The new godfathers

Stars may be sticking to their kind of cinema as actors but are leveraging their brand credibility to pump up the fortunes of independent filmmakers. Meanwhile, new-born directors are turning producers to legitimise many of their kind in Bollywood. Ekatmata Sharma analyses the trend

By now everybody must have watched Peepli Live and spawned theories about an original treatment to an honest-to-god story from debutante filmmaker Anusha Rizvi. The media, while internalising the sting of the film’s criticism of it, continues to dish out fond bites week after week, building an aura around it — how much business the film raked in, how it has impacted the hinterland, how Habib Tanvir’s legacy called Naya Theatres has been resurrected, how many real life Nathas are born every day, how the real town of Pipli is different from its fictional namesake and how Twitter is reacting to its every frame.

Presiding over this mastercraft is a man called Aamir Khan, who has thrown the entire weight of his conviction and brand power behind the film’s promotion. Every search engine in town drives home his ownership rights: Aamir Khan Productions’ Peepli Live. And Rizvi never misses mentioning how he was the first producer she ever approached. Meanwhile, the star himself keeps harking back to his Lagaan days, another film which he had produced and helped redeem director Ashutosh Gowariker as a man of substance. Though it went on to become a huge commercial hit, it is true nobody expected the unconventional storyline of villagers using cricket as an assertion of self-rule against the British Raj to work with the masses. Of course, Aamir had acted in Lagaan, too, perhaps to protect his stakes. In the process, he developed the sensibility of a much in control director in Taare Zameen Par and retreated completely as a producer who knows he’s picked the right horses, be it the youthsy Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na or the thought-provoking Peepli Live and Dhobi Ghat.

A new trend is coursing through Bollywood where small wonders, produced and hawked by mega stars, are becoming big successes, changing the rules of the game. Interestingly, these big daddies continue their formulaic, safe commercial pursuits to deepen their pockets, then pick up the most creative talent cheap and sell them at a bigger profit. Call it ambition, creative expansion, legacy-hunting or pure business, the industry’s masala men and women are fuelling an independent boom of meaningful cinema and mainstreaming them in the process. It is not about the dream merchants weaving gossamer skeins anymore, it is about dreamcatchers, about the inception of reality as a leitmotif. Film critic Derek Bose explains, “The distinction between what works and what doesn’t is narrowing. Unlike the 1980s, when arthouse existed as parallel to the mainstream, today it is a question of making a good or bad film. This coming together of commercial and arthouse shows that the industry is maturing, where there is scope for all kinds of expressions. This will rekindle another golden age. Let us not forget that some of India’s most defining films were produced by legends of their time like Dev Anand, Kishore Kumar, Guru Dutt and Raj Kapoor.”