Page 65 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

52 << Industrial Identity in an Era of Reform

His colleague, having noticed the quizzical looks that Rolly and Chowd-
hary are exchanging, explains: “You see, in Hollywood the script is referred
to as property.” Rolly’s response—“out here, only property is referred to as
property”—invites a smirk and another patronizing remark from the young
executive: “You see, there content is king. We want to bring that culture to
your industry. There needs to be a change in your mind-set.” Unfazed, Rolly
immediately responds that “change is indeed taking place” and that they had
signed John Abraham and Bipasha Basu not only because they were promi-
nent stars but more importantly, because the “script demanded it.”
A few months later, with his own production in disarray owing to the
hero (Zaffar Khan) of the film pulling out and other actors unwilling to
work with him, Rolly finds himself back in a meeting with the corporate
executives. “You had said ‘content is king,’ ‘script is property,’ ‘you want
to change the culture of this industry.’ And now you ask me ‘first tell me
who is the hero!’” With the executives refusing to finance his film without a
major star in place and deciding to back his brother-in-law’s project instead,
we then see a forlorn Rolly having tea with the heroine’s mother and her
friend, Dinyar Sadri, a shipping merchant with no ties to the film indus-
try. As it transpires, Sadri is willing to finance the entire film on the condi-
tion that once the agreement was signed, he would have nothing to do with
the project. A visibly overjoyed Rolly then turns to the heroine’s mother to
address her concerns about casting a new actor at short notice. “New face,”
he declares with a flourish. “I have been thinking about this, and I now real-
ize that Zaffar’s exit was a blessing in disguise. This role demands a new
face!” The newcomer from New Delhi gets the role, and the film goes on to
become a superhit. Luck by chance.
Watching Luck by Chance in a Reliance Entertainment-owned multiplex
in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, a few weeks before traveling to Bombay
to attend the FICCI-FRAMES 2009 convention, I had wondered about how
the celebration of a decade of corporatization and globalization would be
staged. As it turned out, the contradictions and disjunctures between the
rhetoric and practice of corporatization, the ambivalence that a producer like
Rommy Rolly expressed regarding ongoing changes, the persistence of estab-
lished modes of filmmaking and anonymous (benami) financing, and the
topsy-turvy culture of production in Bollywood that Luck by Chance alluded
to were on display for all see at the convention. In this chapter, I draw on my
experiences and observations at the FRAMES 2009 convention to examine
how a decade of industrial change was staged. In particular, I consider the
ellipsis in the title of the report that the consultancy firm KPMG released
during the inaugural session of the convention—In the Interval . . . But Ready