KEY POINTS:
Ronnie Screwvala is the posterboy for the new Bollywood. Twenty years ago Screwvala made a forgettable debut in the entertainment industry by supplying cable feeds to half-a-dozen high-rise complexes in Mumbai. Today, he runs a listed company that produces a mix of movies and television shows.
Last year
he hit the jackpot by selling part of his Hungama TV channel to Walt Disney Corporation for about US$30 million ($43.8 million).
Screwvala is a very different figure from the larger-than-life, Sam Goldwyn-type characters who once ran India's glitzy and prolific Hindi cinema industry known as Bollywood.
Bollywood's new czars such as Screwvala have finally got the formula right for making movies that are raking in cash. Last year was one of the most successful with films such as Krrish, a take-off on Superman, in which the hero spends time flying round Singapore (Krrish was a sequel to another movie, Koi Mil Gaya, partly filmed in New Zealand).
Trade analyst Taran Adarsh says: "Last year was a great year because film-makers finally realised that a good script is more important than anything else."
But that's not the entire picture. Like the rest of India, the Hindi film industry has been through an era of wrenching change and disruption. In the last five years it has adjusted to a world where cinema must compete with hundreds of TV channels, DVDs and all the other entertainments of the modern world, not to mention lots of piracy.
But it has bounced back almost like a Hindi film hero who triumphs against all the odds. Last year revenues were up by almost 25 per cent and movie theatre audiences were rising.
This was because the films were better and the growth of multiplex cinema halls in urban centres during the past four years.
"People had stopped going to old theatres that were filled with rats and cockroaches. They wanted good sound systems and a theatre where the air-conditioning worked," says Adarsh.
These multiplexes only account for about 2 to 3 per cent of the country's screens. But they've delivered 39 per cent of the box-office returns because ticket prices are higher in the bigger cities. That's forecast to climb to about 47 per cent of gross returns this year.
What impact have the multiplexes had on moviemakers? Quite simply they've spawned a new breed of "crossover' films aimed at urban audiences and have realistic plots - though actors aren't allowed to kiss because of the fear of censorship.
"The multiplex genre is more experimental. We are ready to do stuff that conventional Bollywood hasn't done for years," says Pritish Nandy, Chairman, Pritish Nandy Corporation, a former magazine editor who turned moviemaker six years ago.
Nandy has now made about 18 low-and middle-budget movies and risen further in the industry than anyone expected him to.
"When we began people called me the father of the multiplex genre. They have learnt from the lesson we passed around," he says.
Indian cinema is amazingly large in terms of the number of movies made annually. About 800 films are made each year around the country in about 20 languages. Bollywood, or the Hindi film industry based in Mumbai, produces around 200 each year.
Its earnings are no patch on Hollywood. Last year's top grosser, Dhoom2, made about US$37 million from theatres. That pales to insignificance compared with Hollywood's top moneymaker, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, which raked in over US$1 billion.
But the moguls of Hollywood aren't looking down their lenses at their poor Indian cousins any longer.
On the contrary, companies like Sony Pictures are funding smaller movies and gingerly testing the Indian waters.
It isn't tough to figure why the Bollywood story isn't about to end in tragedy. In 2000 the Government dropped its distrust of the movie business and gave it "industry" status, which meant that banks could lend more easily to film-makers .
That has, to some extent, pushed out the powerful shady financiers.
Says Adarsh: "Corporates have come in and so have financial institutions. Everything has cleaned up."
The Bollywood clean-up has also resulted in new, corporatised ventures coming into the picture and bringing cutting-edge management ideas to the world of movies.
Also they have become more efficient at tapping foreign markets like the US and the UK and other revenue streams such as DVDs and music (every Hindi film has lots of song-and-dance sequences that punctuate the action).
At another level, the multiplex revolution is also now being screened all over the country. One of India's most powerful businessmen, Anil Ambani (formerly of the multi-billion-dollar Reliance Group who now heads his own Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group), has bought a stake in a company called Adlabs which has plans to open 22 multiplexes with 100 screens in the next two years.
Another theatre chain PVR has also been spreading out from the cities such as Delhi and Mumbai to smaller cities.
If the figures are right, India needs more screens desperately. It was reckoned that India had 12,500 screens compared with 65,000 in China, according to a study released in 2005 by industry organisation CII and KPMG.
But forget the numbers. That wouldn't be the way to judge Bollywood. It occupies a larger-than-life space in Indian hearts and minds - with cricket and cricketers.
Amitabh Bachchan, the 64-year-old who has dominated the industry for the last 30 years, would certainly trounce Prime Minister Manmohan Singh if a nationwide popularity poll was held. Other stars like Shah Rukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan are instantly recognisable figures in any household.
What next for India's films? The CII-KPMG report predicts double-digit growth for the film industry through to 2010.
But even that's probably too modest and it's safe to predict that Bollywood will keep turning out the hits and become an even bigger blockbuster story.
