Page 147 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

134 << Dot-Coms and the Making of an Overseas Territory

and magazine articles, DDLJ marks a key transition in the film industry’s
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approach to overseas distribution. As the story goes, Aditya Chopra’s debut
film DDLJ went on to earn Rs. 200 million abroad and Rs. 500 million in
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India, but was sold for just Rs. 6–7.5 million per territory. Anxious not
to repeat this mistake, by the time their next film was ready for release in
1997 (Dil To Pagal Hai/The Heart Is Crazy, dir. Yash Chopra, 1997), Yash Raj
Films had established twelve distribution offices across India, and offices in
the United States, U.K., and U.A.E. to distribute their film in overseas mar-
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kets. The growing financial importance of overseas territories gradually led
other companies like UTV, Reliance, and Rajshri to follow Yash Raj Films’s
example. While this narrative speaks more to Yash Raj Films’s canny mar-
keting/PR skills and the company’s position in the industry, and glosses
over the unevenness of the terrain of overseas distribution, it does serve as a
useful point of entry. Let me map this ongoing transition by drawing on an
interview with Lokesh Dhar, who oversees UTV’s North America and U.K.
operations.
Dhar, who had tried his hand at scriptwriting in the Hindi film indus-
try before moving into the distribution and exhibition sectors, arrived in the
United States to pursue an MBA degree. With an MBA in hand, he joined
Eros Entertainment, a company that until recently had a virtual monopoly
on the overseas distribution of Indian films. After two years with Eros Enter-
tainment, Dhar joined UTV and launched the company’s overseas opera-
tions in 2004 in New York City. “And even Eros, what could one company
really do?” Dhar remarked, as he went on to recall that the overseas distribu-
tion terrain was defined by a “lot of players, most of them mom-and-pop
type setups who would last five to six months or at most one year.” Dhar
entered the business with the understanding that it would involve interac-
tions with players with questionable reputations and whose accounting prac-
tices were anything but transparent. “There were all these companies like
Spark, Videosound, Rainbow, Net Effects Media . . . you don’t hear about
them now. They’re all gone,” Dhar explained. Positioning himself in relation
to the corporatization of the production sector in Bombay with the entry of
companies like UTV and Studio 18, Dhar offered his take on the changing
landscape of overseas distribution:

Now things are much more professional and we are not like the wheeler-
dealers earlier. There is a different level of transparency and accountability
in reporting and other operations. There was a time when some interna-
tional distributor would acquire a film from a producer in India and there
was no information flow. People had no idea what was happening here,