FilmIndia (1939)

January 1939 f ILMINDI A temporary fits of extravagance when suddenly sky-rocketed to fame and incredulous fortune. I saw the dancing at Trocadero or eating plebian hamburgers at the Brown Derby, swimming or tanning themselves on the beaches or just shopping and they did not appear to be either a super-human or a sub-human race. Being a cosmopolitan crowd many of whom have suddenly acquired a lot of money, a sort of flamboyancy of dress and deportment, a craze for the unusual and the outlandish, is inevitable and naturally the extragirls (many of them more beauti Immortality in Cement — Jean Harlow's autograph and hand and foot-prints in front of Chinese Theatre, Hollywood. ful than the real stars) try to look like Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford—by using the same make-up! I do not claim to have visited all the studios or met many of the stars. I was there only for a little over a week, and unfortunately, owing to a heat-wave most of the more prominent film personalities were out for their summer vacation. Moreover, publicity chiefs of some of the studios (whose Bombay representatives never tire of asking me to give their pictures free publicity) were too "busy" to reply to my letters asking for facilities to see their studios. Anyway, others were more courteous to a visiting journalist and I went round some of the biggest studios including Warner Brothers', whose publicity department was good enough to entertain me to a lunch in the studio. I watched films being made, studied In particular the scenario and publicity departments, met men and women representing all branches of film activities and even broadcast a talk from the K.M.P.C. ("the station of stars"), in the course of which I was allowed not only to pay a tribute to Hollywood's leading stars but also to utter a few home truths about the anti-Indian films that are made there. And all the time while I scoured Hollywood, 1 kept thinking of our own film industry—our producers, studios and stars. What, I asked myself, is the lesson that India must learn from Hollywood? Briefly summed up below are some of my dominant impressions. HARDLY 10% ARE "SUPERS"! We have a tendency in India to over-rate the superiority of foreign films. About three hundred and odd foreign feature length films are shown in India every year but these are not even ten per cent, of the total produced in England and in the U.S.A. These are the selected ones from the more resourceful producers. Hundreds of the inferior ones are never seen in India. Some of these that I happened to see abroad were as bad as the crudest Indian films. I do not mean to say, however, that generally the technical standard of American films is not higher than that of the average Indian film. I am not surprised at it. If we had half the resources enjoyed by Hollywood studios we could assuredly do just as well. The best equipped of our studios do not come anywhere near even the smaller Hollywood studios. This superiority is particularly marked in the matter of sound-stage construction, cameras, sound-recording apparatus, lights, automatic laboratories and, last but not the least, make-up. They are able to afford everything of the best because of their extensive production activities. Each one of the half a dozen leading Hollywood studios produces almost as many pictures as are the total output of all studios in India put together. There are 24 sound stages in Warner Brothers' Burbank establishment alone. Have we got 24 sound stages in the whole of India? THAT GLAMOROUS "HOLLYWOOD TOUCH" The secret of that "Hollywood Touch" of elegant technique and polished presentation seems to me to consist mostly of three factors —scenario construction, photography and publicity, each of which may be briefly touched upon here. It is not infrequent in India to start production with half-finished scenario and, in some cases, no shooting script at all. The scenarist struggles hard with his job to keep pace with production. Dia Granmon's Chinese Theatre, Hollywood. Iogues are often written on the set. In Hollywood I met scenarists who were busy in August, 38 on scripts which will go into production somewhere towards the end of 1939! Not one but almost half a dozen scenarists and dialogue writers start work months in advance. They write, revise, rewrite, polish and re-polish until the whole thing is perfect — on paper. Is it any wonder that so many of our films appear amateurish and slip-shod when compared with the smooth and slick Hollywood productions? Very few people seem to realize in India how important is the role of photographers in "manufacturing" stars. The much boosted "personality" of so many of them is but the product of clever manipulations of lights conspiring with the camera. Sometimes enamel-like glamour is produced by high lights, on other oc r41