Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I had to nip in the bud stage the asthmatic Scot version of Don
Corleone tap-dancing through a hail of bullets, asking if the Bombay
studio system resembled Hollywood's in the good old days, when
superstars got five hundred dollars per flick and had contracts
enslaving them forever or for five minutes, whichever proved more
profitable. I'd imagined it this way, although Shobha Dé's novel
Starry Nights
made it sound more like Capone's Chicago.
'There is no studio system,' he informed me, amazed anyone could
have thought there was one.
'Who makes the films then?'
'Anyone who wants to be making them.'
'Who makes the deals? Agents?'
He laughed. 'Agents? We are having no agents here!'
'So who handles the stars, the directors?'
'Secretaries.'
'Secretaries?' It seemed that the major players - big directors, even
bigger stars all had 'secretaries' in their employment. These
'secretaries' were the real power brokers - like agents, except that
they didn't sign up the stars, the stars hired them. Agents with one
client, these 'secretaries' were thus only as powerful as their
employers.
'So how is it we hear of stars being worked to death, shooting
three or four films simultaneously?'
'No one is
making
them - they are just too greedy. Quite often
you are finding the big star signing contract not for just three or four
movie, but twenty movies at same time.'
'How the hell can you make twenty films at the same time?
You'd have to memorise two thousand pages of script.'
'Script?' Considering that most Indian films were four hours
long, I was about to up the count to four thousand pages, but
apparently no one in Bollywood bothered with scripts. They
improvised. Driving from set to set, changing from mythic king to
high-tech assassin all day long, no one generally had much idea
what any film was about, let alone where his or her character fitted
into it. This certainly explained why the films looked as if they were
made that way. It also explained why, although you read about famous
actors, directors, and producers, you never seemed to hear any
