscreen goings-on. Having made Welcome for Rs 25 crore, Firoz Nadiadwala may have thought himself lucky when Indian Films and UTV, fresh from having raised new money in London, chased him for the two-years-in-themaking comedy’s worldwide rights. He asked Indian Films for Rs 47 crore, which UTV upped to Rs 50 crore. Having bought it, UTV then re-sold it to Indian Films for Rs 55 crore, happy with a profit of Rs 5 crore. But it’s Indian Films that’s now sitting pretty, with Welcome making Rs 110 crore in revenue. But is it Bollywood shining or Bollywood shamming? Several independent producers, who relied on the old system of advances from individual exhibitors are now idling their time. Studio floors in Mumbai are booked— as a result, a city like Bangkok currently has five Hindi films being shot almost simultaneously. Everyone is signed on in “non-exclusive contracts”. So while Anurag Basu directs Hrithik Roshan in Kites, to be co-produced with Eros and Carving Dreams, UTV has already announced a three-film deal with him. While Imtiaz Ali gets ready to direct a film for Saif Ali Khan’s Illuminati Films, Sajid Nadiadwala and Shree Ashtavinayak have also declared he is directing their next films. There is a certain amount of desperation in the air, with companies signing on whoever they can find. Almost anyone will do. UTV has announced a two-film deal with Shahid Kapur, a two-film deal with John Abraham and even Kangana Ranuat (who is barely four films old). And to think that just two years ago, when Adlabs offered Akshay a Rs 14.5 crore deal for four films and Hrithik Rs 35 crore for three films, it seemed as if the Rubicon had been crossed. As strategic consultant Prabhat Choudhary puts it, “Bollywood launches a new consumer product every Friday with one-tenth of FMCG budgets.” And every Friday, the product gets bigger. The advent of the film school generation (from FTII products, directors such as Rajat Kapoor and Sriram Raghavan, to foreign trained Shimit Amin and Manish Acharya) and advertising gurus (R. Balki and writer Jaideep Sahni) has lent a new substance to the old fashioned style of storytelling. It has coaxed Saaed Akhtar Mirza out of retirement in Goa to make Ek Toh Chance for PNC and caused Sudhir Mishra, who couldn’t make a film for seven years, between 1996 and 2003, to coast from one studio floor to another. It’s the nature of the money. It demands—and gets—more movies. And a more adventurous spirit. Source: http://indiatoday.digitaltoday.in/content_mail.php?option=com_content&name=print&id=6615

Through the lens, digitally

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Markers for the seriesThe Indian film industry is expected to be worth $5.1 billion in 2011, a three-fold increase in five years.The coming of corporate giants has made deals cleaner. Mafia money does not rule. Payments are mostly done by cheque.There are 500 multiplexes now, expected to increase to 3,000 in a few years. Viewers are back at the theatres.Actors and directors are signing multiple film deals — but there is a severe shortage of scripts and stars. Coming up: movies on mobiles and IPTV and games based on movies.

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To meet the new Bollywood, you need to get out of Mumbai. We found it 125 km down the highway from Mumbai, next to a bicycle repair shop and a tea seller, in a large village called Neral.
The only theatre here, the single-screen Mahesh Talkies, was on the brink of being shut down before being reincarnated last year. It now downloads films on a satellite link, using a technology that few have begun to use across the globe.
From themes to work ethics to the way films are written, sold and distributed, the world’s most watched movie industry is going through its biggest transformation ever. In ways visible and invisible, this change will touch the lives of millions of people across the globe — including those who watch it and those who live off it.
All that, however, would have could come to nothing if theatre owners like Srinivas Dasrath Dhule in Neral did not ride the new wave. People like him will begin to decide the destiny of flop films which could break even or make profits through digital theatres. In the process, they will also avoid the death that threatens thousands of humble single-screen theatres across India.
And how. From Aurora Cinema in Doomdooma (Assam) to Shyam Chhavi Grah in Churu (Rajasthan), and Zeenath Theatre in Alwaye (Kerala) to Amar Mahal in Katra (Jammu and Kashmir), hundreds of small-town theatres are screening films digitally, in languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Bhojpuri, Tamil and Kannada. Of India’s 13,000 film theatres, at least 1,500 are already using digital technology.
In Neral, a village surrounded by craggy hills and shrubby plateaus, the leap of imagination by the owners of the 310-seat Mahesh Talkies is showing results. The theatre is winning back viewers by screening films the same day they are released — not a month later, as it used to do earlier. It does not pay Rs 60,000 to buy a print and then transport it in heavy metal boxes on bumpy journeys from Mumbai.
Instead, it pays just Rs 4,000 upfront and an average of Rs 200 a show to screen the film. It is winning the battle against piracy. The films have great sound and picture quality. There are big savings on electricity and equipment. And it is making good money — despite raising the prices of tickets, 70 per cent of the seats are sold out, up from 40 per cent earlier.
Shiny new seats have been placed. And Mahesh Talkies now has a Dolby sound system. “We were deep in debt. We could only show scratched prints of old films. By the time we got prints in Neral, everyone had seen pirated copies,” says 40-year-old owner Srikant Dasrath Dhule, sitting in a room full of the strong fragrance of sandalwood incense. “Now, things have transformed.”
It is a fitting statement on how the village has aligned itself with the world: the film being shown at Mahesh is a new Hindi dubbing of the Thai film Chai Lai’s Angels — a takeoff on the Hollywood hit Charlie’s Angels. Hours later, an even more popular offering will play — Rambo 4.
Outside the theatre, a few lanes away, the swiftly globalising India was making a footprint in the village — a leading international motorcycle maker had brought a road show, showing off gleaming new models from a truck amid loud music.
In the earlier format — still alive in most theatres across India — two attendants braved thick carbon fumes and placed huge spools of film every half hour in the projectors, and had to connect negative and positive carbon rods to produce the flash that illuminated the screen. Now there is a small glass cabin built on the side and a split air-conditioner keeps the satellite-connected computer cool. The two attendants lost their Rs 5,000-a-month jobs, but it saved dozens of others from getting fired.
Last Friday, Mahesh Talkies witnessed something unimaginable even a year ago. Villagers who often travel two hours by the train to watch films here saw this season’s big-ticket offering, Jodha Akbar, the same day as the rest of the world.
An idea born of desperation
Dhule grew up in nearby Badlapur, enjoying action movies and comedies like most other friends. Then he made movies his profession. But the world of cinema viewing was swiftly changing. Hundreds of thousands of jobs around the country were at risk as theatres began shutting down to make way for shopping malls and office complexes.
Soon, the monster was on Dhule’s doorstep. One day, a theatre closed down in Karjat, an hour away. “The day that cinema closed down in Karjat, I realised I had to do something... I had to change while there was still time,” he says. He did a quick survey — there was no other theatre nearby, and he could potentially draw thousands of viewers from 56 villages. All he needed was the right idea.
With over 1,500 screens on digital projection, India has emerged as one of the largest theatres for the new technology.Armed with information from some other theatre owners, Dhule travelled to Mumbai, where a handful of companies such as UFO Moviez, Real Image, Pyramid Saimira and Adlabs are providing the software and the hardware needed for digital projection.
Before films are released, they are brought to such a company. Any leakage could mean huge losses to piracy. Expectedly, it thrives on a detective agency-like secrecy. One owner of such a company was once barred by guards from entering the area where the prints were kept because he did not have the authorisation.
At UFO Moviez, a security guard travels in the van that carries the print from the producer to the lab where huge spools are converted to digital D5 files, which look like big VCR tapes. It is then brought to the UFO ‘Capture Centre’ under tight security, with the van driver’s time of departure and arrival monitored to ensure the film has not been illegally copied on the way. Only the fingerprints of a few people can help open the door at the capture centre, physically linked by a 2,300-km optic fibre to a New Delhi satellite hub, which downloads a digital version of the film to the member theatres.
Dhule soon had all he needed: a digital projector, a server called Cineblaster attached to a satellite link, an uninterrupted power supply set, and a high-speed phone connection for data transfer. Better still, the company gave it all for free.
Using all that could sound like rocket science, but if the company’s cooks could use it, surely could Dhule. “When we started out, we first called our cook and asked him to download a movie, reading from a pictorial chart we give to all our customers,” says Sanjay Chavan, the UFO Moviez chief technology officer, who was earlier with the Indian Air Force. “Until all the five cooks in our office could download films without our help, we kept refining the chart.”
Now, every Thursday, UFO engineers download the upcoming film to the computer at Mahesh Talkies and 1,000 other theatres across India. Every film, about 2,500 gigabytes in size (on an average, the storage capacity of 125 home computers), is compressed to an encrypted 10-gigabyte version. The download takes real time — a two-hour movie is saved on the theatre’s computer in two hours.
However, someone like Dhule cannot screen the film until the scheduled time on Friday morning. And when he does, he uses a pre-paid card or a numeric key that has to be used to show a film.
For now, all seem to be gaining from digitisation.
“On an average, there will be an increase of 15 per cent to 20 per cent in tickets sold per movie — that is, if the shift from traditional screens to digital screens happens,” notes a Confederation of Indian Industry study.
“For a hit movie from a mid-sized production house, the average domestic gross box office collections will increase by about 40 per cent (from Rs 20-25 crore to
Rs 30-35 crore), while for a flop movie the gross box office collections will increase by about 15 per cent (from Rs 5-5.5 crore to Rs 6-6.5 crore). This will help some of the flop movies to break even or even make money,” the study predicts.
And as theatre owners such as Dhule dream big, companies such as UFO are dreaming bigger. They want to now reach out to the US, where the penetration of digital films is only 2 per cent. Hollywood mostly delivers its films physically to theatres, on hard disks.
Attempts to digitise films in the US began in the 1990s, but did not take off because the technology available there is extremely expensive, says UFO’s Chavan.
“We will now take Hindi content to the US theatres — we can even beam Hollywood content to American theatres if they are willing to share,” he says.
But back home, the new Bollywood is still dealing with the glitches of the India out there, which is often not a Bollywood fairytale.
“There are huge power outages in small towns. The UPS runs for only 15 minutes — we have had several burnt projectors,” says Chavan. “And there are satellite link breakdowns at the local level. Sometimes the cable is loose, at other times the rat has eaten the cable."

The changing face of movie-making business
They are all over Bollywood – in their dark glasses and business casuals, making offers you cannot refuse.
Not the new mafia, they are Bollywood’s new corporate honchos, the new age producers transforming the movie industry. And from two opposite ends of the city, two men are watching.
Over three decades, Mahesh Bhatt, Bollywood’s master of reinvention has set benchmarks for Hindi movies. But to stay ahead in the new Bollywood, Bhatt’s company, Vishesh Films, is about to begin a new journey of its own. It has tied up with a major international company and will make something it has long scoffed at — big budget films.
“The dream is the same, the dreamers have changed,” Bhatt said.
A two-hour drive away in the seaside money district of Nariman Point, editor-turned-producer Pritish Nandy meets visitors in a conference room lined with nattily designed posters of his films. Nandy knows a thing or two about this new Bollywood. After all, he helped invent it.
And somewhere midway on this long drive, in the neighbourhood called Mahalaxmi, is the swank office of Sandeep Bhargava, now betting on a new breed of cinema.
Bhargava is the chief executive officer of Studio18, one of the leading corporate players in the film business. With deep pockets, legal money and a new way of working, corporate houses like UTV, Studio 18, Reliance ADAG, Mahindras, Adlabs and Eros are changing the face of the business. Hollywood majors — like Warner, Sony Pictures and Disney — are jumping in too.
But moviemaking was a messy game years ago when Bhargava was pursuing his management degree in the American state of Ohio. Movies wasn’t where MBAs went to work those days. “The culture was dominated by the underworld and petty shopkeepers. Some were a pretty sick lot,” said director Sudhir Mishra. “Now, the nature of financing has changed.”
Much else was changing all around. Even after the Vajpayee government gave Bollywood the status of an industry in 2000, corporate majors watched from the sidelines, just releasing Hollywood films in India. Nandy, bored with his work in television software, decided to move in that year to his new home: the movies.
“There was a belief that only ‘mainstream’ movies — the formula movies — worked. And I did not believe that,” he said. “We wanted to do mainstream films — not what was called parallel cinema — and try and transform it inside out.”
The year 2003 brought two landmark films for both Bhatt and Nandy. Jism, written by Bhatt and produced by his daughter Pooja, introduced John Abraham and made him and Bipasha Basu stars. It became one of the biggest hits of the year with an audacious edginess and a pushing-the-envelope sexuality.
Later that year, came two small films produced by Nandy, Chameli and Sujoy Ghosh’s Jhankar Beats.
By the end of that year, the word “corporatisation” was doing the rounds of Bollywood. Then headed by Bhargava, Sahara Motion Pictures led the way, putting on the floor about 40 films. “In the early days, the cost of production was not very high. Artistes were not charging a lot, and not a lot of corporates had come in with deep pockets… (but) transparency was a big concern,” Bhargava said. “But by 2006, just about everybody was entering here.”
India had swiftly changed too. Malls and multiplexes were coming up, incomes were rising, and ticket sales were soaring. Viewers were returning to theatres, experiencing the joy and comfort of film viewing with the family.
Bhatt realised it was time again for the only constant of his life: change.
“At Vishesh, we have survived for three decades, but with the corporatisation of the media, we are finding it difficult to stay afloat,” Bhatt said. “We have tied up with Sony-BMG. Budgets will be much more scaled up. We will cater to the indigenous audience but hope it will stand shoulder to shoulder with world cinema.”
In another part of the city, meanwhile, Nandy was winning his own small and big battles. “The mainstream industry tried its best to ignore us… till it could no longer do so,” Nandy said. “People were watching these movies, people were waiting to see more of this stuff.”
The corporates made lives easier for a lot of people. Payments were clean. Financing was assured. Once it was in the works, there was certainty that a film would be made. Films began to be sold well, and new income avenues emerged — including mobile phones, the Internet, cable television.
“Theatre revenues are going up by more than 17 per cent every year, but less than 50 per cent of revenues are now coming from theatres,” said Bhargava. “To an extent the conventional wisdom that all films lose money is being turned on its head.”
Every time that happens, Nandy says, “It not only reaffirms my faith in the Indian audiences’ quest for good cinema, but also redefines Bollywood.”
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print.aspx?Id=82cf1757-9d5f-42e7-a568-2ee0f650d41d

Bold & brainy: Bollywood’s new thought leaders

Twenty years after class got over, the three men met and hugged each other outside a movie theatre, telling each other the story they had never told anyone: all they had touched since had turned gold.
That, of course, would have been the Bollywood version of the story of director buddies Raju Hirani, Sriram Raghavan and Rajat Kapoor. Hirani created Bollywood history with the “Munnabhai” films, Raghavan just joined the A-list with the cracker Johny Gaddaar, and Kapoor proved his point on his kind of film-making yet again with the just-released witty thriller Mithya.
But for almost 20 years after they studied at the Film and Television institute of India (FTII) in Pune, the reality was more like a 1970s arthouse movie. Armed with just their ambition and talent, they wrote scripts and planned movies and patiently heard producers say “No”.
Until now — until they ran into the new Bollywood. The three friends are now among a small group of Bollywood’s new thought leaders — audacious directors helping define the new Hindi cinema. They are being wooed to make the kind of films no one would touch a few years ago.
“This is the best time for filmmakers like us,” said Raghavan, now working on his next film with John Abraham and Aishwarya Rai. After that, he directs Saif Ali Khan. “We did not give up — but we did not know it would take this long.”
We are standing outside the box office at Fame Adlabs, one of Mumbai’s earliest multiplexes, on a noisy February evening. Director Sudhir Mishra (Hazaron Khwahishen Aisi, Khoya Khoya Chand) joins in. A small crowd gathers as the HT photographer takes pictures, and a teenage autorickshaw driver walks up to the reporter to show off his knowledge: he knows all the four directors and their films.
That is the new Bollywood — where good, intelligent cinema is also the cinema of the masses, and not labelled condescendingly as "parallel" cinema.
“After the release of the first Munnabhai, a director — I won't name him — said in criticism: ‘you broke every rule — you took an action hero and made a comedy, you shot indoors, there are no outdoors’ … but now, people have stopped believing in all these pre-conceived rules that they thought worked,” Hirani said.
Not too far away, at a small coffee shop where the movie types hang around, director Sourabh Narang takes another sip of his coffee and lists what else he sees changing around him.
“Just look at the kind of people coming in from non-traditional pools — there are doctors, lawyers, former bankers. They want to be assistant directors,” said Narang, who directed Vastushastra, is now doing a film for UTV.
“When I came to Bombay eight years ago, the profile of the assistant director was different. There was a big city focus. Now we have people from Kanpur and Meerut — and they wear it proudly as a badge,” Narang said.
But in this melee, some see the spectacle of the proverbial fools rushing in.
“It is a very slippery street. Opportunities are many. There is a temptation to rush in without proper experience or qualification,” said Milan Luthria, director of films like Hattrick, Taxi No. 9211, and Deewar. “If at all we see a dip, it will be because of this.”

Young men and women, some in their twenties and thirties, are being signed up as directors. Many directors have multiple film deals from corporate filmmakers.
“There seems to be too much money around, people signing three-film and five-film deals with actors and directors. There is a level playing field to some degree,” said Raghavan, his bag slung over his shoulder. “But I hope to guard myself against getting trapped in the ‘big film’.”
Hirani is buzzing with optimism: “This a great time to make a different kind of cinema.”
Hirani grew up in Nagpur, where he did theatre and grew up on the work of Hrishikesh Mukherjee and other favourites, and finally, after film school, came to the city where all dreamer and filmmakers finally aspire to come. He worked on several advertising films, began working with Vidhu Vinod Chopra, for whom Hirani made the genre-setting Munnabhai MBBS.
“Raju Hirani Munnabhai!” someone mumbles in the small crowd around the autorickshaws.
A huge poster of Mithya looms behind the three FTII buddies. One of the evening shows is on now. A young woman walks up for autographs of the directors.
That image is a long journey from many images of the past two decades, when they made documentaries — and lived through frustrating times when even if a good film was made, it had no hope of being screened.
“We all ended up doing nothing for a long time. I used to make a documentary and it used to sustain us for three months,” said Raghavan. He often watched films at the Topiwala film theatre near his home in Goregaon. Films aimed at the single-screen theatre, films that could please all, were the films being made back then. “Earlier, films were being made only for the front-benchers. Now the films are made only for the balcony viewers, as it were. Now there is no front bench,” Raghavan said. He assisted filmmaker Mukul Anand and briefly worked for the Stardust film magazine as a trainee reporter but would go and watch shoots, come back and write nothing.
“I was thrown out in four months,” he said.
Some other small film jobs and the film school diploma later, Raghavan made a short film on the serial killer Raman Raghav in 1993. It got him attention and a toe in the door, but it wasn’t until 2004, when he made Ek Haseena Thi, that he would be pampered by attention from producers.
Meanwhile, the movie-watching world had started transforming. A new kid arrived in the city. It was called the multiplex, the saviour of filmmakers like Kapoor.
At 21, after breaking up with his girlfriend, Kapoor had taken to theatre in New Delhi to fill the void. He would get before the arclights once again, years later, when he began to get work as a model during the excruciating wait for someone to help him become director.
“For about 10 years I made no money at all,” Kapoor said. “For eight years I took Mithya to every possible producer — between 1998 and 2006. They said ‘mindblowing! but can't produce it’ — and it is understandable."
Kapoor and some others like him are shooting entire films in as little as nine days, turning the entire production model on its head — in a good way. The hugely successful Bheja Fry, in which Kapoor acted, was shot over 12 nights at just 16 locations. When he directed Raghu Romeo and was short of Rs 25 lakh, he began sending out e-mails to friends, urging them to donate Rs 10,000 each, which he would return later.
“My friends got it, then their friends, and before I knew it, I was getting mails from complete strangers, from all over the world. Many gave money as well — and I had what I needed,” Kapoor said.
“After the success of Bheja Fry, I was getting a call from a producer every second day. Me — who has been going around with a script, begging people — ‘please make my film!’” he said. “Now they have woken up to the fact that you can make a film in Rs 60 lakh and still make pots of money.” And even the single-screen Topiwala theatre, near Raghavan’s former home, is turning into a multiplex.

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