Video Night in Kathmandu (38 page)

Sippy, in fact, evinced little embarrassment at the compromises the form demanded. “Look,” he said straightforwardly. “The intelligence of the average moviegoer in India is that of an eleven-year-old. That you must always remember. Look at
Mard
and you’ll see what I mean. The Wonder Dog puts up his paw and whistles. It’s just berserk. Another movie was made in which a dog has flashbacks, and the whole movie—the whole damned movie—was shown from the dog’s point of view. There was even a background song sung by the dog, saying, ‘Oh, my
master, you left me and I miss you.’ In the end, of course, the dog avenges his master.

“Yes, I know that in the West you have Lassie, Benji, the Lady and the Tramp. But this is just crazy.” Maybe so, I thought. But in the West we also have
E.T.
And
Jaws.
And R2D2. America has sent Bugs Bunny as its emissary to every continent, and installed Mickey Mouse as a patron saint in many a Third World land. The Paramount head office once cabled Cecil B. De Mille that “what the public demands today is modern stuff, with plenty of clothes, rich sets and action.” And the United States does not have a 65 percent illiteracy rate, or half its population living under the poverty level.

As we went on talking in his Bombay office (a plush carpeted place on the second floor of a fantastically run-down old house, its polished shelves full of books on Hitchcock and Sam Goldwyn), Sippy laid out for me, with a craftsman’s clarity, the nuts and bolts of an Indian movie. In every case, he said, there must be a hero, a hero’s friend (often a clown), a heroine, a vamp and a villain (I thought of
The Two Gentlemen of Verona).
If the hero was rich, the heroine was poor, and vice versa (I thought of
Romeo and Juliet).
If there was a poor hero, he had an aging mother; if a rich heroine, there was a strict father
(Much Ado About Nothing).
And the poor must always conquer the rich
(Coriolanus).

“Look at Manmohan Desai,” he continued. “All his films have the same pattern. Always there are two brothers who get lost in childhood—one good, one bad.” (I thought of
King Lear, The Comedy of Errors.)
“Then they meet in adulthood, and fight one another, and then they gang up and kill the villain.” What about the women? “Yes,” he said, a little impatient at my simplicity. “The good brother loves the heroine. The bad brother loves the vamp. And if he’s very bad, at the end he will save the hero’s life and die.” And all this was unvarying? Well, he added, sometimes there were three brothers. “And every successful Hindi film has a vendetta,” he went on. “Action and a vendetta.” Oh, and one more thing, added Sippy—all Indian movies are nothing more than
The Taming of the Shrew.

And then, of course, there was the formula fairy tale about the wicked queen with the poisoned apple, and the rogue who steals into the sleeping beauty’s bedroom, and the princes who are
raised as shepherds and must prove themselves in battle, and the god who suddenly appears onstage, and the nearly murdered girl dressed as a boy who wakes up next to the decapitated clown, and then the grand finale where everything is resolved, and everyone is reunited, and twenty-eight plot strands are brought together, and love wins out, and hero marries heroine, and children are returned to parents, while the country is rescued from its conquerors. But that was
Cymbeline
, and they hadn’t turned that into a Hindi movie yet.

Just about then, though, Sippy, having itemized all the right moves of the Hindi formula movie, took me by surprise. “In America,” he said, “it’s not so different, is it? I have seen so many versions of
First Blood.
Look at the Chuck Norris picture
Missing in Action.
There are lots of replicas.”

I thought back to the offerings of the summer just past. Most of the movies advertised in the papers had been teen-pix sex-comedies—the bastard progeny of
Porky’s
—and horror movies spun off from
Halloween, Halloween 11
and
Halloween III
, themselves the linear descendants of
Psycho.
There were the usual Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds pictures in which the stars played their usual larger-than-life selves. There were some third-generation musicals and shoot-by-number Bond flicks. But the biggest hits of the summer, as usual, were the Stallone action sequels (full of formula patriotism and common-man heroism) and the latest pastiches from the Spielberg factory. Nearly every big picture was simply a combination of big names (Redford and Streep, Streep and De Niro, De Niro and Duvall, Duvall and Pacino, Pacino and Sutherland, Hepburn and Nolte, Nolte and Murphy, Murphy and Aykroyd …), or a remake, or an out-and-out, in-and-out exploitation movie.

As I was thinking this, there came a knock on the door, and a servant brought Sippy the latest issue of
Variety.
He turned quickly to the box-office listings, and we pored over them together. At the top was
Commando
, and beneath it a battalion of look-alike action movies, the sons of Rambo, the grandsons of Bronson, the Western cousins of Bruce Lee.

“
AH, THESE PEOPLE
,”
said my aunt as we drove past the beggars and slums of Bombay on the day after my arrival. “It makes you shed tears. Real tears.
”

———

THE INDIAN MOVIE
industry is the biggest, the most popular, the closest to the heartland of any in the world. But the American is still regarded as the best. Hollywood, not Bombay, is the capital of glamour, the nerve center of show biz, the source of every trend. And so, quite sensibly, Bombay takes its cues from Hollywood; what goes down well in America goes up quickly on the screens of India. And what is today in India is tomorrow around the world.

Sometimes, I learned, the Indians take no more than a label from America (Satyajit Ray shoots some of his movies in a complex called Tollywood, and a typical Hindi movie stars “Sunny” and “Jackie”). Sometimes they simply appropriate a kind of trend (while I was in Bombay, the cover story of the
Illustrated Weekly
, the grandfather of Indian magazines, its
Saturday Evening Post
or
Life
, discussed India’s new generation of “movie brats,” who “bring to their craft a remarkable understanding of celluloid and a professionalism rarely seen in the industry”). Sometimes, the Indians take over a great notion (creating the “curry Western,” for example, simply by dressing up Amitabh in a cowboy hat). Sometimes, they even lift specific tricks—a chase from
Raiders of the Lost Ark
here, a plot development from James Bond there, now a camera technique from
One from the Heart
, now a dance sequence from
Saturday Night Fever.
Often, though, it is easiest to pilfer the entire movie.

The heist was managed easily enough, an editor of a movie mag explained. By hook or by crook, through contacts in the West or relatives in the Gulf, each of the Bombay movie moguls got hold of a video of the latest Western hit. Often, they were in possession of such tapes within two months of the movie’s U.S. release and before it had even been shown in Britain. No sooner had the last credit rolled across their screens than they furiously set about cranking out frame-by-frame remakes. Thus, for example, five separate replicas of
Death Wish
had assaulted the screens of India almost simultaneously.

Other American tricks could be deployed in post-production. Telling me of a “lovely” article in
The Hollywood Reporter
about the use of teasers and trailers, Sippy said that he planned to follow the precedent of
Rambo
, which had been previewed to the public through teasers in 1,000 different cinemas. Promotion
could likewise benefit from the wisdom of the West. One of the most popular ads in Bombay during my stay showed a hairy-chested he-man waving a gun while flames erupted behind him; on another billboard, an incredible hulk with scars on his chest and murder in his eyes straddled the world under the legend “He Is the Answer to Every Challenge.” These two like-minded movies were certainly well advertised, I thought, as I saw the same image staring down at me from hoarding after ad after hoarding. Only when I turned to an entertainment newspaper and there found three separate full-page ads showing bestial he-men bestriding the world, bloodied, bare-chested and brandishing a deadly weapon, did I realize that all the ubiquitous ads were not selling just two movies, but several: one image served all. If Rambo did not exist, the Indian moviemakers would have had to invent him.

The process of turning an American movie into an Indian one was not very difficult, Sippy explained, but it did require a few changes. “The Americans like a straightforward story line,” he explained, “something uncomplicated. An Indian audience likes everything complicated, a twist and turn every three reels.” In addition, he continued, the Indian hero had to be domesticated, supplied with a father, a mother and a clutch of family complications. “Take
Rambo
, for example. Rambo must be given a sister who was raped. He must be made more human, more emotional. His plight must be individualized—not just an obscure vendetta against the system.” Also, of course, there had to be some extra flourishes. “The average U.S. movie is only ninety minutes long; the average Hindi picture lasts a hundred and forty minutes. So we must add singing, dancing, more details.” And since even kissing, not to mention nudity, had long been banned in India, explicitness and expletives had to be toned down, while suggestiveness had to be turned up. “Let’s say a Western movie shows a typical society woman. In the West, she will sleep with ten different guys, and everyone takes it. But in India, we will make her just a high-society lady. We want puritan characters.” Even so, the buxom puritan would doubtless be obliged to play much of the movie in miniskirts, wet saris and nighties. The Indian adaptation would, in effect, be faithful to its model, but bigger, broader, louder. In the Indian cinema, nothing succeeds like excess.

Thus the skill in producing Hindi movies lay less, it seemed, in making excellent pictures than in deciding which ones could be profitably copied. The obscure Hemingway-sister movie
Lipstick
, for example, had been popular, because it featured the two favorite themes of Indian movies, rape and revenge; Bronson movies were always good, since they turned on vigilantism; more surprisingly, Erich Segal’s
Man, Woman and Child
(thanks, perhaps, to its domestic focus) had inspired two adaptations. Sippy himself was famous for his version of
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
Another perfect candidate for translation, he said, would be
The Natural.
“Just change baseball into cricket,” he explained, “and it’s a perfect Hindi movie. The dying father. The heroine and the vamp. The bolt of lightning from the heavens. The hero who somehow triumphs.” And the implausibility of the original was, if anything, more a help to the adapter than a handicap. “How can you believe that the guy’s in a stadium with a hundred thousand people and he can see one bloody woman standing up? But it’s stirring.”

I mentioned
Flashdance
, which had just arrived in Bombay, as another seemingly ideal source for a remake. It had, after all, a poverty-stricken, dark-haired girl with a gift for suggestiveness and a soulful, slightly fat-faced hero. The heroine had a lonely fairy godmother and a friend, the friend had parents who rallied round her during times of stress. The movie also had a likable comic figure, a pair of cartoonish villains and a potential Wonder Dog; lots of neon glitz and a rush of titillating song-and-dance sequences that had nothing to do with anything. It even had an inspirational it-pays-to-dream story line and a moral. “No,” said Sippy, “it’s too subtle for the Indian audience. It’s too understated. At the end, for example, Alex leaves her audition and simply embraces her boyfriend; in India, the scene would have to be spelled out.”

I received a more personal angle on the differences between the Eastern and Western approaches to filmmaking one day when I happened to run into Persis Khambatta, the only Indian actress to have recently made it to Hollywood. An unofficial repertory company of Indians is always on hand to stock the quiet art-house movies of James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, or to fill any PBS series about the subcontinent; Shashi Kapoor and Saeed Jaffrey, and more recently Victor Banerjee and Art Malik
and Roshan Seth, are coming to seem almost as ubiquitous in “quality productions” as John Gielgud or Alan Bates. But these characters play to small audiences in small movies that show in small theaters. Khambatta, by contrast, had followed the golden brick road all the way to
People
magazine.

When I met her, however (feeding info to a gossip rag; even bad publicity was better than no publicity at all), Khambatta did not seem to be on the ascendant. She was, in fact, returning to the Hindi cinema. When I asked her about this—it sounded a little like going from riches to rags—she made a virtue of necessity, perhaps, by donning the sackcloth demeanor of an ascetic anxious to draw closer to her roots. The offer to return to India could not, she said, have come at a more propitious moment; at the time she received the call, she explained, she was cooking Indian food and all her thoughts were of the homeland. The summons seemed like a good omen. “I have to touch the ground of India every year,” she continued. “I want to marry an Indian guy and come back here for good. I have to.” On and on she raced, unstoppable. “Yes, the others in the industry think I’m crazy. But I need India. I want to be here. This Hindi picture I’ve just finished shooting is a great
masala
movie. I get to cry. I get to laugh. I get to dance. I play a schoolgirl in braids and a seducer. In the West, acting is all a matter of control. Here it’s all emotion. Indians have a lot of guilt, lots of emotion. In the U.S., the more control, the more excellent; here I get to sob and sob and sob.” And when, in the course of shooting, she had had to grieve over her film mother’s coffin, said Persis, she simply looked across the set to where her real mother was standing, and the tears came freely.