Page 70 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

Industrial Identity in an Era of Reform >> 57

developments in cable and satellite television, the emergence of multiplex
chains across urban India, and the entry of large media and nonmedia cor-
porations into the film business, he outlines a predictable story of change.
Further, according to Mitra, the first and foremost challenge revolved around
the issue of film financing. Corporatization meant working with film compa-
nies to develop, at the very least, a balance sheet that banks and other inves-
tors could examine. By the same token, this process also involved getting
banks to understand how to assess risk in the film business. As he recalled:

Banks had no idea how to lend. FICCI worked closely with IDBI (Indus-
trial Development Bank of India). We took the then Minister for Infor-
mation & Broadcasting Sushma Swaraj to New York where 22 bankers
from the world congregated. She discussed for three hours the feasibility
of lending to the business of movies. They explained how they are lend-
ing and are also making money, how they diversify risk, how they balance
portfolios where eight films are made—one succeeds and seven fail, and
yet you make a buck. So, the technology of lending in a risk environment
was shared. 12

From this perspective, corporatization was about bringing the operations of
the film industry—and in particular, notions of risk and modes of specu-
lation that shaped the workings of the industry—into alignment with the
demands of global capital. And in Mitra’s view, this was beginning to hap-
pen. However, several panel discussions at FRAMES 2009 revealed that the
transition from Bombay to Bollywood was, far from being seamless, a con-
tested, uneven, and at times volatile reworking of the prevailing culture of
capitalism in the Bombay film world.
One panel in particular—“The Business of Filmmaking in 2008: Agony or
Ecstasy?”—disrupted the celebration and became a topic of conversation for
the remainder of the convention. Held on the second day of the convention,
this panel brought together filmmakers from established family businesses
as well as executives from large media corporations that have entered dif-
ferent sectors of the film industry over the past decade. The question that
each panelist had been asked to address was this: despite unprecedented lev-
els of investment in production, distribution, and exhibition, why does the
film industry continue to grapple with failure on such a large scale? The year
2008, the moderator noted, had been a particularly dismal one with less than
ten films earning enough to classify as a “hit.”
The first speaker, Goldie Behl, son of well-known producer and direc-
tor (the late Ramesh Behl), said nothing that was new either to his fellow