FilmIndia (1940)

TIT BITS OF MY TOUR WJ.TH MALICE TO NONE! Hollywood! There can't be a greater fraud in a single word than you find in this one. Like every one else, in spite of several reports to the contrary, I chose to believe all the glamorous and magnetic legends hanging round the world's greatest movie capital. I thought it was beautiful in the extreme. I thought it was full of devastating beauties. I thought there were numerous idealists and artists. I thought Hollywood was a temple of art. To me it had become an obsession to reach this Mecca of filmdom. But when I did, how quickly was I disillusioned! Hollywood is a suburb of Los Angeles. It can't be called a city and as a town it is dirty and disappointing. It boasts of one good street, The Hollywood Boulevard, where you find everything of what Hollywood has to offer. Business houses, shop windows, cinemas, and would-be-stars on the pavements with time to kill— they are all there crowded together in a big highway and desperately trying to prove that Hollywood is the glamorous capital of the film industry. * * * The glamour factories — the studios where pictures are made for a hungry and thirsty world — are the least attractive part of this film capital. Barring a couple of studios which are right in the heart of the town, the rest are dumped either on the barren riversides or in the deep shadows of the Californian hills. As factories manufacturing poisonous dope with fatal regularity they are rather imposing, but as temples of art enshrining the nobler ideals of humanity, almost every one of them is in unimpressive ruins. * * * Film making in Hollywood is an industry — in every sense of the word. Its leaning towards art is a mere pretension. Art is made an (By Baburao Patel) unwilling handmaid of capitalism and Hollywood has become the most famous centre from which come the latest streamlined tropisms to make the already suffering humanity more miserable. Capitalism with its grim intention of bleeding the poor — more and ever more from day' to day — finds its great devotees in the Jewish producers of Hollywood. When once in a way a progressive picture is turned out, it only gives an extended lease to the tin gods to manufacture a hundred more capitalist tortures with subtle designs. The world outside having no choice appreciates small mercies and applauds occasional good pictures like '"Zola", "Pasteur" and "Juarez." * * * Strangely enough in this capital conscious capital of the movies almost every studio is mortgaged with the banks. Most of them are head over heels in debt and yet the show goes on. In India, we are better off. We have at least half-a-dozen studios which are not in debt. * * * Stars — the glamour girls and the godlike boys — are better to see on the screen than in life. I met almost all of consequence and I was frankly disappointed. The women were no longer women. Their femininity was missing. They looked artificial all over. Several wellknown girls are in addition ugly and repulsive. The make-up men make them beautiful and the camera gives them glamour. While the god-like boys are like heathen gods, crude and primitive and some of them even lack ordinary drawing-room manners. * * * The story that Hollywood is littered with thousands of girls from all over the world is at best a good legend. True, there are more unemployed, but the general impression that every beauty queen of every town and village goes glamour hunting to Hollywood is just so much publicity stuff. Hollywood buys stories like that. The administrative side of this picture making business is, however, in keeping with the best American traditions of business. Production heads, publicity managers, censors and all those who come in direct touch with the public, display a distinct and cultivated politeness towards all visitors and even manage to get them photographed with a couple of glamour queens. Indian Maharajas are generally more welcome, as their photographs with the garbos and gables make news for the speedy Americans and give some more material to the publicity boys. * * * Even in distant Hollywood I found a couple of 'swamis' from India practising the much boosted Indian spiritualism and yoga. They hold weekly discourses to tone up the walls of the souls, particularly of the rich old American dames, who are soon tempted to part with their dollars to build a 'temple' for the 'swamy.' Some of them have turned it into a well organized industry and are earning a streamlined livelihood. Their knowledge of Yoga however, is never disputed in Hollywood. * * * They say that Los Angeles is the biggest city in California. It would be with all the waste land all around, crying to be taken into some city. * * * Hollywood is an expensive place to live in, particularly so if the dollars are bought with the Indian money. Rs. 25 per day for a room in a small sized hotel is considered poor. And the food has to be paid extra. Every little thing is priced high to make it look important and expensive. And in this land of false values, nothing will sell unless it is priced high. The Americans know that they are being 'gypped' but they don't mind it. They do the same thing in their own lines. 23