Lost in India’s biggest shantytown, a hellish sprawl in the heart of Mumbai,
what should have been a 20-minute trip, to attend the premiere of the latest
Bollywood blockbuster, was now an hour-and-a-half odyssey. Somewhere the
driver had taken a wrong turn and we were crawling through Dharavi, Mumbai’s
mega-slum.
Exhaustion may have been to blame. The driver was so tired he had to stop in
the middle of the street every 10 minutes to splash water on his face. With
neither Hindi nor geography to fall back on, I was left to stare anxiously
out of the window as he drove further and further into the dense network of
shambolic streets.
Dharavi’s slum looks as though it has been cobbled together from flotsam and
jetsam after a flood of apocalyptic proportions. More than a million people
live here, stacked in hovels that appear to teeter on the edge of collapse.
But that night the population was teeming outside, preparing for a chaotic
collision of religious holidays: Holi, the Indian spring festival; Good
Friday; and the Prophet’s birthday. Holi celebrants were stringing up chains
of lights and preparing to get smashed on bhang lassi – a potent mix of
yoghurt, sugar and cannabis. Turn the corner, pause for the cows, and an
outdoor church service was in full swing, complete with people carrying
life-sized crucifixes. Another corner and an imam sat with a circle of
followers. Then, suddenly, we were in the wilderness. No lights, just deep
potholes, and lorries piling out of a huge factory and sending up clouds of
dust. In the darkness I could see a light. Imax!
It seems impossible that any film – no matter how starry the cast – could
compete with India itself. Yet Indians are the most avid cinema-goers on the
planet. Inside the Imax Wadala was a world away from Dharavi. Ignore the red
carpet and the paparazzi and you could be forgiven for thinking you’d landed
in Maidenhead on a Saturday night. Chubby kids with their chubby parents,
all in too-tight T-shirts and jeans, stuffing popcorn and looking bored as
they waited for the stars to arrive. Then everything changed. A vision of
breathtaking loveliness emerged. Katrina Kaif is one of India’s hottest
movie stars and tonight she is sizzling. Dressed in pink and dripping in
diamonds, she floated around protected by five security guards. This is a
woman famous in a country of over one billion people. The unfeasibly polite
crowd politely snap away with cameras. Nobody jostles or pushes. That’s not
to underplay India’s devotion to its stars. A BBC poll to discover the
world’s greatest film star ranked the Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan –
“Big B” – first, ahead of Sir Laurence Olivier, thanks to the devotion of
the Indian diaspora. In the south of the country, Bachchan’s biggest rival,
portly 58-year-old Rajnikanth (so famous he needs only one name), is
worshipped as a god with shrines bathed in milk and garlanded with flowers.
The premiere, a film called Race, tells the story of two brothers, the
megastar Saif Ali Khan, the unholy love child of Tom Ford and Bono, and
Akshaye Khanna, a dead ringer for the Coronation Street alumnus Terry
Duckworth. The two brothers run Stallions Inc, a stud farm, and scrap over
beautiful women and money. It is a three-hour mix of Dynasty and MTV.
English peppers the script. It’s hard to reproduce in print but feels
something like this: “Yudhamanyus ca vikranta uttamaujas ca viryavan, he
lives life in the fast lane.” “Dharmak? Etre kuruk? Etre samaveta yuyutsava?
Can I borrow your pen?”
When the cast aren’t throwing smouldering looks or speeding from one exotic
locale to the next, they’re singing and dancing: there’s a cowboy hoedown
(emphasis on ho) at a ranch, a disco raunch-out that would make Britney
Spears blush. The critics hated it. “An average plot pourri,” ran the
headline in the Hindustan Times, “a
crime-grime-adultery-disco-bomb-explosion thriller” that left the critic as
“exhausted as someone who’s been driving for hours without a destination”.
Perhaps we shared the same taxi driver.
Indians disagreed and packed the cinemas – so far the film has pulled in $25m
worldwide. Britain is Bollywood’s second-biggest market outside the
subcontinent: the International Indian Film Academy Awards – the Bollywood
equivalent of the Oscars – were held in Sheffield last year. Race made
£460,000 in its first weekend.
But for all Bollywood’s flash, it cannot compete with Hollywood. India makes
about 1,000 movies a year, 10 times Hollywood’s total. Unlike the US,
though, its films don’t travel. Nor has it achieved the crossover successes
of films from Britain, Japan and, more recently, China and South Korea. The
reverse has also proved true. The Indian film industry has a huge audience
at home that is largely immune to Hollywood’s charms. Indian’s don’t watch
foreign films, just as non-Indians don’t watch Bollywood.
“India Shining” – as the government labels its hot economy – is spreading its
wings. Mumbai-based Tata bought Jaguar and Land Rover the week Race was
released. But its world-famous film industry has yet to make it big
overseas. It’s a national embarrassment. Somewhere in the sea of people
attending the Race premiere is a man who intends to change all that.
Newsweek recently dubbed Ronnie Screwvala, a 45-year-old Mumbai native,
India’s Jack Warner. Warner is credited as the man who set parochial US
cinema on its path to world domination. An outsider who has taken Bollywood
by storm, Screwvala has bigger ambitions. He wants to be India’s Rupert
Murdoch – or at least Harvey Weinstein, Miramax’s legendary movie producer.
His company, UTV, is the closest India has to the giant media combines of
the West and stretches from cable TV shows and video games to movies and
music. Ronnie Screwvala’s UTV financed Race – the Bollywood formula still
makes lots of money. But unlike his competitors he has his eye on a new
generation of Indian filmgoers bored with Bollywood’s singalongs, and has
big plans to make his mark in the outside world.
Indian films have long struggled to crack the western market, but its diaspora
has never been so influential in the industry. The subcontinent’s Hollywood
hotshots include Elizabeth director Shekhar Kapur; Mira Nair, who has
directed Vanity Fair and The Namesake; The Sixth Sense director M Night
Shyamalan; and Bharat Nalluri, who directed episodes of Spooks and Life on
Mars and the recent hit Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.
Unlike the Chinese film industry, which is also targeting the West, India
doesn’t have censorship to deal with. India has the history, the skills and
the money to make it on the international stage. Now all it needs is the man
to make that happen. Screwvala is pretty sure he’s that man. He had his
first taste of Hollywood glory with The Namesake, Nair’s international hit
about Indian immigrants. The film grossed about $14m at the box office –
more cash than any other Indian production has earned abroad to date.
UTV has since co-produced the Chris Rock comedy I Think I Love My Wife (not an
Indian in sight) and is in negotiations with Will Smith about future
features. But his biggest bet comes this weekend with the opening of The
Happening, a sci-fi thriller starring Mark Wahlberg and directed by
Shyamalan.
Not so long ago Shyamalan was being hailed as the new Alfred Hitchcock for his
twist-in-the-end thrillers. But his last movie, Lady in the Water, bombed
and he was left, reportedly, struggling to find money. “One had sent him a
couple of mails a few years back,” says Screwvala. “Then he was on a
completely different level, so that got ignored.” Now Screwvala’s on the
rise and it’s Night making the calls. With a budget of $57m, The Happening
cost as much as 10 Indian blockbusters. Having read the script, Screwvala is
sure Night is back on form. UTV is up for half the budget. If the gamble
pays off, Screwvala will become a player in two time zones.
Screwvala lives with his second wife, Zarina, and his lookalike labrador,
Sprite, in an upscale apartment block in Mumbai. They are currently having
another apartment renovated that will look out over the Arabian Sea. It has
mogul written all over it. Zarina is easily a match for Screwvala. She is a
successful television executive and helped co-found UTV. They met at work
but she winces when I suggest it was an “office romance”. “I guess,” she
says. Nor is she happy to have her picture taken with Ronnie. “We’d never do
a Hello!” she says. She will talk about Sprite. “I had him trained but it
didn’t seem to work: it seemed like I was wasting all this money. But
suddenly he seems to listen,” says Zarina. I assume we are still talking
about the dog.
Ronnie – Big Ron, as he’s called behind his back – is an imposing figure with,
by all accounts, a short fuse. He speaks English beautifully but likes his
metaphors mixed. “With all things being equal at that crossroads in my life,
I wanted to be an entrepreneur,” he says at one point. Jokes and sarcasm
keep his crew in line. I attend a meeting of his directors and one tells him
that the video crew loved the music to a film’s he’s making. “Oh, that’s
earthy,” says Screwvala. “Maybe we should screen our movies to the canteen
staff?” Another director tells him a film was “the best-lit movie” he had
seen. “What! The ‘best-lit’ movie,” laughs Screwvala. “There’s a lot of new
language being used today.”
Born in Mumbai, his father was a successful executive who headed the British
firms J L Morrison and Smith & Nephew, owner of the overseas rights to
Nivea cream. The Screwvalas are Parsis, members of India’s small and
close-knit Zoroastrian community. Parsis have long held influential
positions in Mumbai’s business community and Screwvala’s father wanted him
to train to join their ranks. “Dad was keen I went to England to be a
chartered accountant.” But “at the last minute I snitched out of that one”,
he says.
Instead he took a job as an advertising copywriter – “I needed a decoy” –
while he looked for business opportunities. He spotted his first one on a
trip to England with his father. During a visit to an Addis hairbrush
factory Screwvala spotted two toothbrush-making machines that had been
discarded. He bought them for £4,000 – “a princely sum at the time” – then
went back to India to get a loan to finance the purchase. He sold the
business in 2004 to buy back shares that the media giant News Corp, the
owner of The Sunday Times, had taken in UTV. The sum was “a lot more than
£4,000”.
While he was keeping the nation’s teeth clean, Screwvala began exploring cable
TV. Until cable TV came to India in the early 1980s, the country had only
one channel. “No one had a TV remote: there was only one channel,” he says.
Screwvala began selling cable subscriptions door-to-door.
In 1990 he founded UTV as a production company to make shows for the state
broadcaster. The company has kept expanding. But it is in the film industry
that Screwvala has had the biggest impact. India’s film industry is a family
affair largely controlled by a few powerful producer-directors with personal
ties to Bollywood’s superstars, many of whom are also related. Scripts and
budgets have been fluid concepts. In a recent interview, the Indian
character-actor Roshan Seth, who played Nehru to Ben Kingsley’s Gandhi, said
he didn’t do more Indian films because film producers rarely had scripts,
and the ones he got were “awful, simply awful”.
As an outsider, Screwvala has fought to impose order on a chaotic system. “We
were not to the manner born,” he says. “We had to start at subzero, not even
zero.” He looked outside India for expertise and investors. Disney now owns
a 32% stake in the company and Screwvala has close ties with News Corp’s
Fox, which is co-producing The Happening. The big western media firms now
want in on the booming Indian market. Screwvala is the first to look out.
Andy Bird, chairman of Walt Disney International, says Screwvala is ahead of
his time. “Historically this has been a cash-driven, family-run business.
He’s brought greater discipline,” he says. “He thinks broadly about the
market.”
“It’s normal,” says Screwvala. “It’s not like a French company would think,
‘Let’s just make biscuits for France.’ But India has been a very insulated
economy. Ten years ago you had to have special permission if you left the
country more than twice a year. You could only take $20 of exchange, so you
landed anywhere and you didn’t have the money for the taxi fare.”
) ) ) ) )
Bollywood film sets are closely guarded. Gossip columns vie for the smallest
titbit about their stars. Behind high walls down a nondescript street on the
outskirts of Mumbai is what looks like an abandoned circus. Giant demon
heads lie abandoned in tents, a row of masks stuck on poles. On the main
set, a group of actors perform against a background depicting Delhi and a
forest. At the centre of the action is Rakesh Mehra, filming scenes for
Dilli 6, his first movie since Rang De Basanti, Screwvala’s favourite film.
RDB, as it’s known in Bollywood, was a landmark piece of Indian cinema and
featured Brit Alice Patten opposite the Indian superstar Aamir Khan. It
tells the story of an English film-maker who travels to the subcontinent to
make a documentary about freedom fighters mentioned in her grandfather’s
memoirs, and it draws parallels between Indians ruled by the British and
Indians ruled by corrupt politicians today. Despite lacking the usual
Bollywood “masala”, RDB was a box-office smash.
Dilli 6 will star Abhishek Bachchan, son of the Big B, but Mehra is a new-age
Indian director, impatient with the star system. “There was a period in the
1950s and 1960s that was a golden age for Indian cinema. Somehow we got lost
in the star system,” says Mehra. “We’ve been making musicals for a bit too
long now.” Using the same stars and the same stories has been bad for
business, he adds. “Star films don’t reach a wider audience – only the fans
of that star go to see that star’s movies.” The country’s obsession with its
stars has led Bollywood to think “it’s a whale when it’s a tadpole”.
“There is a lot of talk about new stars, new stories and new structures. But
our movies are still in the Stone Age. I think we were further ahead 40
years ago. Films were reaching a wider audience then. We are happy here if a
film makes $3m in the US. To me that is an embarrassment.”
But things are changing, he says. “India is, in a way, a very young country.
As a concept it came about after the British left in 1947. In the following
20 years there was a lot of nation- building and that was reflected in film
with bold subjects. It wasn’t just boy meets girl. But then the economy
didn’t do so well. The 1970s, 80s and 90s were decades of famine, poverty…
Nobody wanted realism. Actors became like demigods. Now with prosperity
moving in to the middle class, the movies have changed. There is a whole
world out there. Society is changing – I don’t know if it is for good or bad
– and that will be reflected in the films.”
Some 72% of India’s population is reported to be under the age of 34 and they
increasingly look to the outside world for inspiration – they want to hear
different stories. Stories that the rest of the world will want to hear too,
says Mehra. “This is India; Hollywood is Hollywood. There are enough Indians
across the world to watch us, but you have to reach out to non-Indians as
well.” But the films Bollywood has been making “are very complicated. I
don’t understand them”.
“Americans created their own film grammar and it seems to work, but if
India follows that, it will be hari-kari. We will neither please the
Americans or the Indians. My belief is that the more Indian you get, the
more universal you get as well. People in the West are not interested in
seeing an Indian version of what they see already. They want to see
something original.”
Screwvala gets that, says Mehra. “It makes a difference that he is an
outsider. He’s uncorrupted; he’s unlearning the process by which Indian
films have been made.” For Screwvala there are no sacred cows.
Back in Mumbai, Screwvala and his deputies are holding a planning meeting. The
executives are discussing producing a film with Shilpa Shetty, the Bollywood
actress who won the reality show Celebrity Big Brother last year after a
heated race row. The film is “Charlie’s Angels meets Race” and will be set
in London. “Can we get Jade Goody to play the villain?” asks Deven Khote,
one of Screwvala’s longest-serving deputies. “We need bikini,” says
Screwvala. “We could shoot in Dubai,” says Khote. “Good,” says Screwvala.
There’s some discussion about a film with Heather Graham, then another film
with a political angle comes up in conversation. UTV has two films coming up
which touch on the Mumbai train bombings of July 2006 that killed more than
200 people. There’s another that updates part of the Indian epic Mahabharata
and is going to cause “political fallout”, says one of Screwvala’s team.
“Good,” says Screwvala, helping himself to another handful of popcorn. He’s
all for trouble. Trouble and bikinis.
