Hollywood Firms Target Bollywood Market

The popular perception that “East is East, and West is West; Never the twain shall meet,” has been time and again been questioned and is being put to scrutiny by the film worlds of the largest and most powerful democracies of the world.

Hollywood has been increasingly showing interest in its counterpart in India, popularly called the Bollywood. What else can explain a major U.S. film studio giant entering into distribution of Indian movies? Columbia Tristar Films of India Ltd. (CTFIL) has entered into distribution of Hindi films.

Columbia is planning to make a countrywide splash with its maiden venture film director Raj kaushal’s “Pyar Mein Kabhi Kabhi” on June 25 under the Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) banner.

The film, casting newcomers Dino Morea, a model, and Rinki Khanna, second daughter of former film stars Rajesh Khanna and Dimple Kapadia, has 118 first-timers in the production team, comprising of the shooting crew and technicians.

PMKK will be marketed and publicized in a major way and the road shows for the movie may include premieres, dinners and organizing gatherings and interactive meetings between the cast and the audiences. The promo campaigns will also cover contests and quizzes and tickets could be sold through tie-up arrangements.

And there are corporate tie-ups too in the run-up to the release. Columbia has approached Pepsi, the Taj Group, Carbon Black, which is the de Beers representative in India, Jet Airways, BPL and Ray Ban. This is not all. The U.S. major has already plans for some other Hindi films in the pipeline. But this is only their recent-found area of interest. There have been other areas of investment too. India and Indians are increasingly attracting the U.S. film industry.

Recently, an Indian computer animator, who has worked on several Hollywood projects in the past, played a key role in the unique full-length animation film 'Antz', which he says took two years of hard work to produce.

Mumbai-bred Apurva Shah still remembers the day a little more than two years ago when producer Steven Spielberg had come to the Pacific Data Images (PDI) studios in Palo Alto, California, where he works to see the opening shots of 'Antz,' and was thrilled by it. Spielberg had apparently told Shah that it was a unique film, on which Shah and 25 other animators had spent months on, and that they should release it soon because it “is going to be ground-breaking."

'Antz' tells the story of Z, a worker ant ("the middle child in a family of five million") who meets and falls in love with the colony's Princess Bala. Though he sets out to impress the princess, Z soon finds himself the ironic hero leading a revolution that becomes a celebration of individuality in the face of overwhelming conformity.

Armed with a budget of $60 million, Shah and the other animators at PDI approached the making of the film in much the same way as they would a live action feature.

The Indian animator, who graduated from Bombay University in 1989 with a degree in engineering and later did his masters in computer science from Texas A&M Universit, told California newspaper India-West that he pursued computer animation as a career since it "was a wonderful combination of the creative and technology."

Shah, who landed a job with PDI as part of the company's R&D, got his real break when the animation supervisor on the film 'Batman Forever' asked him if he would like to work on a couple of shots incorporating computer images into a live action sequence. It meant slow, tedious work, but Shah leaped at the opportunity.

That experience later landed him a spot with two other animators who had been asked to pump up the action for a sequence involving a train and a helicopter at the climax of 'Broken Arrow.' On 'The Arrival,' a science fiction film starring Charlie Sheen, Shah was moved up the assistant technical director's position. He helped coordinate the efforts of 16 animators and was responsible for a twist at the end of the film. Then came 'A Simple Wish' starring actor Martin Short and Shah was promoted to computer graphics supervisor.

'Antz' was PDI's first animated feature film, and its success has in turn led to Shah being named as sequence supervisor on PDI's current full-length project, "Shrek," with actor Mike Meyers playing the part of an ogre from a fairy tale by William Steig.

Hollywood’s interest has gone beyong just skilled Indian technicians. Recently the Ramoji Film City, a massive film production facility outside Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh, had caught the eye of Hollywood’s Roger Corman.