A Cine-fan’s Journey from Bollywood to Hollywood and Back
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Wise Desi (Fremont, USA)
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A Cine-fan’s Journey from Bollywood to Hollywood and Back
I consider myself a cine-buff in an average cine goer way, the one who enjoys all kind of movies. As I have stated earlier I don’t like the term Bollywood, but using it anyway for this post it fits the title.
Being born in a small conservative town of India and growing up during the terrible (in every which way) 80’s India, my early exposure to cinema was limited to the Sunday 5:45 pm show on Doordarshan. And those of you who have seen this era might remember the kind of movies DD used to inflict upon us. Most of the times, these used to be flop movies at least 15-20 years old, lying in some dust bin that somebody forgot to clean-up for years and years. I am not sure what the reasons were, apart from the terrible taste and ineptness of the DD babus, I suspect it must have been lack of budgets as DD used to only take a 15 min ad break in between as what we used to call ‘Interval’. I won’t deny that once in a while DD used to slip in some decent movies that must have been hits in their time, but they had to be at lease 15 years old. To DD’s creadit, I did watch classics/hits like ‘Aradhana’, ‘Anand’, ‘Aan Milo Sajna’, Saajan’ (old Manoj Kumar/ Asha Parekh movie – a decent watch), ‘Majboor’, ‘Naram-Garam’, ‘Katha’ etc., first on DD.
Despite this only occasional viewing and that too of mostly flops and worn out movies on a black and white screen (first, then colored later), that used to flicker most of the time (until you go hit the ‘Antenna’ with a ‘danda’, or rotate it randomly), my fascination and love with cinema was instant. I knew that I am hooked for life. Going to a theatre to watch movies had gone out of fashion by the time I grew old enough to do so. It became a ritual only for the ‘Rikshawallas’ as the theatres were in shabby conditions. Believe me, they were in even worse condition than the Naz8 here in Fremont, CA. On top of that, most of the times the movies that were shown there were not suitable for a ‘Susheel’ (English: nice or nerdy and sometime both) boy like me. Sneaking out to watch a movie in the cinema hall was out of question because as I already told you, I was a ‘Susheel’ boy and being a small town you never knew who you may run into. But the cinema halls tempted and tortured my soul all through my growing up years. I used to walk/cycle extra slowly, every time I passed a cinema hall so that I could get extra time to take a peak at the posters. And once in a while, when I did get the opportunity to go to a theatre to watch a movie, mostly with some distant visiting cousin, it used to be the best day of my life for some time to come. I used to like every one of those movies that I saw in theatres and used to remember every scene and dialogue verbatim. It didn’t matter how those movies were as they were all great piece of cinema to me, back then. If you take a look at some of the movies I watched during that period, the pun would become clearer to you – Mard (yes, I loved it then), ‘Gazab or Gajab( atrocious Dharmendra movie in a double role), ‘Ganga Jamuna Saraswati, Sampoorna Ramayana, Gharwar, ‘Swarg Se Sundar’. Years later, I still sometimes rent these movies on DVD for nostalgic reasons alone and laugh at how silly or naive I was.
As I grew older and got into an engineering college, it became easier to watch all sorts of movies. Even at home, we started renting VCRs more frequently and used that to watch all the oldies from 60’s and 70’s. This was the period when I discovered classics like ‘Deewar, ‘Trishul, ‘Shakti’, ‘Arzoo’(watch this one for Sadhana), ‘Waqt’, ‘Who Kaun Thi’ (to me, the best suspense film ever made in Hindi cinema. Please note that this was the period of mid-late 80’s when Mithunda was the greatest star, followed by Jeetendra a close second. Those of you who are a generation younger may not know how big Mithunda was in 80’s, particularly in smaller towns where he was not just a big star, but also style icon (believe it or not) and a heartthrob for girls. See, in those days, stars were bigger or smaller depending on how many movies they do in a year. In one such year, I remember, Mithunda released almost 67 movies, out of which 62 were flops. And this was before he moved to Oonty and decided to work only with TLV Prasads of the world.
Anyway, as I discovered the classic oldies, I slowly learned why Hindi film industry was dying a slow death in 80’s, primarily because of the quality of the movies. However it was always blamed on TV/video and piracy. Irrespective of what was being produced or released I did use my newfound freedom in college to watch all kind of movies in all kind of theatres and slowly started craving for something better and watchable. Finally I also grew out of my ‘Susheel’ boy mode and watched those Malyalam dubbed movies such as ‘Aaj Ka Samson’, ‘Jungle mein oye oye’ and all sorts of movies with ‘Jawani’ in the title that were called ‘J-series’. In those movies, we had even mastered when exactly to get into the theatre to catch the inserted porn clip and when to get out in order save yourself from unnecessary bug bites. Unfortunately even my college happened to be in a small town of now Uttaranchal and the quality of cinema halls didn’t improve for me.
This was the time when I first came in touch with Hollywood through many channels. These channels included – weekend video shows in the hostel TV room, occasional movie shows in the institute movie theatre and morning shows of primarily soft porn movies with some nude scenes such as ‘And God created women’. Initially, I couldn’t figure out what the fuss was all about, mostly because I followed very little of what they were saying. I watched ‘Good Bad Ugly’, ‘Romancing the stone’ and ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ during this period and except GBU, didn’t like any other movies. The biggest torture was BHC because I couldn’t follow any of the dialogues so didn’t know why people were laughing. Now you must have figured out why I liked GBU, because it was mostly style and music and the hero in it hardly spoke.
As started my professional life and made my journey to big cities like Bombay and Bangalore, via Delhi, I finally saw some good quality theatres. I made sure that I watched at least one movie in each of the well known theatres – Liberty, Metro in Bombay and Plaza in Delhi. These places were to me like New York or San Francisco to someone living in Jhumri Talaia( an imaginary place in India used as an example of a typical sleepy small town in rural India). My friend circle grew wider and I came into touch with people who were well versed into Hollywood and different genres of movies that came out of there. I sat silently through most of such conversations as these guys raved about Star War series, or the other classics and great hits that used to be released in big Indian cities those days. Most of these guys spoke lowly of ‘Bollywood’. Slowly, I also started agreeing with them as I had become tired of Bollywood by them. The fascination was wearing thin, every cliché, every formula twist was becoming predictable to me as I was suffering from Bollywood burn out and was really in need for some change.
That’s when I landed up in US on a software job. I grabbed the opportunity with both hands and immersed myself into a crash course in Hollywood movies. I rented on VCR and then DVD, every old time classic I had heard of, such as Star Wars, Godfather series, Casablanka, Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhiwago and was needless to say, completely blown away. I was amazed at the range of different kind of movies guys made, the detailing of scenes, the character sketches, and dialogues (which I finally could follow – close captioning is great). I watched some of the absolute gems around this time that I accidently discovered – ‘Regarding Henry’ (man, what a screen presence this guy Harrison Ford had), ‘The Firm’ (a tight thriller and Tom Cruise rocked), ‘Few Good Men’ (discovered Jack Nicholson finally.
Did I tell you that even during peak of my fascination with Hollywood, my love for my old flame Bollywood, didn’t completely die. In fact I used this new found freedom with DVD players to rent some of the old Hindi classics and even sat through some of the Tamil classics (with subtitles) with a friend. Of course, both me and my wife were big fans of SRK/Kajol and watched every one of their releases religiously.
But this was the period when my love for Hollywood was at it’s peak. I was discovering different genres, action, drama, disaster (I even loved‘B’ class disaster movies such as Twister), horror, comedy and was awed and amazed by the range these guys had. But like every good thing, it had to come to an end. Slowly I started to get the same feeling of familiarity that I had with Bollywood. All the formula and twists started becoming predictable. Even character sketches and movie endings started become clichéd and I started getting the same feeling as I had with Bollywood and beer. Initially when I discovered beer, I loved it. I used to enjoy the first sip, the first bottle, the second bottle and I thought ‘How can somebody not like bear?’ But after few years, I still enjoy the first sip, but not beyond that, unless I am in some great company of friends or in a Bangalore pub where there is great draft beer on tap. Same thing happened between me and Hollywood movies. I used to go into great anticipation into a Hollywood movie and used to come out satisfied, completely tript (English: extra satisfied like in an orgasm), the kind of feeling that I only got after eating ‘Gujarati Thali’ in Gujarat) or ‘Shalimar’ (Pakistani restaurant, you can Google them) food in bay area. But it’s been sometime since I got that kind of feeling from a Hollywood movie. Yes, I still watch them and enjoy some of them, and even occasionally get an orgasm such as with ‘LOTR’ series or final episode of Star Wars or with horror flick ‘The Ring’. But it has become an exception to find a great movie that I loved, just like with Bolloywood flicks. Even the romantic comedies now a days, don’t have the same kind of wit or warm characters that they used to have earlier. To Holloywood’s credit however, they had too many genre to choose from and if you grew tired of one, you could always switch to another. This is time when I started discovering different and weird kind of stuff – David Lynch, Tarantino, ‘Fightclub’, ‘Memento’ ‘Everlasting sunshine…’ etc.
That’s why I smile when some of friends deride or look down upon Indian cinema and dismiss it as mere song and dance. Well, I tried watching the song and dance that Hollywood produced and absolutely hated them. Both of these –Chicago and Moulin Rouge were nominated for Oscars. I completely agree with people like Gulzar, Vishal or others who understand and are able to articulate why there is nothing wrong with the song and dance routine in Indian cinema and how it’s a valid genre and art form. It apparently has it’s origins in ‘Nautanki’ (English: Drama and songs) in northern part of India or it’s other forms around the country where songs were used to move the story forward. Of course, I am all for change and so called growing up of Bollywood and is happy to see different kind of scripts come out and even songless films. Also, I am happy to see finally the emphasis on screenplay, script and characterization. But give me the old style, well made Bollywood film with all the necessary ingredients and nothing comes close to it. That’s why I loved ‘Main Hoon Na’. It was the old style Bollywood with song and dance routines and suspension of belief with newer techniques and better production values. I expected the same and more from Farah Khan in OSO, but was completely let down. That’s for some other day.
Anyway, my journey still continues I do think it’s slowly coming to full circle. I am no more bound by the barriers of country, culture or even language anymore and consider myself fully fit to enjoy cinema produced in various parts of the world and in different languages. I no longer worry about running out of options to watch as my horizon has expanded.
I have a firm belief that when I grow old and weary and kids are all grown up and left the house, my two passions ‘Reading Books’ and ‘Watching Movies’ will always be there to keep me company.
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Just the right time for this post…… I just went into the silence of Ingmar Bergman…. Hope that u have already followed this path or will follow it in near future….
Wise &(Susheel) Desi,
Interesting post. I guess I have travelled the same road. I like Hollywood moveis but really yearn for good Indian movies. My only issue is the song and dance sequence. I guess we all have our opinions. I am wating to see all the comments on this topic. Oh by the way, I love the Hollywood musicals (Chicago being my favourite).
Oh, by the way, the “J-Series” comment was hillarious. Sadly, I never got to go to the theatre experience it.
nice read..Been there done that..strangely i enjoy reading about hollywood movies more interesting than watching them..read two books by peter biskind on 70s and 90’s cinema recently.cant come to watch the 80 Gb odd movies on my lappie or the Pirated DVDs i keep on bying. the joy of discovering something new..miss it.. felt a little better after watchin TZP.
It made for a nice read Wise Desi. I could easily identify with some parts. You didn’t mention anything about the vernacular movies DD used to play on Sunday afternoons. Though I used to find them utterly boring then (mostly due to the cumbersome sub titles one had to read), I regret missing out on those movies. I remember them playing a Ray or a Ghatak once in a while.
Btw, Jhumri Tilaiya isn’t fictional at all! It is an actual place in what is now Jharkand. Got couple of friends from there who always need to flash their driving licences to the non-believers in the beginning (including me, who too thought just like you, that it is a fictional place cooked up by Hindi movies). And apparently its pretty beautiful too.
Enjoy your experience with cinema and discoveries. Like someone suggested before, Bergman would be a great journey too into a completely parallel world. And have you tried Woody Allen yet? Gotto love that guy and his films!
Sachin,
Thanks for educating me about Jhumri Talaia. Yes, I did miss most of those vernacualar movies, except when I was realy bored or knew the Hindi film in the evening is going to be bakwas.
I have Woody Allen but not Bergman yet. That would be next.
Thanks to you and Mewani for the tips.
sahi kaha bhai.
once a noted author said about communism that if you are not a communist at 20 you are not young and if you are not finished with communism at 25 you are not intelligent.
same thing apply with hollywood. if you don’t know it you lack exposure and after being exposed to it for five years you are not out of it you are not intelligent.
:-j
HI!
Really nice post friend!
This is xctly wht i am going through now!
Very nice!