Page 71 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

58 << Industrial Identity in an Era of Reform

panelists or those in the audience. Reminding the audience that low-budget
films that attempted “something different, something new” had done well
that year, Behl trotted out a well-worn cliché about the difficulties of treading
the fine line between commerce and art that defined filmmaking. As he saw
it, “if the studios are playing a stock market game, then they are going to be
in trouble.” After pointing to a few areas that needed improvement such as
script development and marketing, Behl ended his talk with a vapid, if reas-
suring, comment: “There will always be funds available for someone with a
solid story to tell. I’m a second-generation kid in the industry, and I have
seen many ups and downs.”
Things took a much more exciting turn, however, when Vishesh Bhatt,
son of producer Mukesh Bhatt and nephew of well-known director Mahesh
Bhatt, was handed the microphone. Beginning with an account of his family-
run company’s films that had failed at the box office and the one hit they had
delivered in 2008 (Jannat, Heaven), Bhatt’s speech soon grew more pointed.
While his comments on the unreliability of box-office figures and question-
able reporting practices in the Hindi film industry drew knowing nods and
a few “yeahs” and “hmms” from the audience, his next set of comments set
the room abuzz. “We, in our company, foolishly believed that a good story
was the only formula for success. But we also knew that marketing muscle
only was not the way out and definitely not worth the risk,” he began. Paus-
ing for a moment and waving his hand, as if to draw our attention to the
corporate executives on stage, he continued, “considering that we invest our
own hard-won money.” As his fellow panelists smiled nervously and nod-
ded politely, Bhatt delivered the lines that made them visibly uncomfortable:
“In the past we also failed, but we at least came clean of the blood that most
corporate companies have on their hands . . . after unknowingly, initially, and
later knowingly deceiving the public and bringing down the industry with
exaggerated spending and then claiming bogus returns.”
Three more speakers followed Bhatt—Sunil Kheterpal, a former bank-
ing industry executive now serving as the chief operating officer of BIG Pic-
tures, Reliance Entertainment’s film division; Vikas Bahl, a television and
advertising industry executive who now oversees Spotboy, a division of UTV
Motion Pictures; and Vishal Kapur, chief operating officer of FUN Cinemas,
a prominent multiplex chain. Not surprisingly, they all avoided responding
to Bhatt’s claims. While Bahl sidestepped the question of film financing and
speculation altogether by talking about the importance of developing good
stories, both Kheterpal and Kapur delivered talks involving PowerPoint
slides, graphs, and statistics that seemed designed to avoid precisely the kind
of discussion that Bhatt apparently wanted to generate. Their presentations