Is Your Friday Over… Mr. Kashyap?
Black Friday has come. And it has gone. Questions, were what you, Mr. Anurag Kashyap wanted from PFC and it’s authors, it’s readers. Questions that you were hoping were invoked in the viewer of Black Friday. Questions I have now, after coming in contact with many Indian men and women settled in California, whom I got to meet, for the first time, over the last two weeks.
Last night I was invited for dinner by a few PFC readers and their families. I had met none before. The modest house in Irvine, a city south of Los Angeles, had over two dozen Indians, men and women, software engineers, managers, CPAs, lawyers and business executives. The reason for inviting me was to discuss Black Friday and the impact it had on them, the questions it raised in them, the after effects in each of them that led to this dinner and my meeting faces I had never seen before.
Two days prior to this dinner, I was invited by a close friend who had arranged a small get together for his daughter’s first birthday, at his house in the City of Orange. There were over 30 people at this function. As soon as guests came to know about me, I was surrounded by them over tea and samosas served on a discussion that last for over two hours. The discussion was Black Friday.
Earlier this week a few doctors in the beach city of Laguna got together to discuss the future of independent cinema in India and how they could help in making films that they believed in. Key discussions revolved around Black Friday.
Over the last three weeks, I’ve received countless invitations from readers of PFC who are holding similar living room discussions amongst friends and families. It’s like Black Friday has become the prime topic of discussion in Southern California.
It’s been about 4 weeks since Black Friday’s “minuscule” release in the USA.
The question to you Mr. Kashyap is… where the fuck is Black Friday?
I don’t see any theater in California running Black Friday. Instead screens have made way to movies of vegetable intelligence.
So what is going on Mr. Kashyap? Are you, your producers and your distributors done? Number of years, interviews, posts of PFC were used to discuss Black Friday. The time spent by independent bloggers on Black Friday seems to be far greater than the actual time the movie was screened in the theaters.
Which begs the question… Is your Friday over? Is the team and the promoters of Black Friday done and moved on? What about those questions, those discussions and the reactions you wanted to hear from people? I guess it does not matter anymore.
What would you then suggest I tell this chain reaction of Black Friday discussions taking place the NRI living rooms of Southern California? Should I say Mr. Kashyap’s Friday is over? Done? Finito?
I also have serious questions to ask of Adlabs the people behind distributing and marketing Black Friday. Firstly what pin-headed scrambled brain executives does Adlabs have, those who decided Black Friday’s screen life. It’s clear they already made assumptions of Black Friday’s legs. It appeared quite short to them. Would it be possible for these egg-headed honchos to step out of their teak wood office and step into Orange County to show what’s happening in those living rooms and get togethers I’ve mentioned earlier about? Or are they too busy planning the 6 month marketing of their so called A grade movies, movies they are betting on to make the most moolah?
t! had arranged a large group of Independent filmmakers to come together and watch Black Friday. The objective was to show Indian talent and create opportunities for tie-ups between the passionate filmmakers of the independent kind in the US and in India. Two days before the group is supposed to meet at the theater, t! realizes that Black Friday is no longer running in theaters here.
Everyday I get numerous emails from Cinema buffs asking when Black Friday will be released in their town or city. Obviously your “esteemed” distributors did not deem it fit release Black Friday beyond the shores of India and to some extent in the USA. What did they think? There are no Indians or Indian Cinema buffs living in Europe, East Asia, Australia and Southern America? Or perhaps they passed a judgment on these people that Black Friday is “NOT” for them.
The official DVD of Black Friday came out about 10 days ago. The distribution is limited to Indian stores. If one doesn’t exist close to you, you can forget about seeing Black Friday. If it does, then please do check the number of copies a store may have. The maximum I’ve come across in a store is ONE.
And if any PFC fanatic stays in that area, chances are he or she has already bought the copy.
Is this the way to market a movie like Black Friday on the Home Video Front? One copy? ONE?
Every major studio has a dozen odd films per year that they release. Some are their cash cows, some they just carry along – those are those low budget, “arty” kind of movies in their eyes, that they “have” to produce or distribute to show that they have a well oiled factory that churns out movies every year. The difference, between the studios in Hollywood and in India though, is the way (in Hollywood) such independent movies are handled with passionate interest once the executives realize the potential of the movie in terms of hitting the right notes in the viewers’ heart.
Black Friday seems to have been a burden on your distributor and he seemed quite eager to get it off his back as soon as possible.
The questions you were waiting for have started echoing amongst the Indian diaspora here in the USA. Thoughtful, intelligent, challenging, motivating, passionate, forward thinking questions.
The question to you though Mr. Kashyap is… what are you gonna do about it? Is there a way to open your distributor’s eyes and have them see the ground realities? Or…
Is your Friday done and over with… Mr. Kashyap? Huh?
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
Interesting post Oz. I must say I was a little disappointed with the way the film was marketed here in the US. It seems to me like Adlabs underestimated the interest the film held in territories like California. I met a lot of people who had no idea the film had even released in the theaters here. As a result, the opening numbers were quite modest, and the film has been released on DVD.
Now, let me also talk about the flip side here. Many film-passionate Indians, and I meet a lot of them through my work with IFFLA, will not really go to the theater to watch a film like Black Friday because for families here, the theater-viewing experience is very family oriented. So they prefer saving their trips to Naz8 or Laemmle Fallbrook for an SRK film. Something like Black Friday which is a heavy subject matter with no stars is stuff they are interested in, but for a DVD viewing.
It’s very tricky marketing movies like this to the diaspora. The interest is there no doubt, but on a Sunday a man takes his family of 4 out for dinner and then spends $32 on movie tickets, he wants to see something happy. His wife and him can sit home and watch a film like Black Friday on a late night on their home theater system with their kids fast asleep.
Timely post Oz bhai, am being asked the same question too. And after I tell them that I am going to Calif mostly to be with PFC junta, all questions are about AK.
Its not only BF but also questions abt Paanch? Where is that? Will there be atleast a DVD release?
Much as I hate to admit it, Oz, I don’t know how else this story would have ended … I did not expect the film to fare differently in the US Hindi film distribution network. The only way things could have worked out differently would have been if an entity like Fox Searchlight had picked the film up; that would have ensured it’s appearance in the regular art house or chain cinema halls (AMCs, for instance); I remember catching a Fox Searchlight free preview of Bend it like Beckham at an AMC here several months before the nationwide release of the film. Of course, these are different films and Bend it like Beckham is clearly a safer easier sell than Black Friday; yet, I don’t see how a small ambitious film like this would gain a wider audience otherwise; the regular Hindi film distribution circuit (at least as I see it from where I am) relies on medium-to-large films that have a guaranteed initial audience; no one will take risks on smaller films (they’re prepared to take risks on larger films with big stars thanks to the NRI droves that rush to catch a glimpse of their favourite Khan in a piece of embarrassing tripe); films with no perceptible “entertainment” value stand a chance only in few places across the USA. I was lucky to catch Maqbool (a version that didn’t make it to DVD!) at a film festival — a fluke. The same film festival included Mani Ratnam’s Kannathil Muthamittal in 2004, two years after its release in India (AFAIR); a month or so later, the film showed up at the local Landmark Theatres cinema hall. I was hoping this same film festival would snag either Paanch or Black Friday, but IFFLA had all the luck. Had things turned out differently, we may have had some local distributor pick it up, if only for a limited rule.
This was a film that could’ve been sold to a larger audience (in fact, I contend that the diaspora would’ve proved to be a poorer target audience); the material in the film transcends cultural boundaries. Hence, the hope that an entity like Fox Searchlight had picked it up (or even one of the more independent distributors).
I have to make do with DVD releases for movies like this; I was hoping to catch Black Friday on the original scheduled release date (the same Friday as Bhansali’s opus), but alas, the ban put paid to my hopes (some friends managed to catch a screening at a local film festival later, but I was out of the pocket then). I would have loved to watch movies like Mixed Doubles, Being Cyrus, Khosla ka Ghosla, Bas Ek Pal and 15 Park Avenue in a cinema hall, but there’s no way the local desii cinema hall here would’ve screened them. I would have had to be in India to be able to walk up to a ticket counter and get a ticket for these films. I wish I could have planned a vacation around the release of Black Friday, if only to do this … but alas.
However, we must not ignore the triumph that the eventual release of the film represents. The film could have been stuck in limbo forever after the ban and the legal nightmares. Yet, it has made it to the cinema halls and has received the critical attention it deserves; this has also bolstered Anurag’s stock as a filmmaker. We would all have wished for a more filmy end to all this, but perhaps just like Mani Ratnam’s film, Black Friday might show up at some local (US) film festival and pique the curiosity of a distributor and enter a different cycle of life
Hey OZ I can feel your frustration, I was willing to travel 200 miles to Houston to see this movie and it did not come. Its out on dvd but and copied dvds are available for rent, but I’d say buy it from sites like this
“I also have serious questions to ask of Adlabs the people behind distributing and marketing Black Friday.”
that’s funny oz.. distributing.. eh.. ok fine (if you wanna call it that). but i don’t even recall BF being marketed in the first place! :o where was the marketing on behalf of adlabs? i didn’t see shit during all thouse hours of surfing hindi channels. unless you’re talking about the countless newspaper and magazine articles about its court fiascos and the delayed release.. “any publicity is good publicity” they say.. was this a case of the same though? not really.
weirdly enough, a month after its release.. i saw two things related to BF.. saw pavan malhotra on b4u music (”star stop” i think it was)giving his interview and some other show doing a coverage segment on BF.. but i caught it at the tail end and it ended pretty quickly. again, i doubt adlabs even had a hand in these smaller methods used to get the word out to the public of the release. and now that the DVDs are here, it’s easy to expect the same attitude. but only anurag can shed light on this issue…
i do want to thank adlabs for bringing BF out in the open.. but at the same time, i can’t help but raise the same questions you did.. should we be happy that at least they helped release BF? or should we instead put them on the stand saying they should’ve done more?
Let’s not put all the blame on the distributors alone guys. The exhibitors also have a significant role to play here. Screens for big budget mainstream films are booked months in advance. Look at the films that released in the US in diaspora theaters after Black Friday – There was Eklavya, Honeymoon Travels, Nehle Pe Dehla, Nishabd, and Guru and Salaam E Ishq are still running in some desi theaters. So the amount of screens for desi movies is extremely limited, but so many movies, and the mainstream films with stars obviously attract more crowds. So given the string of releases in the weeks post Black Friday, even if Adlabs wanted to continue keeping it in theaters, it would have been difficult. The film was released on such a day that they really did not have time for word-of-mouth to spread. Given, the opening was poor, but in this market, few films without big names open well.
You talk of USA, and here in Southern tip of India every week I enquire whether they would release Black Friday next week; there is no reply.
For the distributors of the film, the marketing ended on first weekend itself:(( with AK hogging every TV channel. After that nobody remembered the film. Now, I listen to its songs once in a while on Vividh Bharathi. I’m not even aware of DVD release.If it was a Yashraj product or a Vikram Bhat sleaze, there would’ve been TV spots advertising the DVD release. :(
I have been a ‘passionate’ fan of this blog and OZ exactly expressed my own feeling of “Black Friday”… I have been thinking about this for quite some time, whenever a director who cires that ‘people now a days dont watch a good movie, all they want is masala stuff’, should look at how much passion they put in to market the product. In this age of in your face marketing, where even crappy shitty affairs of the Johars, Chopras, Roshans go on to become hits just beacause of the ‘image; that they create… I guess independent and talented filmakers shouldnt just consider that releasing their product of passion is the end of it… we must take a leaf of Ram Gopal Verma and look at how he markets his produts, even though half of them are shoody affairs, still he has created a brand for himself… guess the filmakers will have to undergo a course in Business/Brand management:d
sorry for such a lengthy post… should have used ‘enter’ i guess…
In Sydney, theaters were announced (with the dates and show-timings) one month before the release of Guru – Big B would have been proud of the fanfare and the pomposity with which that crassfest of a movie opened in Australia. Chuttu movies like Baghban, KANK, Dhoom2, Jaan-e-mann, Umrao Jaan, Nishabd – all these flicks enjoyed the local patronage, being released in more than one theater – all of them ran (some still running) full page ads in most of the local desi mags/papers. Black Friday however is nowhere to be seen – as far as Australia is concerned the movie’s lost – stuck somewhere in the time and space continuum, defying every law of physics and karma. We see rave reviews all over – even MSM praising about the gritty nature of the movie, about AK & his steadfast crew and their tenacity, and about the final outcome – the censors, courts, and the whole nine yards. Satyameva Jayate – “Truth Prevails” – one reviewer opined. A truth which apparently has no distributors, exhibitors or buyers. Dhana moolam idam Jagat – “The World is run by Money” – he would have said had he been from Australia.
Oz, because of such a long waiting period for the
movie release it has killed my appetite for it.
I dont think I seriously would be enjoying once
it releases here in Middle East, that would be
another month or so as per my DVD store guy.
Cinema’s wont be showing it.
Thank you for venting my frustration as well.>:p
Sir OZ and other cine fanatics at PFC…very intresting post and comments and questions…wish i had the answers to your questions…but the questions are for mr.kashyap…presently, Mr.kashyap is very busy with his house shifing and the post production of NO SMOKING and his animated feature HANUMAN 2…and i mean he is really busy…i will inform him to log on ASAP and reply to all your questions…and Sir OZ…i have few questions for you meself, if i may say so…will email it to you at your email id in few days.
Interesting experiences, Oz and valid concerns all around. But as a silver lining in the cloudy scenario, Black Friday is still running 3 shows in San Jose.
I am currently residing in india, so probably I might not be able to understand your angst on the lovers of cinema not being able to view Black Friday in the US.
But I think Anurag kashyap is a moviemaker and not a social reformer. His passion and his interest is in making movies. It could be those that he felt shoul reach out to people or those born out of his fantasies. I think he has done a fantastic job from his side. he has lit the torch and I think it is too much of us to expect him to run along with it.
There will be around 4-5 million people at least who would have watched the movie in India. People who would have felt the loss .if they are not interested in discussing or debating it, I think the motivation from people across the seas is really commendable.
As roshni mentioned earlier, the media had seveal discussion forums on KANK…which did not deserve even a local train discussion…but not a single one on Black Friday.
So I think it is better that we let Anurag kashyap to move on and do the thing that he loves and we love him for…make movies.
Oz, what i want to tell you is Black Friday was big for us, we were dying to see the movie (pfc ppl n othr movie lovers)
but for anyother person, black friday is just one of the movie which releases every friday, they’ll watch it and forget it, inciase if they can’t watch
they’ll say -’who cares.. we’ll watch it on tv…’. and what is the strength of all those people who have been asking u and AK about the movie … 100, 200?? may be 1000… or more.. and even for the producers that figure is too small… what they mean is – ‘business’
that’s the thing: distributors presume that the targeted audience is very small and thus, they do not market it as much as the film deserves it. another thing, if they are going to be brave by distributing this kind of films and then they should go one step higher by marketing the film heavily to generate a curiosity in the audience. A good film will always work as long as you sell it to the audience.
all films need a good marketing; if they can spend heaps of money to promote a movie that includes the stars – which does not need any marketing, then why cannot they spend a good amount of money for marketing this kind of films.
Distributors need to do their research and they need to come up with a better way for promoting…
OZ,
More than Anurag, I hope that the distributors (including Mid Day people) read this and do something about it… after the film gets over there many thngs which are out of the directors control… especially when a director is just directing and not also simultaneously producing his film… Though I hope that, the film is screened in all the places and more that you have mentioned…
By the way, i have got a mail from Weibke, She is saw my short and have loved it. They are going to convey their decision to me by April end, so lets see.
Cheers.
Very well said Sirji. People in US, at many places, still waiting for the movie to get released. But the prints are somewhere in a warehouse and probably waiting for the day they travel back to Home.
PFC fellows always talked about Black Friday whenever they got a chance to talk, what they get in reply is.. “huh…it didnt even run for a week in theaters, it was a flop, I am looking for someone who owns the dvd” …and things like that.
It appears to me that Black Friday was a burden to adlabs and they got it rid of it like it was nothing to them or the film makers.
The question comes down to the economics of indie cinema. How many theaters can they afford to show it in, what do the numbers have to show and therefore can they expand the # of theaters or will they have to reduce the #?
I remember the director and producer of another indie movie, Red Doors, which sent out numerous email solicitations asking viewers to show up at the opening week b/c if the opening week was good, it would expand, otherwise that would be the end of it.
That said, there are producers who have deep pockets, who sometimes treat a film differently based on the fact that the message is so important that it overrides economics? Is this one such film? It doesn’t appear to be.
Should BF fall into the category where producers go beyond economics. I think so. Why? Because it starts conversations. It makes people question beliefs. That is a rare film.
Why should AK answer that? Shouldn’t we
be asking the same question to ourselves? He did not make the film so that it could run to
packed houses and elicit hoots, catcalls, and whistles. It was never meant to. The audience does not whistle at the BSE blowing up or Muslims being butchered in riot after riot. The audience only hoots at heaving bosoms and gyrating hips.
I think we should think about the response
the film recieved at home in India before we
get at the throats of foreign distributors, producers, the diaspora.
Oz, the fact that there have been discussions
means that the film has achieved its objectives
and served its purpose. Films like Black Friday
are and will be (until we overhaul our
star-system and turn around the way in
which films are made)talking points for a minority. A small group of people.The rest, and
I think it is quite a large majority will dismiss it as a film that glorifies the Muslims.
I think I have said this before and am saying it again- AK’s triumph lies in the fact
that the film generated talk. This is a country where KANK gets debated. Wake up, folks!
Thanks to Oz and PFC I can say all this and more
and not get hit. But seriously, let’s wake up and
change things. Any ideas on how to do that?
OZ,
BRUTALLY HONEST MAN!!!!!….I love U for this
post…..actually have’nt been visiting PFC for some days now…due to other commitments.
Raaj
Roshni,
U too have a valid point …
Raaj