Noted ad-man and soon-to-be feature filmmaker, Prahlad Kakkar lists industry quirks to Nichola Pais, including the curious fact of scripts – which nobody reads anyway! – being written in ‘Roman Hindi’!
Fill very recently, Bollywood was just a moms-n-pops shop. It was run entirely by a couple of families and a few large production houses. They decided on which stars would act in their films and who the established stars were. If there were any new stars, they were also in some way connected to the industry. There were very few outsiders who were taken into the industry.
But as far as the technical side is concerned – directors, cameramen, lighting people and the like – it was open house and it didn’t really matter where they came from. They were the guys who really put the film together, they were the most hardworking of the industry and whatever they earned was never easy money. The people who were treated really very badly until recently were the scriptwriters. They wouldn’t be paid, their scripts would be jhaaped, they would be denied credit.
That is all slowly changing now. It’s becoming a little more professional. But this moms-n-pops attitude of only bringing in youngsters who are in some way connected to the industry, whether they be sons of sons of film people, still hasn’t gone. Most of the new faces that you find are related to somebody or the other in the film industry. The thousands of young hopefuls who come from all over the country to Mumbai to actually make a break in films, never get a chance. They probably never even get an audition.
Women find it much easier to break into films than men do.
If you’re good looking and relatively photogenic, there’s a good chance that you’ll break in because the industry-wallahs themselves don’t want their daughters and wives to be in the industry, unless they can ensure they are protected. They realise that the female casting part is very sleazy and everybody is sort of out to make propositions. There’s no question about it that the casting couch exists. The more desperate and helpless you are, the more the danger for you and the more protected and connected you are, the less it is. Though it is easier to break into films for a lady, the journey is slightly sordid.
The industry is starved of really major stars, because of which the stars are tending to charge exorbitant amounts of money. And that is sending the cost of films spiralling. Star aura… well, it exists because they’re charging shitloads of money! And they wouldn’t actually be paid that money if the market didn’t believe they were worth it. The point is that they don’t back it up later with a good story. Filmmakers spend anything from Rs.10 to Rs.20 crore on stars and they won’t spend Rs.20 lakh on a good scriptwriter, who is as much responsible for the film as the star is.
A lot of films flop because the stars put them out of reach of any recovery. Unless the production houses get tough and make it clear that they won’t dole out money but instead award points, which win stars a share in the profits if the film succeeds, I don’t think it’s going to become viable. Out of every 10 films one or two are big hits. Everybody thinks their film will also fare similarly but 8-9 films flop without ever recovering their money!
So now you have two kinds of films – the below Rs.4 crore films which never get to release properly and are tacky as hell, and the other is the Rs.25-plus crore films which become Rs.50 crore films on account of the cost of the big stars! Even if such a film makes Rs.40 crore, it has still lost money.
Most films do precisely that because they need to make the money back in the first weekend, which is in the first four days of release of the film before the audience figures out that it’s a shit film. By this time, they would have recovered their basic costs.
They are released in 2000 theatres with a whole lot of publicity. The publicity for a film is itself around Rs.10-12 crore. If you make a film for Rs.5 crore, how can you afford to publicise it for Rs.10 crore? With the result, the small films never get publicised. And because of that nobody gets to know about them and nobody wants to go and see them. It’s a Catch 22 situation.
Sure, people like Ram Gopal Varma at one point, and now Anurag Kashyap are doing their bit to bridge this gap. Kashyap has a bunch of young directors who he is encouraging. He is more keen on subjects than on stars, which is why stars, after a while, are willing to come onto his films for a lesser amount because they feel that it’s a different kind of film, a different genre and hard-hitting. But this is still not big enough for the system to change. The system will only change when there are enough young people in the industry who are viable, when people start looking for directors and stories, rather than looking for stars. At the end of it, you go to see a film because of the story-telling, not because any of the big stars are in it because it could just be a shitty film.
If it’s Aamir, you can be sure that he has gone through the script and made his own changes, and you know that he won’t accept a film unless it has a strong story. This is why he has been so successful in his own way. But we seem to have treated our storytellers so badly or we interfere so much in their work that we don’t get a great number of good stories, unfortunately. That needs to be corrected because it is an anomaly. Once we start telling good stories, people will go to watch all kinds of cinema, not necessarily ‘big’ cinema.
Last year was a good year at the box office because a lot of blockbusters actually made a good amount of money. But if you actually calculate, it’s just 2 out of 10. And that’s not a good ratio for any industry. When you get graded as an industry, you should be able to get easy finance but securing finance for the film industry is very difficult because everybody wants their pound of flesh, including the banks if they decide to give you the money. We are now frozen in a state of change but how much it is going to change, one doesn’t know.
Other industries have a particular form of discipline but the film industry, as a whole, has no discipline. Certain producers and certain pockets of directors are personally disciplined but many are not even literate. Bollywood is perhaps the only place where you write Hindi scripts in English – I call it ‘Roman Hindi’! I find it really ridiculous not only because nobody can read Hindi, but because nobody reads the English either!
Everybody takes a look at a thick bound script and says they don’t have the time to read and, at the end of it, they will say, ‘Suna do abhikahaani’! It becomes a storytelling session, a narration. Finally, a dialogue-writer comes in to try and translate the script into Hindi but there’s a falsity to that; it doesn’t come as a flow and is not natural.
Yes, I am writing my film, in the process of completing the script. Let’s see if any of the stars like the idea… To get the money that we need for it to be shot we have to get a reasonably good star-cast otherwise the producers themselves will not be interested. Approaching the corporates is futile. Corporates are worse than producers because at least the latter have been a part of the business. The corporates firstly don’t know the business. All they’ve learnt is that if you have a big star-cast your film is saleable. That’s all they’re interested in. They wouldn’t know a good story if it bit them in the backside. And because all the corporates are literate, they actually read the scripts and start interfering in them, which is not their job! And yes, they are the only ones reading the scripts!
On account of all the advertising work I do, the first contact with the stars is easy because they think I’m going to be offering them some huge amounts of money for some ads. So they do give me that access – until they hear that I’m trying to do a feature! Then immediately they become stars again and tell me to please get in touch with their secretary or manager, or that they’ll call me back and so on!
