A Fuc***g Drinker Never Dies
Rajat Kapoor is flush with Rs 20 crores from PNC..The deal to make six films.
Farhan Akhtar inks a deal with Studio 18 for Rs 230 crores..The deal is to make six films.
Indian Film Company to invest the money raised upto 50million pounds to make 40-50 films.Six of them have been announced.
Planman motion pictures is accelerating its film production business and ready to roll out its six projects.
The number six is coincidental..
What is essential is the announcement of so many projects by these production houses..There is nothing new in films being treated as a project..Because film is not only creative inputs, it requires so many other elements to be put together and tied up properly to bring it to the screens,monitors, LCDs, or mobile screens(in near future).
If ever there was any doubt about Bollywood being business, it is scotched with entry of corporate production houses,makeover of indie producers into corporate entities and entry of Hollywood studios—all having eyes on having their share in the expanding picture-pie.
And these production houses and studio entities are not bothered about the quality as much as the quantity..In a high risk business proposition like filmmaking, it is a must to minimise the risks..Not to have all the eggs in one basket..To thin the spread..And that’s what they all are doing..To hedge their bets.
On one level it is encouraging..Because more movies will be made..more stories will be told..more directors will get work..(Stars are as such getting flooded with offers and mega bucks)..Still it is not guaranteed that the output will be of high quality..An individual director on a personal level may want to ensure excellence and quality but it is not certain whether he will get away with it completely..Because it is not meat anymore but the marketing of the meat that is of importance..And creativity is going to be controlled by marketing principles and pressures..What you consider to be a great story may not be so..Even if your story or script is accepted as a project it will depend on how it qualifies as a product in the market..And market is still ruled by stars and not the scripts.
More and more focus now is going to be not juggling a movie or two but a portfolio padded with stars..And movie making is going to be more and more in the hands of these managers who would want to have diversified projects..One Titanic or Harry Potter or Superman or star driven Chak De or dark horse like Bheja Fry they would be looking out for to cover losses of other duds..
The issue is not going to be the originality of the scripts..Or putting more of local stories in a universal language of emotions or making Indian Films with international appeal..That may happen as a byproduct..Bottomline is going to be the revenues that a project can fetch..Any project—whether a remake,rehash,remix,reinvented or retreaded..
So be ready to have flood of movies—maybe 4to 5 releases a week to feed the insatiable appetite of multiplexes, but when it will come to judging the quality it will still be 80-20 principle. Twenty percent of the films generating 80 percent of the revenue.(.In Indian context this ratio is pathetic at present..Hardly 5 percent of the movies generating 95 percent of the revenues..All others either get bar-be-queued or turn turkey..)
This 80-20 principle and having multiple projects in the pipeline is not something new..Only it is going to be more organized and professional with an aura of corporate competence..Earlier Boney Kapoor was doing the same thing but as an independent producer..So was RGV churning out assembly line products from his aptly named Factory.And that had its advantages..They went by their gut feeling or conviction in backing a project..There was more passion and sincerity..And the decision making was quick..In a studio or corporate scenario who will take the call,who will give a go ahead and who will stake his bum on a project may make or break it..Regardless of the fate of a project, in a changed scenario and in future more and more films as projects and products will keep coming with greater frequency..And the show will go on..
It is weird but true and reminds me of an exercise in logic : Every 2nd peg of whisky reduces life by 5 minutes..Each sex trip increases life by 10 minutes..So the basic equation is :A fucking drinker never dies.Welcome to the world of portfolio management and be prepared to get rogered in this new-wave of picture-portfolios!
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
Bottomline is there will be more money, more films, more filmmakers, more shit, more crap, less stories, even lesser storytellers!
it happens only in India, make hay while the sunshines!!
You have said: “This 80-20 principle and having multiple projects in the pipeline is not something new..Only it is going to be more organized and professional with an aura of corporate competence..”
I would like to expand on that. Economics informs us that the value of mass produced goods goes down over time. However, we witness its inversion under conditions of late capital (popularly understood in India as corporatisation) where use value (the real tangible benefit derived from consuming a good) is replaced by exchange value (notional benefit). How does the culture industry (advertising, newspapers, television, cinema) turn out mass produced artefacts and yet retain (in fact increase) interest and consumption. As Adorno and Horkheimer have put it, it is through a widespread process of fetishisation. The consumer is paying, not for the product but for the packaging. Rather than assessments of value based on the qualities of the product, judgments about the qualities of the product are based upon its exchange value, its price, its top-ten rating — consumption of trivia.
In the context of cinema, this will give us star gazing, merchandising, theme parks, restaurants, sharing of trivial information about films etc. Ultimately it will be the auteur armed with a digital camera and good ideas who will provide films that break this stranglehold. But late capital will appropriate and fetishise her/him till they are part of this consumption.