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.”
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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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