Read Online Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry by Tejaswini Ganti - Free Book Online Page A

young couple chose not to elope. In earlier love stories, youthful rebellion was the norm, and young lovers ran away together in order to make a new life for themselves despite parental opposition. DDLJ presented a different male protagonist, one who appeared almost passive in contrast to earlier heroes. In DDLJ, even though the heroine’s mother encourages the young couple to elope—this in itself an unusual portrayal—the hero refuses to do so and works very hard to win over the heroine’s father, to gain his permission for their marriage, despite the fact that the heroine’s marriage had already been arranged byher father to his best friend’s son. DDLJ has earned the title of the longest running Indian film of all time, having completed 800 weeks in Bombay’s Maratha Mandir theater as of February 18, 2011. Both films, due to their tremendous success in India and in diasporic markets, had an enormous impact on filmmaking —in terms of themes, long titles, visual style, music, and marketing—for the next decade. They ushered in an era of what the industry termed “family entertainers”—love stories filled with songs, dances, and cultural spectacle like weddings, set against the backdrop of extremely wealthy, extended, and frequently transnational, families.
    The extent of HAHK’s and DDLJ’s success was beyond the industry’s expectations because of the altered media landscape that Hindi filmmakers were operating in by the mid-1990s, which included the presence of satellite television. Both films were also touted as initiating a resurgence in theater going, which was remarked upon by the English-language press in articles like “Goodbye to Formula?” (Chandra 1995) and “Back to the Movies: In the Age of TV, Audiences Flock Back to Movie Halls” (Chatterjee 1996). The tone of these articles was in stark contrast to the scenario presented a mere four years earlier. Whereas earlier articles had been overly pessimistic in their assessment of the state of filmmaking and the health of the Hindi film industry, this later batch was filled with statements about the magic of cinema and the new wave of innovation sweeping through the industry. For example, “Goodbye to Formula” asserted, “Business is booming, but clichés are passé. . . The box office is lapping up un-Bollywood films, leaving traditional wisdom stumped. Even the money men are now looking beyond the twin peaks of violence and vulgarity” (Chandra 1995: 120). These sentiments were a strong contrast to the industry’s own previous articulations of gloom and, as well as scholarly accounts that, focusing on earlier periods of the Hindi film industry, continually predicted its decline due to the entrance of technologies such as video and cable television (see Chakravarty 1993; Pendakur 1989; Vasudevan 1990).
    The commercial performance of HAHK and DDLJ demonstrated to the film industry that in the age of satellite, cable, video piracy , and increased competition for audiences , it was still possible to generate astronomical profits at the box-office. Taran Adarsh, the editor of Trade Guide , a weekly trade magazine, characterized to me the impact of HAHK on the industry:
    One Hum Aapke Hain Koun , and the economics of the Hindi film industry has gone haywire I would say, because in today’s times when we have cable, we have video, we have television, we have video piracy, we have a lot of factors which oppose the big-screen entertainment, yet to have a film doing a business of 200 crores 19 [2 billion rupees] in the first year is a very difficult task. If someone would have told me that it’s going to do 200 crores, I would have laughed it off, but it’s a fact! So, when a film did 200 crores, people realized, “Oh, that means there is business. We have to make good products.” (Adarsh, interview, September 1996)
    Shyam Shroff, the head of the distribution company Shringar Films, and the father of Shravan Shroff, explained that the increased