1) Freedom from Hollywood – Slumdog Millionaire
http://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/mm/subscribers/downloads/archive_mm/_mmagpast/mm28_slumdog.html
Tiny budget, unknown cast, no Americans – and massive critical, commercial and Oscar success. Austin McHale explains how Slumdog Millionaire thrived on its freedom from Hollywood.
London. February. Slumdog Millionaire has just swooped through the grey slush of the West End in a blaze of colour and sound to scoop seven BAFTA awards, including Best Film and Best Director and an extraordinary eight Oscars. Yet this film does not fit the template of Hollywood success. There are no American accents, few special effects and no big stars. It is the antithesis of glamour – a climactic sequence involves the hero, a Mumbai slum kid, diving through a cesspit and emerging covered in very realistic excrement (in fact peanut butter and chocolate), all to get a signed photograph of a Bollywood actor. Yet it has achieved the Holy Grail of cinema – made cheaply, it appeals to many different audiences, has become a critical and popular success and is set to make huge profits. How has a low budget British film reconciled these opposites without selling its soul? Perhaps our old friend MIGRAIN, inducer of headaches to generations of Media Students, can offer us a way in.
Media language
The media language of the film is indicated in the poster, a kaleidoscope of energy and colour. Against an impressionistic cityscape of blurred neon lighting, a boy and a girl burst through the darkness, both in motion but facing opposite ways. Anxiety but also hope is clear in their tense expressions. The lettering of the title is ragged, uneven, lowercase, progressing from the red of danger to the yellow of hope. In the foreground is the familiar graphic design of a question from the quiz show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? doubling as the tag line, ‘What does it take to find a lost love?’. The theme and narrative are outlined, the fragmented urban, visual style powerfully established.
The cinematography of the film is unusual for an Oscar contender. The Mumbai street scenes are filmed with a kinetic energy and a gritty realism which recalls documentary rather than Hollywood – or Bollywood – studio glamour. This look is achieved through the use of small, very manoeuvrable digital video cameras and on occasion the stuttering images of still cameras at 11 frames per second, far slower than normal film camera speed. This key artistic decision was to some extent forced on the film crew. The influence of mainstream Indian cinema is so pervasive in Mumbai that filming in the slums with traditional large cameras would have encouraged stylised Bollywood moves rather than realistic behaviour, so the film-makers had to disguise themselves as tourists and film unobserved to achieve the naturalism that they wanted.
Sound – non-Bollywood style
Another significant aspect of media language is sound, 70% of the impact of a film according to director Danny Boyle. As with visual language, creative decisions in this area involved a radical departure from the Bollywood norm. Bollywood films are made largely on sound stages, with music and ambient noise dubbed on at a later stage, because Mumbai streets are so loud. However, to Danny Boyle Mumbai street sounds were essential signifiers of the slums, so the diegetic sounds stayed. The non-diegetic musical score was just as important, aiming at a fusion of styles to engage Western as well as Indian audiences. The basic soundtrack was composed by the famous Bollywood musician A.R. Rahman, but it was overlaid by an urban Hip-Hop and Rap track prominently featuring the British Sri-Lankan MIA, reflecting the eclectic ‘masala’ mixture both of Mumbai and of Western cities.
Institutional perspectives
Institutionally Slumdog Millionaire is a fascinating case study. It was made for 13 million dollars, a tiny sum compared with the 167 million dollars of Oscar rival The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, largely raised via the French and British production companies Pathé and Film4. For a film with an almost entirely Indian cast and no stars apart from the Bollywood Indian actor Anil Kapoor, even this budget would have been a challenge to raise without Boyle’s track record as the director of a series of low budget, profitable and critically successful films such as Trainspotting, 28 Days Later and Millions. Casting threw up an unusual problem. Boyle was committed to casting locally, but every actor with Bollywood ambitions was implausibly ‘buff’ for a slumdog, having worked out every day in the approved Bollywood manner. Boyle discussed this with his 17-year-old daughter one evening and received the following piece of succinct advice, ‘If you want a loser, have a look at Skins!’ Hence the inspired casting of Dev Patel, who can project vulnerability as well as determination, and whose slow, shy smile is one of the delights of the film.
Slumdog Millionaire, like all Danny Boyle’s films, is difficult to pigeonhole in generic terms. It is a hybrid of gritty realism and aspiration, of drama documentary and love story. ‘Feelgood’, with its connotations of cliché and stereotype, is a description understandably resisted by Boyle, but despite the poverty, the child torture and the prostitution, it is indisputably an uplifting film.
Genre connections
Slumdog Millionaire’s representation of Mumbai is starkly different from two familiar though opposite stereotypes. One is the glamorous dreamworld of Bollywood, in which no-one is poor (for long, at least) and in which characters more likely to be seen dancing on a Swiss mountain or a Scottish glen than in a Mumbai railway station. The other is the English tabloid newspaper nightmare of teeming, unsanitary ghettoes populated by passive recipients of Western charity, where the only growth industries are begging, prostitution and terrorism. By contrast the slumdogs of the film are resourceful, energetic and independent citizens of one of the world’s great cities – 20 million and growing. This positive ideology, that poverty and apathy can be conquered by communal celebration, is exemplified in the film’s final sequence. As the credits roll, Dev Patel and co-star Frieda Pinto are joined by what appears to be the whole of Mumbai in an exuberant dance number. The location is the city’s main railway station, the Chapatri Shivaji Terminus, host to a thriving sub-culture of recent rural immigrants, the main artery of Mumbai. It was also one of the sites of a murderous terrorist attack last November which made headlines internationally. Despite the film sequence being shot many months before, it is being seen in India as a positive counterbalance to the images of a burning, blood-soaked Mumbai which led the TV news bulletins worldwide.
Audience and ideology
This iconic sequence appeals to many different audiences. It can be seen as the film’s one major concession to Bollywood, an explosion of sound and spectacle which is likely to attract a mainstream Indian audience. The energy of the youthful dancers, the frequent close-ups of the familiar face of Dev Patel and the Hip-Hop/Bollywood fusion of the soundtrack will hold a Western audience, particularly the sought-after demographic of 16-25 with its high level of disposable income. Finally the aspirational ideology, the community’s refusal to be defined by the squalor of the slums, their commitment to celebration, growth and change, intersects with the narrative arc of classic Hollywood cinema, in which seemingly impossible obstacles are overcome in order to fulfil a dream. This is attractive to mainstream Western media outlets.
Narrative structure
This dream, however, is not the traditional American Dream. Comfort and wealth are apparently promised by the film’s narrative structure, cleverly built around the cumulative questions of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? which, remarkably, all relate to incidents in Jamal Malik’s (Dev Patel’s) life. However, this apparent endorsement of a crudely materialist ideology is skilfully undercut, both by the corruption of Anil Kapoor’s quizmaster and by Jamal’s motivation for success, which it would be unfair to reveal. It can in fact be read as a sly critique of the system of values in our status-obsessed society, which prioritises uncontextualised academic knowledge over the real human experience acquired painfully by Jamal in the slums of Mumbai.
Much publicity has recently been given to more negative views of the film. It has been accused of poverty porn, implying that the harsh life of the slums is merely a picturesque travelogue catering for Western audiences, who remain distanced from and uninvolved in the events they see. The slum dwellers, it is said, are patronised and stereotyped. Most bizarrely, Slumdog Millionaire is said to be a derogatory term implying that Mumbai citizens are less than human, when Danny Boyle’s preferred meaning is clearly intended to be an echo of ‘underdog’, evoking connotations of bravery, resilience and moral justification. To me, these spectacular misreadings are travesties of the film’s ideological standpoints. Indeed, cynical observers have seen them as evidence of a ‘dirty tricks’ campaign, orchestrated by unscrupulous publicists of rival films in the run-up to the Oscars. Large amounts of money have been invested, for example, in the effects-laden Brangelina vehicle The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (five years in the making and 13 times the cost of Slumdog Millionaire), and of course the best short-cut to recouping costs and making a sizeable profit is via Oscar success. Why should a cheap British film, entirely shot in India without one American star, win a competition devised by Hollywood studios for Hollywood studios? Perhaps for the same reason that a Mumbai ‘charwallah’ (teaboy) from the slums should win a competition devised by the Indian elite for the Indian elite – to expose prejudice and celebrate our common humanity. After the film’s spectacular success at the Oscars, we now know that the slumdog can become a millionaire twice over.
Austin McHale is Head of Media Studies at Ellen Wilkinson School, Ealing.
This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 28, April 2009.
http://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/mm/subscribers/downloads/archive_mm/_mmagpast/mm26_seasia_film.html 2) Film as business in India
A film needs to take two to three times its production and marketing costs to break even. The Happening demonstrates how co-production can support this process. It looks like an American movie, with familiar US settings and stars. Its director, M. Night Shyamalan was born in Pondicherry in South India but grew up in Pennsylvania. The Happening was a flop in North America ($64 million), continuing the downward trend of box office for Shyamalan’s films since his mammoth success with The Sixth Sense (1999), but thanks to a co-production deal between 20th Century Fox and Indian media group UTV, its dismal American performance was balanced by an international take of over $100 million. This means that with DVD sales and television rights, a film that cost up to $90 million will still see a profit. To properly understand what this kind of co-production means, we need to consider film as a business in India.
Understanding the context of Indian film
Since the 1990s India has produced more films than any other country and these have generated the world’s largest audiences. Each year there are over 800 films made in India and audiences are over 3 billion – more than twice the size of the audience in North America. Most cinema tickets in India are very cheap, some as low as 20p each, and as yet the industry is not comparable with Hollywood in revenue terms. However, a number of factors mean that the situation is changing quickly:
– new cinema building in India is bringing modern multiplexes with digital screens to major cities
– the Indian middle class, with enough money to match Western spending patterns, is growing rapidly
– NRIs or ‘non-resident Indians’ in the UK and North America pay Western prices to watch Indian films.
Two things have happened in response to these factors. In Los Angeles, Hollywood studios have started to think about how they can sell films in India. Up to now, Indian audiences have generally ignored Hollywood films. Even those that have been successful, such as March of the Penguins and the Spider Man films, have not topped the biggest Indian films. Hollywood has reacted in two ways: Sony, a Japanese company with long-standing interests in both China and India, last year produced its first Bollywood film in India, Saawariya. The other option is to co-operate with Indian distributors who know the local market. March of the Penguins was released by Adlabs, an innovative company in the Indian media market.
Not just Bollywood!
Filmed entertainment in India faces a unique set of problems and opportunities. Contrary to what you may have read in many textbooks and newspaper articles, ‘Bollywood’ is not the whole of the Indian film industry. It isn’t even the biggest sector in terms of the number of films it produces. There are about 200 Bollywood films per year, made largely in Mumbai, in Hindi. Bollywood is therefore roughly the same size as Hollywood in terms of the number of features. However, a larger number of films (over 300) are made in the South of India, especially in Chennai and Hyderabad, in the Tamil or Telugu languages; there are 75 million Telugu speakers and 60 million Tamils in India. Films are also made in as many as six other languages. Bollywood films have the biggest budgets, but not necessarily the biggest stars – the Tamil cinema star Rajnikanth is often listed as the highest earner and his last two films have topped the Indian box office. Adlabs was careful to release March of the Penguins in English and also dubbed into Hindi, Tamil and Telugu.
So it’s important to know and understand the Indian market. You can download a free guide to Indian Cinema from http://www.cornerhouse.org/education/schoolsandcolleges.aspx?page=48260
The new Indian ‘majors’
Until recently, Indian film production companies have been relatively small. Although India had a Hindi ‘studio system’ (in Bombay, Pune and Calcutta) not unlike Hollywood in the 1930s-60s, it didn’t develop the ‘media conglomerates’ of modern Hollywood. But something like the Hollywood model is now emerging. Four companies stand out: UTV, Adlabs, Eros and Yash Raj. Each of these companies has interests in television, DVD distribution, film distribution and ‘new media’. One of the most important mergers this year has seen Eros, a largely Bollywood-focused company, merge with Ayngaran, the major distributor of Tamil language films worldwide.
These new Indian media majors see the need to think both nationally and internationally. Over the next few years we will see an increasing number of co-production deals between the six Hollywood majors and the four Indian majors. One of the most eagerly anticipated moments in international cinema is the first crossover film that will bring Indian cinema to American audiences (i.e. not just the NRI audience). Where is the Indian Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? Where is the Indian Jet Li or John Woo? We probably won’t have too long to wait to find out. There are plenty of talented filmmakers in India. What Indian producers need to do is to professionalise their practice. Some producers in India have simply stolen ideas from other film cultures – re-making successful films without paying for rights. But this is changing. As the Indian middle class becomes more affluent it is more able to pursue the leisure habits of the West, so a distribution for American, European and East Asian art films is emerging (see Shackleton, 2008) in the new India.
Whether the Indian majors are yet able to properly exploit the potential of their films in the West is another question. Although they have successfully marketed to the NRI audience in the UK and North America, they haven’t yet joined the UK or North American industry in following ‘institutional practice’. So, in the UK and US, you will rarely see their films reviewed in mainstream press or on television, because they aren’t previewed for journalists outside the Asian media; and distributors seem unconcerned to get the films into cinemas outside what they deem as Asian local markets. This will change.
http://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/mm/subscribers/downloads/archive_mm/_mmagpast/mm21_Bollywood.html
3)Bollywood
moving beyond boundaries
What makes a Bollywood movie – and why have they become so popular worldwide? Juno Kurian and Keith Randle put Bollywood in the picture.
The beginning of 2007 saw an unprecedented rise in the use of the term ‘Bollywood’ by the UK media. As Channel 4’s Celebrity Big Brother, featuring Indian actress Shilpa Shetty, was engulfed in a row over racist bullying, Bollywood was being taken from the specialist DVD section in the local video library to our living rooms.
BB generated massive publicity both for the actor and for Bollywood itself. As a result, Metro was given a red carpet premiere in Leicester Square, a first for any Bollywood film. So, what makes a Bollywood movie and how can we account for their rising popularity outside India?
What is Bollywood?
The name ‘Bollywood’, is believed to have been coined by Amit Khanna, the president of the Guild of TV & Film producers, and was used jokingly to refer to that slice of the Indian film industry centred on Bombay which has a penchant for Hollywood style and glamour. Bollywood films make up one-third of the Indian film industry which, in turn, is the largest in the world in terms of both the number of films produced and cinema admissions. With a total audience of over one billion, some 12 million inhabitants of the Indian sub-continent visit the cinema every day.
Apart from Bollywood, the Indian film industry is made up of regional film sub-industries consisting of Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Marathi and Bengali language films and the parallel cinema movement fostered by Satyajit Ray, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, G Aravindan and Mrinal Sen. But it is Bollywood films that have begun to make inroads into the international film market.
Bollywood films are characterised by song, dance and spectacle which they have inherited from the Indian theatre tradition. Early Indian films were based on mythology and epic stories and portrayed the mighty deeds of various heroes and gods. Though later films portrayed the stories of ordinary people, they retained the larger-than-life elements of these early films in their portrayal of heroes and their escapades.
Both Bollywood and mainstream regional films are frequently set in picturesque locations. Switzerland and Scotland often masquerade as Indian landscapes, representing either the place the story is set or a fantasy locations where the hero and heroine dance. Apart from the aesthetic appeal, they create a fantastic look which underlines the escapist philosophy of many of the films. For much of the population the only way they can ever hope to see those places is on a movie screen. Bollywood films, therefore, are not only the primary source of entertainment for a vast number of the Indian population but also a window to the outside world.
Bollywood abroad
For the non-resident Indian (NRI) population, scattered across the globe, including a sizeable population in the UK, watching Bollywood films is a way of keeping in touch with home and its culture. As the NRI population (estimated at around 20 million worldwide) grew in many countries and an increasing number of Indian students started to go abroad for studies, demand for Bollywood films to be made available in the international market also grew. In 1994 Rajshree Production’s Hum Aapke Hai Kaun (HAHK) was released in the UK. The success of HAHK encouraged others to release their films in overseas territories. The following year saw the release of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (DDLJ) in several overseas territories including the UK, the USA and the Middle East. The phenomenal success of the film overseas prompted Yash Raj films, a prominent production and distribution house, to open a distribution office in the UK. In 1999, 19 Bollywood films were released in the UK by Indian distributors. In the same year Hum Saath Saath Hai produced by Rajshree Productions was placed 5th in the BFI’s chart of the Top 20 foreign language movies. During 2007 there has been at least one Bollywood film in the Top 15 film list of UK box office takings published by the UK Film Council.
How can we account for the rise in popularity of Bollywood, with its own vocabulary and unique culture, to the point where it exports to nearly 100 other countries? Can an industry which does not have huge marketing budgets at its disposal compete against Hollywood and the world’s national film industries?
Bollywood’s overseas appeal
According to Amitabh Bachchan, a veteran actor with 169 Bollywood movies to his credit, whenever a country becomes economically strong, everything about it starts to be noticed and with the opening of the Indian economy, Indian clothing, Indian food, and Indian films have all begun to be appreciated across the globe. In the UK, Indian restaurants have long been a mainstay of the country’s food culture but more recently we have seen the success of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Bombay Dreams, and a 23-day festival of Bollywood fashion in the department store Selfridges, both in London’s West End.
But can the interest in Bollywood films be linked solely to the country’s rising economic strength? A closer look at the industry reveals an industry hungry for new markets and one moving strategically to increase its brand equity in the international market.
Since 2000, the International Indian Film Academy (IIFA) has held an annual awards night in a different world city outside India. The events organized by IIFA are always in conjunction with the local and regional film bodies of the host cities, ensuring local cooperation. IIFA established the awards to celebrate the achievements of the Indian film industry in the arena of world cinema. From a day long celebration in London in 2000, it has grown to a weekend of events.
This year, five UK cities Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, York and Hull jointly co-hosted it. As celebrities from Bollywood, followed by the media, descended on each city enough publicity was generated to spark the interest of locals in Indian movies.
Bollywood film-makers have also been raising its profile by ensuring a presence in the world’s major film festivals, such as Cannes, Venice and Toronto. Holding premiers of films in major world cities is a strategy that is also gaining popularity. Mani Ratnam, a renowned film-maker, premiered his latest film, Guru in New York and Toronto. The rumour of an engagement between the lead actors created huge publicity and drew large crowds of fans for the events. The timely capitalization on the publicity surrounding actors, such as those in Guru, or by the makers of Metro of Shilpa Shetty, shows a dynamic and flexible marketing machinery.
Holding film festivals in emerging and potential markets such as the eastern European and Scandinavian countries, creating specific marketing strategies to utilize the popularity that certain actors enjoy abroad (such as Shah Rukh Khan’s fan base in Poland and John Abraham’s in Norway), or conducting lecture tours in universities worldwide, are all done with an eye to the future. And all serve to take brand Bollywood further, raising its profile and brand equity.
So, a rising interest in Indian culture has been fuelled by some clever marketing strategies. At the same time directors may be realising the limitations overseas of a restricted and unique film culture and, like Hindi-English Bollywood success Monsoon Wedding, look to producing movies in English with stories that will suit a global market.
Keith Randle is Director of the Creative Industries Research and Consultancy Unit, University of Hertfordshire. Juno Kurian is a research assistant there.
from MediaMagazine 21, September 2008.
http://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/mm/subscribers/downloads/archive_mm/_mmagpast/BIK%20Beckham.html
4) Bend it like Beckham
Sadia Choudhury was an A Level Media student at Islington Sixth Form Centre who went on to graduate in Media Studies at Sussex University. She is now a researcher for two Scottish MPs in Parliament. She is still a keen fan of film, popular media and football – and found these passions linked into her own experiences in Gurinder Chadha’s box-office smash Bend It Like Beckham, which she reviews below.
Bend It Like Beckham (Gurinder Chadha 2002), is a very funny and entertaining film about two girls with a passion for football and the ways their respective families deal with the issues around it. As an Asian girl who has played football for many years, mostly with boys/men like the central character, Jess Bhama, I was intrigued to find out how the film would handle the subject.
It would be silly to compare this film to East Is East (McDonnell 1999) or any other film of the ‘Asian’ genre simply because one of the main characters is Asian. East is East touched on serious issues within a mixed race marriage and the comedy element of that film was necessary to alleviate some of the painful scenes of physical and social abuse. Bend It Like Bechkam, on the other hand, is a humorous look at how an Asian girl and her family deal with the conflicts of a popular male-dominated sport and the traditional role of a young Eastern girl growing up in Britain. But the film doesn’t stop there: it juxtaposes this situation with that of an English teenage girl, Jules, and her parents’ attitude to her membership of the Hounslow Harriers squad.
The filming of the football was very well shot, and I really wanted to be on that pitch with Jess and Jules. They genuinely played like they were part of a team. I particularly understood the name-calling incident as it had happened to me in a game when I was playing for Chelsea Ladies about four years ago. The referee handled the situation very well in my case; we were both fined for unsporting behaviour. In the film, however, Jess was punished for letting the team down. The referee sent her off so she couldn’t finish the game, and she was told by the manager that he understood because he was Irish. The film did not acknowledge that this name-calling was wrong and didn’t attempt to resolve it in the way that it would have been tackled in any real game.
The comedy is produced through the culture-clash between Asian and white cultures. One of the most memorable moments for me is when Jess is called a lesbian by Jules’s mother, and an old Asian woman says ‘No – she is Indian’. The humour in this scene is poignant because there is a misunderstanding of language and race on both sides. Jules’s mother does not understand her daughter’s fascination with football, and misreads her friendship with Jess. The word ‘lesbian’ is misunderstood by the Asian women as an ethnic origin.
In my opinion, the film’s narrative is weakest at the end when Jess’s Sikh father explains his resistance to her footballing on the grounds that he was excluded from a cricket club when he first came to Britain; he doesn’t want Jess to be disappointed as he was. Jess challenges her father by saying things have changed, and points to the fact that Nasser Hussein is now captain of the England Cricket Team. I feel Gurinder Chadha could have handled this issue better because, from my experience, this would not be the primary reason for an Asian father stopping his daughter playing football. In my opinion this was a wasted opportunity in the film; from an Asian point of view there would be many more cultural reasons for his disapproval. For example, Asian girls often face a variety of pressures – from the community, from the temple or mosque, peer pressure, family honour – all of which Gurinder Chadha touched on throughout the film but failed to deliver at the crucial point of the narrative. Overall, though, the film is well worth watching whether you are white or Asian. MM
- Sadia Choudhury
- This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 1, September 2002
http://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/mm/subscribers/downloads/archive_mm/_mmagpast/Who_Runs_Hollywood_MM17.html
http://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/mm/subscribers/downloads/archive_mm/_mmagpast/mm28_slumdog.html
Tiny budget, unknown cast, no Americans – and massive critical, commercial and Oscar success. Austin McHale explains how Slumdog Millionaire thrived on its freedom from Hollywood.
London. February. Slumdog Millionaire has just swooped through the grey slush of the West End in a blaze of colour and sound to scoop seven BAFTA awards, including Best Film and Best Director and an extraordinary eight Oscars. Yet this film does not fit the template of Hollywood success. There are no American accents, few special effects and no big stars. It is the antithesis of glamour – a climactic sequence involves the hero, a Mumbai slum kid, diving through a cesspit and emerging covered in very realistic excrement (in fact peanut butter and chocolate), all to get a signed photograph of a Bollywood actor. Yet it has achieved the Holy Grail of cinema – made cheaply, it appeals to many different audiences, has become a critical and popular success and is set to make huge profits. How has a low budget British film reconciled these opposites without selling its soul? Perhaps our old friend MIGRAIN, inducer of headaches to generations of Media Students, can offer us a way in.
Media language
The media language of the film is indicated in the poster, a kaleidoscope of energy and colour. Against an impressionistic cityscape of blurred neon lighting, a boy and a girl burst through the darkness, both in motion but facing opposite ways. Anxiety but also hope is clear in their tense expressions. The lettering of the title is ragged, uneven, lowercase, progressing from the red of danger to the yellow of hope. In the foreground is the familiar graphic design of a question from the quiz show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? doubling as the tag line, ‘What does it take to find a lost love?’. The theme and narrative are outlined, the fragmented urban, visual style powerfully established.
The cinematography of the film is unusual for an Oscar contender. The Mumbai street scenes are filmed with a kinetic energy and a gritty realism which recalls documentary rather than Hollywood – or Bollywood – studio glamour. This look is achieved through the use of small, very manoeuvrable digital video cameras and on occasion the stuttering images of still cameras at 11 frames per second, far slower than normal film camera speed. This key artistic decision was to some extent forced on the film crew. The influence of mainstream Indian cinema is so pervasive in Mumbai that filming in the slums with traditional large cameras would have encouraged stylised Bollywood moves rather than realistic behaviour, so the film-makers had to disguise themselves as tourists and film unobserved to achieve the naturalism that they wanted.
Sound – non-Bollywood style
Another significant aspect of media language is sound, 70% of the impact of a film according to director Danny Boyle. As with visual language, creative decisions in this area involved a radical departure from the Bollywood norm. Bollywood films are made largely on sound stages, with music and ambient noise dubbed on at a later stage, because Mumbai streets are so loud. However, to Danny Boyle Mumbai street sounds were essential signifiers of the slums, so the diegetic sounds stayed. The non-diegetic musical score was just as important, aiming at a fusion of styles to engage Western as well as Indian audiences. The basic soundtrack was composed by the famous Bollywood musician A.R. Rahman, but it was overlaid by an urban Hip-Hop and Rap track prominently featuring the British Sri-Lankan MIA, reflecting the eclectic ‘masala’ mixture both of Mumbai and of Western cities.
Institutional perspectives
Institutionally Slumdog Millionaire is a fascinating case study. It was made for 13 million dollars, a tiny sum compared with the 167 million dollars of Oscar rival The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, largely raised via the French and British production companies Pathé and Film4. For a film with an almost entirely Indian cast and no stars apart from the Bollywood Indian actor Anil Kapoor, even this budget would have been a challenge to raise without Boyle’s track record as the director of a series of low budget, profitable and critically successful films such as Trainspotting, 28 Days Later and Millions. Casting threw up an unusual problem. Boyle was committed to casting locally, but every actor with Bollywood ambitions was implausibly ‘buff’ for a slumdog, having worked out every day in the approved Bollywood manner. Boyle discussed this with his 17-year-old daughter one evening and received the following piece of succinct advice, ‘If you want a loser, have a look at Skins!’ Hence the inspired casting of Dev Patel, who can project vulnerability as well as determination, and whose slow, shy smile is one of the delights of the film.
Slumdog Millionaire, like all Danny Boyle’s films, is difficult to pigeonhole in generic terms. It is a hybrid of gritty realism and aspiration, of drama documentary and love story. ‘Feelgood’, with its connotations of cliché and stereotype, is a description understandably resisted by Boyle, but despite the poverty, the child torture and the prostitution, it is indisputably an uplifting film.
Genre connections
Slumdog Millionaire’s representation of Mumbai is starkly different from two familiar though opposite stereotypes. One is the glamorous dreamworld of Bollywood, in which no-one is poor (for long, at least) and in which characters more likely to be seen dancing on a Swiss mountain or a Scottish glen than in a Mumbai railway station. The other is the English tabloid newspaper nightmare of teeming, unsanitary ghettoes populated by passive recipients of Western charity, where the only growth industries are begging, prostitution and terrorism. By contrast the slumdogs of the film are resourceful, energetic and independent citizens of one of the world’s great cities – 20 million and growing. This positive ideology, that poverty and apathy can be conquered by communal celebration, is exemplified in the film’s final sequence. As the credits roll, Dev Patel and co-star Frieda Pinto are joined by what appears to be the whole of Mumbai in an exuberant dance number. The location is the city’s main railway station, the Chapatri Shivaji Terminus, host to a thriving sub-culture of recent rural immigrants, the main artery of Mumbai. It was also one of the sites of a murderous terrorist attack last November which made headlines internationally. Despite the film sequence being shot many months before, it is being seen in India as a positive counterbalance to the images of a burning, blood-soaked Mumbai which led the TV news bulletins worldwide.
Audience and ideology
This iconic sequence appeals to many different audiences. It can be seen as the film’s one major concession to Bollywood, an explosion of sound and spectacle which is likely to attract a mainstream Indian audience. The energy of the youthful dancers, the frequent close-ups of the familiar face of Dev Patel and the Hip-Hop/Bollywood fusion of the soundtrack will hold a Western audience, particularly the sought-after demographic of 16-25 with its high level of disposable income. Finally the aspirational ideology, the community’s refusal to be defined by the squalor of the slums, their commitment to celebration, growth and change, intersects with the narrative arc of classic Hollywood cinema, in which seemingly impossible obstacles are overcome in order to fulfil a dream. This is attractive to mainstream Western media outlets.
Narrative structure
This dream, however, is not the traditional American Dream. Comfort and wealth are apparently promised by the film’s narrative structure, cleverly built around the cumulative questions of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? which, remarkably, all relate to incidents in Jamal Malik’s (Dev Patel’s) life. However, this apparent endorsement of a crudely materialist ideology is skilfully undercut, both by the corruption of Anil Kapoor’s quizmaster and by Jamal’s motivation for success, which it would be unfair to reveal. It can in fact be read as a sly critique of the system of values in our status-obsessed society, which prioritises uncontextualised academic knowledge over the real human experience acquired painfully by Jamal in the slums of Mumbai.
Much publicity has recently been given to more negative views of the film. It has been accused of poverty porn, implying that the harsh life of the slums is merely a picturesque travelogue catering for Western audiences, who remain distanced from and uninvolved in the events they see. The slum dwellers, it is said, are patronised and stereotyped. Most bizarrely, Slumdog Millionaire is said to be a derogatory term implying that Mumbai citizens are less than human, when Danny Boyle’s preferred meaning is clearly intended to be an echo of ‘underdog’, evoking connotations of bravery, resilience and moral justification. To me, these spectacular misreadings are travesties of the film’s ideological standpoints. Indeed, cynical observers have seen them as evidence of a ‘dirty tricks’ campaign, orchestrated by unscrupulous publicists of rival films in the run-up to the Oscars. Large amounts of money have been invested, for example, in the effects-laden Brangelina vehicle The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (five years in the making and 13 times the cost of Slumdog Millionaire), and of course the best short-cut to recouping costs and making a sizeable profit is via Oscar success. Why should a cheap British film, entirely shot in India without one American star, win a competition devised by Hollywood studios for Hollywood studios? Perhaps for the same reason that a Mumbai ‘charwallah’ (teaboy) from the slums should win a competition devised by the Indian elite for the Indian elite – to expose prejudice and celebrate our common humanity. After the film’s spectacular success at the Oscars, we now know that the slumdog can become a millionaire twice over.
Austin McHale is Head of Media Studies at Ellen Wilkinson School, Ealing.
This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 28, April 2009.
http://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/mm/subscribers/downloads/archive_mm/_mmagpast/mm26_seasia_film.html 2) Film as business in India
A film needs to take two to three times its production and marketing costs to break even. The Happening demonstrates how co-production can support this process. It looks like an American movie, with familiar US settings and stars. Its director, M. Night Shyamalan was born in Pondicherry in South India but grew up in Pennsylvania. The Happening was a flop in North America ($64 million), continuing the downward trend of box office for Shyamalan’s films since his mammoth success with The Sixth Sense (1999), but thanks to a co-production deal between 20th Century Fox and Indian media group UTV, its dismal American performance was balanced by an international take of over $100 million. This means that with DVD sales and television rights, a film that cost up to $90 million will still see a profit. To properly understand what this kind of co-production means, we need to consider film as a business in India.
Understanding the context of Indian film
Since the 1990s India has produced more films than any other country and these have generated the world’s largest audiences. Each year there are over 800 films made in India and audiences are over 3 billion – more than twice the size of the audience in North America. Most cinema tickets in India are very cheap, some as low as 20p each, and as yet the industry is not comparable with Hollywood in revenue terms. However, a number of factors mean that the situation is changing quickly:
– new cinema building in India is bringing modern multiplexes with digital screens to major cities
– the Indian middle class, with enough money to match Western spending patterns, is growing rapidly
– NRIs or ‘non-resident Indians’ in the UK and North America pay Western prices to watch Indian films.
Two things have happened in response to these factors. In Los Angeles, Hollywood studios have started to think about how they can sell films in India. Up to now, Indian audiences have generally ignored Hollywood films. Even those that have been successful, such as March of the Penguins and the Spider Man films, have not topped the biggest Indian films. Hollywood has reacted in two ways: Sony, a Japanese company with long-standing interests in both China and India, last year produced its first Bollywood film in India, Saawariya. The other option is to co-operate with Indian distributors who know the local market. March of the Penguins was released by Adlabs, an innovative company in the Indian media market.
Not just Bollywood!
Filmed entertainment in India faces a unique set of problems and opportunities. Contrary to what you may have read in many textbooks and newspaper articles, ‘Bollywood’ is not the whole of the Indian film industry. It isn’t even the biggest sector in terms of the number of films it produces. There are about 200 Bollywood films per year, made largely in Mumbai, in Hindi. Bollywood is therefore roughly the same size as Hollywood in terms of the number of features. However, a larger number of films (over 300) are made in the South of India, especially in Chennai and Hyderabad, in the Tamil or Telugu languages; there are 75 million Telugu speakers and 60 million Tamils in India. Films are also made in as many as six other languages. Bollywood films have the biggest budgets, but not necessarily the biggest stars – the Tamil cinema star Rajnikanth is often listed as the highest earner and his last two films have topped the Indian box office. Adlabs was careful to release March of the Penguins in English and also dubbed into Hindi, Tamil and Telugu.
So it’s important to know and understand the Indian market. You can download a free guide to Indian Cinema from http://www.cornerhouse.org/education/schoolsandcolleges.aspx?page=48260
The new Indian ‘majors’
Until recently, Indian film production companies have been relatively small. Although India had a Hindi ‘studio system’ (in Bombay, Pune and Calcutta) not unlike Hollywood in the 1930s-60s, it didn’t develop the ‘media conglomerates’ of modern Hollywood. But something like the Hollywood model is now emerging. Four companies stand out: UTV, Adlabs, Eros and Yash Raj. Each of these companies has interests in television, DVD distribution, film distribution and ‘new media’. One of the most important mergers this year has seen Eros, a largely Bollywood-focused company, merge with Ayngaran, the major distributor of Tamil language films worldwide.
These new Indian media majors see the need to think both nationally and internationally. Over the next few years we will see an increasing number of co-production deals between the six Hollywood majors and the four Indian majors. One of the most eagerly anticipated moments in international cinema is the first crossover film that will bring Indian cinema to American audiences (i.e. not just the NRI audience). Where is the Indian Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? Where is the Indian Jet Li or John Woo? We probably won’t have too long to wait to find out. There are plenty of talented filmmakers in India. What Indian producers need to do is to professionalise their practice. Some producers in India have simply stolen ideas from other film cultures – re-making successful films without paying for rights. But this is changing. As the Indian middle class becomes more affluent it is more able to pursue the leisure habits of the West, so a distribution for American, European and East Asian art films is emerging (see Shackleton, 2008) in the new India.
Whether the Indian majors are yet able to properly exploit the potential of their films in the West is another question. Although they have successfully marketed to the NRI audience in the UK and North America, they haven’t yet joined the UK or North American industry in following ‘institutional practice’. So, in the UK and US, you will rarely see their films reviewed in mainstream press or on television, because they aren’t previewed for journalists outside the Asian media; and distributors seem unconcerned to get the films into cinemas outside what they deem as Asian local markets. This will change.
http://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/mm/subscribers/downloads/archive_mm/_mmagpast/mm21_Bollywood.html
3)Bollywood
moving beyond boundaries
What makes a Bollywood movie – and why have they become so popular worldwide? Juno Kurian and Keith Randle put Bollywood in the picture.
The beginning of 2007 saw an unprecedented rise in the use of the term ‘Bollywood’ by the UK media. As Channel 4’s Celebrity Big Brother, featuring Indian actress Shilpa Shetty, was engulfed in a row over racist bullying, Bollywood was being taken from the specialist DVD section in the local video library to our living rooms.
BB generated massive publicity both for the actor and for Bollywood itself. As a result, Metro was given a red carpet premiere in Leicester Square, a first for any Bollywood film. So, what makes a Bollywood movie and how can we account for their rising popularity outside India?
What is Bollywood?
The name ‘Bollywood’, is believed to have been coined by Amit Khanna, the president of the Guild of TV & Film producers, and was used jokingly to refer to that slice of the Indian film industry centred on Bombay which has a penchant for Hollywood style and glamour. Bollywood films make up one-third of the Indian film industry which, in turn, is the largest in the world in terms of both the number of films produced and cinema admissions. With a total audience of over one billion, some 12 million inhabitants of the Indian sub-continent visit the cinema every day.
Apart from Bollywood, the Indian film industry is made up of regional film sub-industries consisting of Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Marathi and Bengali language films and the parallel cinema movement fostered by Satyajit Ray, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, G Aravindan and Mrinal Sen. But it is Bollywood films that have begun to make inroads into the international film market.
Bollywood films are characterised by song, dance and spectacle which they have inherited from the Indian theatre tradition. Early Indian films were based on mythology and epic stories and portrayed the mighty deeds of various heroes and gods. Though later films portrayed the stories of ordinary people, they retained the larger-than-life elements of these early films in their portrayal of heroes and their escapades.
Both Bollywood and mainstream regional films are frequently set in picturesque locations. Switzerland and Scotland often masquerade as Indian landscapes, representing either the place the story is set or a fantasy locations where the hero and heroine dance. Apart from the aesthetic appeal, they create a fantastic look which underlines the escapist philosophy of many of the films. For much of the population the only way they can ever hope to see those places is on a movie screen. Bollywood films, therefore, are not only the primary source of entertainment for a vast number of the Indian population but also a window to the outside world.
Bollywood abroad
For the non-resident Indian (NRI) population, scattered across the globe, including a sizeable population in the UK, watching Bollywood films is a way of keeping in touch with home and its culture. As the NRI population (estimated at around 20 million worldwide) grew in many countries and an increasing number of Indian students started to go abroad for studies, demand for Bollywood films to be made available in the international market also grew. In 1994 Rajshree Production’s Hum Aapke Hai Kaun (HAHK) was released in the UK. The success of HAHK encouraged others to release their films in overseas territories. The following year saw the release of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (DDLJ) in several overseas territories including the UK, the USA and the Middle East. The phenomenal success of the film overseas prompted Yash Raj films, a prominent production and distribution house, to open a distribution office in the UK. In 1999, 19 Bollywood films were released in the UK by Indian distributors. In the same year Hum Saath Saath Hai produced by Rajshree Productions was placed 5th in the BFI’s chart of the Top 20 foreign language movies. During 2007 there has been at least one Bollywood film in the Top 15 film list of UK box office takings published by the UK Film Council.
How can we account for the rise in popularity of Bollywood, with its own vocabulary and unique culture, to the point where it exports to nearly 100 other countries? Can an industry which does not have huge marketing budgets at its disposal compete against Hollywood and the world’s national film industries?
Bollywood’s overseas appeal
According to Amitabh Bachchan, a veteran actor with 169 Bollywood movies to his credit, whenever a country becomes economically strong, everything about it starts to be noticed and with the opening of the Indian economy, Indian clothing, Indian food, and Indian films have all begun to be appreciated across the globe. In the UK, Indian restaurants have long been a mainstay of the country’s food culture but more recently we have seen the success of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Bombay Dreams, and a 23-day festival of Bollywood fashion in the department store Selfridges, both in London’s West End.
But can the interest in Bollywood films be linked solely to the country’s rising economic strength? A closer look at the industry reveals an industry hungry for new markets and one moving strategically to increase its brand equity in the international market.
Since 2000, the International Indian Film Academy (IIFA) has held an annual awards night in a different world city outside India. The events organized by IIFA are always in conjunction with the local and regional film bodies of the host cities, ensuring local cooperation. IIFA established the awards to celebrate the achievements of the Indian film industry in the arena of world cinema. From a day long celebration in London in 2000, it has grown to a weekend of events.
This year, five UK cities Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, York and Hull jointly co-hosted it. As celebrities from Bollywood, followed by the media, descended on each city enough publicity was generated to spark the interest of locals in Indian movies.
Bollywood film-makers have also been raising its profile by ensuring a presence in the world’s major film festivals, such as Cannes, Venice and Toronto. Holding premiers of films in major world cities is a strategy that is also gaining popularity. Mani Ratnam, a renowned film-maker, premiered his latest film, Guru in New York and Toronto. The rumour of an engagement between the lead actors created huge publicity and drew large crowds of fans for the events. The timely capitalization on the publicity surrounding actors, such as those in Guru, or by the makers of Metro of Shilpa Shetty, shows a dynamic and flexible marketing machinery.
Holding film festivals in emerging and potential markets such as the eastern European and Scandinavian countries, creating specific marketing strategies to utilize the popularity that certain actors enjoy abroad (such as Shah Rukh Khan’s fan base in Poland and John Abraham’s in Norway), or conducting lecture tours in universities worldwide, are all done with an eye to the future. And all serve to take brand Bollywood further, raising its profile and brand equity.
So, a rising interest in Indian culture has been fuelled by some clever marketing strategies. At the same time directors may be realising the limitations overseas of a restricted and unique film culture and, like Hindi-English Bollywood success Monsoon Wedding, look to producing movies in English with stories that will suit a global market.
Keith Randle is Director of the Creative Industries Research and Consultancy Unit, University of Hertfordshire. Juno Kurian is a research assistant there.
from MediaMagazine 21, September 2008.
http://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/mm/subscribers/downloads/archive_mm/_mmagpast/BIK%20Beckham.html
4) Bend it like Beckham
Sadia Choudhury was an A Level Media student at Islington Sixth Form Centre who went on to graduate in Media Studies at Sussex University. She is now a researcher for two Scottish MPs in Parliament. She is still a keen fan of film, popular media and football – and found these passions linked into her own experiences in Gurinder Chadha’s box-office smash Bend It Like Beckham, which she reviews below.
Bend It Like Beckham (Gurinder Chadha 2002), is a very funny and entertaining film about two girls with a passion for football and the ways their respective families deal with the issues around it. As an Asian girl who has played football for many years, mostly with boys/men like the central character, Jess Bhama, I was intrigued to find out how the film would handle the subject.
It would be silly to compare this film to East Is East (McDonnell 1999) or any other film of the ‘Asian’ genre simply because one of the main characters is Asian. East is East touched on serious issues within a mixed race marriage and the comedy element of that film was necessary to alleviate some of the painful scenes of physical and social abuse. Bend It Like Bechkam, on the other hand, is a humorous look at how an Asian girl and her family deal with the conflicts of a popular male-dominated sport and the traditional role of a young Eastern girl growing up in Britain. But the film doesn’t stop there: it juxtaposes this situation with that of an English teenage girl, Jules, and her parents’ attitude to her membership of the Hounslow Harriers squad.
The filming of the football was very well shot, and I really wanted to be on that pitch with Jess and Jules. They genuinely played like they were part of a team. I particularly understood the name-calling incident as it had happened to me in a game when I was playing for Chelsea Ladies about four years ago. The referee handled the situation very well in my case; we were both fined for unsporting behaviour. In the film, however, Jess was punished for letting the team down. The referee sent her off so she couldn’t finish the game, and she was told by the manager that he understood because he was Irish. The film did not acknowledge that this name-calling was wrong and didn’t attempt to resolve it in the way that it would have been tackled in any real game.
The comedy is produced through the culture-clash between Asian and white cultures. One of the most memorable moments for me is when Jess is called a lesbian by Jules’s mother, and an old Asian woman says ‘No – she is Indian’. The humour in this scene is poignant because there is a misunderstanding of language and race on both sides. Jules’s mother does not understand her daughter’s fascination with football, and misreads her friendship with Jess. The word ‘lesbian’ is misunderstood by the Asian women as an ethnic origin.
In my opinion, the film’s narrative is weakest at the end when Jess’s Sikh father explains his resistance to her footballing on the grounds that he was excluded from a cricket club when he first came to Britain; he doesn’t want Jess to be disappointed as he was. Jess challenges her father by saying things have changed, and points to the fact that Nasser Hussein is now captain of the England Cricket Team. I feel Gurinder Chadha could have handled this issue better because, from my experience, this would not be the primary reason for an Asian father stopping his daughter playing football. In my opinion this was a wasted opportunity in the film; from an Asian point of view there would be many more cultural reasons for his disapproval. For example, Asian girls often face a variety of pressures – from the community, from the temple or mosque, peer pressure, family honour – all of which Gurinder Chadha touched on throughout the film but failed to deliver at the crucial point of the narrative. Overall, though, the film is well worth watching whether you are white or Asian. MM
- Sadia Choudhury
- This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 1, September 2002
http://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/mm/subscribers/downloads/archive_mm/_mmagpast/Who_Runs_Hollywood_MM17.html
5) Who runs Hollywood?
Have you ever thought about who runs Hollywood? Is it the directors, film stars, scriptwriters, or the big cheese execs who hold the purse strings? Have you ever thought that, in fact, it might be you, the audience? Drawing on research by the BBC World programme Talking Movies, Helen Dugdale peeks behind the big screen to find out who really calls the shots in Hollywood.
Each year the film industry spends millions of dollars researching the habits of cinemagoers; they want to know what we like so they can give us more of it. After all, astonishingly, every year more cinema tickets are sold than there are people on the planet! As a group, we cinemagoers have an extremely powerful voice that moviemakers listen to. But how much power do we really have? Does the audience rule the roost – or does Hollywood rule us?
People power
On average Hollywood’s studios make in the region of $25 billion a year globally from moviegoers. However, in the last 12 months there has been a 7% drop in box office sales, showing that things are changing. Actor Tilda Swinton, star of The Chronicles of Narnia explains why she thinks this is:
The studios are panicking because the numbers are down. But that can only be a good thing for filmmakers, because it means that the audience is saying that it wants something new. It’s not just that the diet of films is possibly unappealing, it’s also that audiences want to consume films away from cinema, and watch them at home.
The popularity of DVDs and downloading has inevitably had some impact on the number of people going to the cinema. If the audience can choose whether to go to the cinema or stay at home and still get to view new movies then surely the audience has power over Hollywood. If audiences stop buying as many cinema tickets, then box office figures will continue to fall, with major financial implications for the studios. Did you ever think that your decision to rent a DVD or watch the film on the big screen was such an important one?
Tony Angellotti, a top Hollywood public relations and marketing guru, believes that the audience holds the power.
If you break it down and look at it as a business then the audience has the greatest power. It’s the audience that tells you what they like. So if the audience tells you they like a particular superstar, then Hollywood is forced to use the superstar and that star then becomes extremely powerful.
The power of promotion
But not everyone agrees that the audience calls all the shots. Many people see Hollywood as a manipulating machine with the power to brainwash audiences all around the world. American Professor Toby Miller totally disagrees with the Angellotti school of thought:
In a world where money spent on the budget of a film often sees 50% going on promotion as opposed to what you actually see onscreen, the idea that we have a world where the consumer can exercise authority is absurd. This industry is like any other. Of course it has to sell things, but it doesn’t rely on waiting, listening, responding to what audiences want and then delivering that to them. It relies on knowing which parts of the world and the media need its products and will pay for them.
Filmmaker Terry George worked on location in Africa while shooting Hotel Rwanda. He’s astounded by the international reach of the American film industry and the way it cashes in on audiences seduced by the films that the Hollywood Dream Machine delivers.
The penetration of Hollywood in Africa and Asia is huge. It’s almost like it’s a surrogate emigration. Clearly American and Western values are spread particularly by movies and television, and I’m not so sure that’s a good thing.
Boys and their toys: the audience which matters most
If the audience does have any kind of clout, then according to many industry experts it’s one particular audience demographic that dominates. Professor Toby Miller explains:
The main focus for Hollywood for some years has been the young male audience member because they are deemed to be the people who buy the merchandise, who take repeat trips to the movies and who participate in electronic video games associated with the product. These are the people who are supposed to make major household decisions in the future about everything from the favourite blend of whiskey to which car to drive next, and those whose consuming preferences haven’t been set in stone.
While Hollywood caters to the tastes of young males, the industry largely ignores other demographics, including the elderly and different ethic groups. However, the lack of true global representation doesn’t stop international audiences tripping over themselves for a ticket to the latest Hollywood release. The major growth area for the American film industry now exists beyond the US borders. Global box office accounts for sixty per cent of its income.
Stars, directors and the studio
So where do the directors and film stars fit in? Surely they must have some say? Opinions are divided:
Once I’m working on a film I feel that people might listen to my opinion, but I don’t think I have a lot of power. Ralph Fiennes
In terms of getting films financed, it’s all about the actors nowadays. It’s all about who’s your cast, and the stars. But that’s constantly changing for them – Tom Cruise might be at the top one minute and then down five the next. I think it’s like a war that’s ongoing. The actors are very dependent on press; the press is dependent on the companies and the industry, so it’s an intertwined, complicated thing. I don’t know who literally has the power. Mike Mills, Director
Does anyone know?
A look at the Warner Brothers Matrix series may reveal who has the power. Despite the fact that all his films have taken $5 billion around the world, the producer, Joel Silver, works with Warner Brothers and he remains a well-paid subordinate:
The studio makes the decision of what movies they want to make. That’s where the powers is. When they say we’ll make this movie or we won’t, that’s the power to say yes or no. I don’t really have that power. I can influence them and persuade them to let me try to make a certain movie I want to make, but they have the power.
Steven Spielberg is one of the most powerful players in Hollywood. He is a co-founder of a studio, a producer, director and screenwriter. His commitment to a project will guarantee it will be made. Hardly any other players rival his power.
Reaching for the stars
Top directors also hold sway, but most filmmakers’ power is limited by the stars attached to their project. John Madden discovered from working with Gwyneth Paltrow on Proof in 2005 that:
The bigger the star you have in the movie, the more doors open for you. It’s still true, and will always remain so, that people will go see a movie largely because of who’s in it. It perhaps becomes slightly less true at the upper art-house end of the market, but that’s important. Stars aren’t stars for no reason, they’re stars because they’re extraordinary and they’re stars because their presence is unusual, because their charisma is palpable and because, generally speaking, they’re wonderful actors. So I’ve no argument with that system.
So what about the stars themselves – how much power do they have? It’s only those in the stratosphere, who receive more than $25 million a picture, who become a formidable, independent controlling force.
PR guru Tony Angellotti again:
Among actors, you have a select group who represent a genre. Tom Cruise is and has been for many years an action star. Now he’s three-times Oscar nominated, so he’s got credentials, he does big action pictures, which was surprising to me that he went in that direction. Julia Roberts is probably still the reigning female actor, because she can do any kind of film. She’s in the Ocean’s Twelve commercial films, she doesn’t have any problems with that, and she can be in a tiny little theatrical-type picture, like Closer, which is still a big picture, but a four-character drama. So she probably wields as much clout as any actress in Hollywood.
Julia Roberts has immense power because studio executives will approve almost any film she makes, knowing her presence will generate good box office. Such power is given to any actor who can guarantee a big audience, even child stars such as Dakota Fanning, whose name attached to a film means that it will almost definitely get the go-ahead because of her very strong fan base. For an eleven-year-old it’s bit hard to understand why she has more influence than most other actors in Hollywood:
I don’t even know about that, I just enjoy the movies I do and I’m glad that people enjoy the work that I’ve done and that everyone else has done as well.
Obviously, the more awards stars have to their name, the more weight they can throw around. Charlize Theron confirms this perception:
The only thing that was incredible – besides the honour of winning an Oscar – is that it opens a lot of doors, and I would be very naïve to sit here and say it didn’t change anything in my career. It did, as far as the quality of material that I get, and also I don’t have to audition anymore. So do I have the power to make any movie happen? I would never want to think that, that’s just power that nobody should have, and if I do have any more power now, I really hope that I use it in a smart way.
Other people benefit from star power, like the agents who represent them, but there’s a downside for the writers; screenwriters like Terry George have found that a star-driven system doesn’t empower the storyteller:
If it’s a Hollywood-financed project the screenwriter is basically a very well paid typist. It’s whatever stars you can get that determine the budget, the publicity and the greenlighting of the picture itself.
The government and Hollywood
Ever since the birth of Hollywood, its power to influence has made it a top concern for politicians and government. At times Hollywood has become an overt propaganda machine for the state; but the corporate bods that control the studios also have the power to influence public policy.
One area in which the US government and Hollywood routinely work together is on films where the military’s hardware and personnel are involved, such as War of the Worlds. Major Breasseale, a US army liaison officer to the entertainment industry, was on the set of the Spielberg film giving advice.He explains that the army has a vested interest:
The Army gets a chance to educate the public on what it is the Army does. Even if it’s a Science Fiction project. I know that seems kind of silly – how can you tell the Army’s story in a Science Fiction project? Well, you can tell the Army’s story in showing that it’s men and women who fight these fights. You can tell the Army’s story in saying; this is the most plausible way we would do this.
However, author and journalist David Robb, who has studied a great many military films, claims the army’s real aim is to promote America’s fighting forces in the way it sees fit. War films provide many examples where the government can influence film content unbeknownst to the public by requiring filmmakers to submit their scripts and hand over editorial control in exchange for use of the military’s sought-after resources, whether it be submarines, aircraft or tanks. David Robb:
When you give your script to the military, not only do they get to read it first, but when you shoot the film they actually have military minders on the set to make sure you shoot the film just the way you agreed to do it. This isn’t the way films are made at all, because changes are made all the time. You have to do it just the way you agreed and then after the film is shot, they pre-screen it for the Pentagon admirals and generals before it’s released to the public.
Early on in his career, Tom Cruise starred in Top Gun, which some say is a classic example of military image-tampering. He played a heroic top navy pilot in the film which showed off shiny new US military hardware in several aerial scenes. Professor Toby Miller:
Top Gun was done with the direct participation of the Defense Department, which was not only involved in scripting but also in product placement of its aircraft. And immediately after the release of that film, which was tremendously successful, recruitment rates went through the roof, to become the kind of pilot that Tom Cruise was.
At the time, Tom Cruise wasn’t pleased with the idea that his film might be propaganda glorifying combat; but by holding back its co-operation on films that portray the armed forces in ways it doesn’t like, isn’t the US military engaging in propaganda and trying to obscure the truth?
So who does rule the roost?
Hollywood certainly talks the talk and walks the walk as the big ‘I am’! But behind the arrogance, pomp and glam facade sits a long line of people who are all important ingredients in the Hollywood magic. Without the studios and the executives, there would be no money; without the scriptwriters and directors there would be no stories or productions; without the stars there would be no characters to love or hate; and without the audience there would be no-one to watch. Everyone involved has something to say; it is just that some people are listened to more than others are. Remember to use your ‘audience power’ at all times, and be sure to tell Hollywood what you really think if it comes knocking.
- Helen Dugdale is a freelance writer.
- Follow it up
- www.bbcworld.com
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- This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 17.
Have you ever thought about who runs Hollywood? Is it the directors, film stars, scriptwriters, or the big cheese execs who hold the purse strings? Have you ever thought that, in fact, it might be you, the audience? Drawing on research by the BBC World programme Talking Movies, Helen Dugdale peeks behind the big screen to find out who really calls the shots in Hollywood.
Each year the film industry spends millions of dollars researching the habits of cinemagoers; they want to know what we like so they can give us more of it. After all, astonishingly, every year more cinema tickets are sold than there are people on the planet! As a group, we cinemagoers have an extremely powerful voice that moviemakers listen to. But how much power do we really have? Does the audience rule the roost – or does Hollywood rule us?
People power
On average Hollywood’s studios make in the region of $25 billion a year globally from moviegoers. However, in the last 12 months there has been a 7% drop in box office sales, showing that things are changing. Actor Tilda Swinton, star of The Chronicles of Narnia explains why she thinks this is:
The studios are panicking because the numbers are down. But that can only be a good thing for filmmakers, because it means that the audience is saying that it wants something new. It’s not just that the diet of films is possibly unappealing, it’s also that audiences want to consume films away from cinema, and watch them at home.
The popularity of DVDs and downloading has inevitably had some impact on the number of people going to the cinema. If the audience can choose whether to go to the cinema or stay at home and still get to view new movies then surely the audience has power over Hollywood. If audiences stop buying as many cinema tickets, then box office figures will continue to fall, with major financial implications for the studios. Did you ever think that your decision to rent a DVD or watch the film on the big screen was such an important one?
Tony Angellotti, a top Hollywood public relations and marketing guru, believes that the audience holds the power.
If you break it down and look at it as a business then the audience has the greatest power. It’s the audience that tells you what they like. So if the audience tells you they like a particular superstar, then Hollywood is forced to use the superstar and that star then becomes extremely powerful.
The power of promotion
But not everyone agrees that the audience calls all the shots. Many people see Hollywood as a manipulating machine with the power to brainwash audiences all around the world. American Professor Toby Miller totally disagrees with the Angellotti school of thought:
In a world where money spent on the budget of a film often sees 50% going on promotion as opposed to what you actually see onscreen, the idea that we have a world where the consumer can exercise authority is absurd. This industry is like any other. Of course it has to sell things, but it doesn’t rely on waiting, listening, responding to what audiences want and then delivering that to them. It relies on knowing which parts of the world and the media need its products and will pay for them.
Filmmaker Terry George worked on location in Africa while shooting Hotel Rwanda. He’s astounded by the international reach of the American film industry and the way it cashes in on audiences seduced by the films that the Hollywood Dream Machine delivers.
The penetration of Hollywood in Africa and Asia is huge. It’s almost like it’s a surrogate emigration. Clearly American and Western values are spread particularly by movies and television, and I’m not so sure that’s a good thing.
Boys and their toys: the audience which matters most
If the audience does have any kind of clout, then according to many industry experts it’s one particular audience demographic that dominates. Professor Toby Miller explains:
The main focus for Hollywood for some years has been the young male audience member because they are deemed to be the people who buy the merchandise, who take repeat trips to the movies and who participate in electronic video games associated with the product. These are the people who are supposed to make major household decisions in the future about everything from the favourite blend of whiskey to which car to drive next, and those whose consuming preferences haven’t been set in stone.
While Hollywood caters to the tastes of young males, the industry largely ignores other demographics, including the elderly and different ethic groups. However, the lack of true global representation doesn’t stop international audiences tripping over themselves for a ticket to the latest Hollywood release. The major growth area for the American film industry now exists beyond the US borders. Global box office accounts for sixty per cent of its income.
Stars, directors and the studio
So where do the directors and film stars fit in? Surely they must have some say? Opinions are divided:
Once I’m working on a film I feel that people might listen to my opinion, but I don’t think I have a lot of power. Ralph Fiennes
In terms of getting films financed, it’s all about the actors nowadays. It’s all about who’s your cast, and the stars. But that’s constantly changing for them – Tom Cruise might be at the top one minute and then down five the next. I think it’s like a war that’s ongoing. The actors are very dependent on press; the press is dependent on the companies and the industry, so it’s an intertwined, complicated thing. I don’t know who literally has the power. Mike Mills, Director
Does anyone know?
A look at the Warner Brothers Matrix series may reveal who has the power. Despite the fact that all his films have taken $5 billion around the world, the producer, Joel Silver, works with Warner Brothers and he remains a well-paid subordinate:
The studio makes the decision of what movies they want to make. That’s where the powers is. When they say we’ll make this movie or we won’t, that’s the power to say yes or no. I don’t really have that power. I can influence them and persuade them to let me try to make a certain movie I want to make, but they have the power.
Steven Spielberg is one of the most powerful players in Hollywood. He is a co-founder of a studio, a producer, director and screenwriter. His commitment to a project will guarantee it will be made. Hardly any other players rival his power.
Reaching for the stars
Top directors also hold sway, but most filmmakers’ power is limited by the stars attached to their project. John Madden discovered from working with Gwyneth Paltrow on Proof in 2005 that:
The bigger the star you have in the movie, the more doors open for you. It’s still true, and will always remain so, that people will go see a movie largely because of who’s in it. It perhaps becomes slightly less true at the upper art-house end of the market, but that’s important. Stars aren’t stars for no reason, they’re stars because they’re extraordinary and they’re stars because their presence is unusual, because their charisma is palpable and because, generally speaking, they’re wonderful actors. So I’ve no argument with that system.
So what about the stars themselves – how much power do they have? It’s only those in the stratosphere, who receive more than $25 million a picture, who become a formidable, independent controlling force.
PR guru Tony Angellotti again:
Among actors, you have a select group who represent a genre. Tom Cruise is and has been for many years an action star. Now he’s three-times Oscar nominated, so he’s got credentials, he does big action pictures, which was surprising to me that he went in that direction. Julia Roberts is probably still the reigning female actor, because she can do any kind of film. She’s in the Ocean’s Twelve commercial films, she doesn’t have any problems with that, and she can be in a tiny little theatrical-type picture, like Closer, which is still a big picture, but a four-character drama. So she probably wields as much clout as any actress in Hollywood.
Julia Roberts has immense power because studio executives will approve almost any film she makes, knowing her presence will generate good box office. Such power is given to any actor who can guarantee a big audience, even child stars such as Dakota Fanning, whose name attached to a film means that it will almost definitely get the go-ahead because of her very strong fan base. For an eleven-year-old it’s bit hard to understand why she has more influence than most other actors in Hollywood:
I don’t even know about that, I just enjoy the movies I do and I’m glad that people enjoy the work that I’ve done and that everyone else has done as well.
Obviously, the more awards stars have to their name, the more weight they can throw around. Charlize Theron confirms this perception:
The only thing that was incredible – besides the honour of winning an Oscar – is that it opens a lot of doors, and I would be very naïve to sit here and say it didn’t change anything in my career. It did, as far as the quality of material that I get, and also I don’t have to audition anymore. So do I have the power to make any movie happen? I would never want to think that, that’s just power that nobody should have, and if I do have any more power now, I really hope that I use it in a smart way.
Other people benefit from star power, like the agents who represent them, but there’s a downside for the writers; screenwriters like Terry George have found that a star-driven system doesn’t empower the storyteller:
If it’s a Hollywood-financed project the screenwriter is basically a very well paid typist. It’s whatever stars you can get that determine the budget, the publicity and the greenlighting of the picture itself.
The government and Hollywood
Ever since the birth of Hollywood, its power to influence has made it a top concern for politicians and government. At times Hollywood has become an overt propaganda machine for the state; but the corporate bods that control the studios also have the power to influence public policy.
One area in which the US government and Hollywood routinely work together is on films where the military’s hardware and personnel are involved, such as War of the Worlds. Major Breasseale, a US army liaison officer to the entertainment industry, was on the set of the Spielberg film giving advice.He explains that the army has a vested interest:
The Army gets a chance to educate the public on what it is the Army does. Even if it’s a Science Fiction project. I know that seems kind of silly – how can you tell the Army’s story in a Science Fiction project? Well, you can tell the Army’s story in showing that it’s men and women who fight these fights. You can tell the Army’s story in saying; this is the most plausible way we would do this.
However, author and journalist David Robb, who has studied a great many military films, claims the army’s real aim is to promote America’s fighting forces in the way it sees fit. War films provide many examples where the government can influence film content unbeknownst to the public by requiring filmmakers to submit their scripts and hand over editorial control in exchange for use of the military’s sought-after resources, whether it be submarines, aircraft or tanks. David Robb:
When you give your script to the military, not only do they get to read it first, but when you shoot the film they actually have military minders on the set to make sure you shoot the film just the way you agreed to do it. This isn’t the way films are made at all, because changes are made all the time. You have to do it just the way you agreed and then after the film is shot, they pre-screen it for the Pentagon admirals and generals before it’s released to the public.
Early on in his career, Tom Cruise starred in Top Gun, which some say is a classic example of military image-tampering. He played a heroic top navy pilot in the film which showed off shiny new US military hardware in several aerial scenes. Professor Toby Miller:
Top Gun was done with the direct participation of the Defense Department, which was not only involved in scripting but also in product placement of its aircraft. And immediately after the release of that film, which was tremendously successful, recruitment rates went through the roof, to become the kind of pilot that Tom Cruise was.
At the time, Tom Cruise wasn’t pleased with the idea that his film might be propaganda glorifying combat; but by holding back its co-operation on films that portray the armed forces in ways it doesn’t like, isn’t the US military engaging in propaganda and trying to obscure the truth?
So who does rule the roost?
Hollywood certainly talks the talk and walks the walk as the big ‘I am’! But behind the arrogance, pomp and glam facade sits a long line of people who are all important ingredients in the Hollywood magic. Without the studios and the executives, there would be no money; without the scriptwriters and directors there would be no stories or productions; without the stars there would be no characters to love or hate; and without the audience there would be no-one to watch. Everyone involved has something to say; it is just that some people are listened to more than others are. Remember to use your ‘audience power’ at all times, and be sure to tell Hollywood what you really think if it comes knocking.
- Helen Dugdale is a freelance writer.
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- This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 17.
