From underdog to movie baron

Often compared to Warner Brothers’ founder, Jack Warner, the man credited with making parochial American movies global, Ronnie Screwvala has done in India what Warner did so many decades ago. This is interesting indeed because he only stumbled upon the virtues of the movie-making business rather late in life

It was a film no one in Bollywood would have touched with the proverbial bargepole. In an industry which usually churned out feel-good romantic musicals and family dramas at regular intervals, the 2006 box-office hit ‘Rang De Basanti’ stood out by a mile.

Everyone in the Indian movie business had rejected it, saying it wouldn’t work. The story wasn’t like anything anyone had seen. Why would anyone watch a film that chronicled the journey of a bunch of carefree college kids stumbling upon an almost-forgotten chapter of Indian history and being inspired by it to take on a corrupt system and almost fail?

Most of the film was shot in sepia-toned black and white. There was no romance, no glamour, and the best-known actor cast in the film looked old and puffy-eyed. ‘Rang De Basanti’ did extremely well and few remember its arduous journey to the can and the years it took to come alive. In the Indian box-office, driven more by passion than science at the best of times, it clicked and became a sensation.

Years later, a national daily listed the film amongst the ten most influential films ever made in India. The movie made nationalism cool and brought youngsters from college canteens out on the streets. The paper referred to a series of citizen—led movements, fanned to a great extent by the media and inspired by the film for a couple of years after its release.

Justice for Jessica; justice for Nitish Katara; justice for Priyadarshini Mattoo; and crusades against government apathy: in each case, the story was the same-long-pending cases, corruption and delayed justice. The film inspired candle-light vigils and street marches.

But there was more to it than the sentiments it aroused and the marches it inspired. As days rolled into weeks and box-office revenues poured in from all over the country, there was frenzy. Veterans of the industry tried to fathom the magnitude of the success. Others cringed at how mundane their productions looked in comparison. Everyone wanted to know who could have had the gumption to greenlight a project like this one.

Rohinton ‘Ronnie’ Screwvala remembers how he backed the film’s director, Rakeysh Om Prakash Mehra, a relatively unknown ad film-maker then, to co-produce the film. The one thing that strikes you about Ronnie is his frank manner. And he makes no bones about the fact that ‘Rang De Basanti’ became his calling card in the Indian movie business, not because it became a sensation but because it opened up channels for him in the most unlikely way.

A few weeks after the film’s release, Screwvala’s company, UTV Motion Pictures, took out a full-page ad in the Bombay Times and across national dailies, declaring that ‘Rang De Basanti’ had become the third biggest grosser in the Indian film business. The film had raked in box-office revenues of over Rs 90 crore.

The morning the spread appeared, Screwvala got a series of terse messages from the offices of the biggest movie producers of the time. ‘When they saw the ad they must have thought,“Who is this guy, where has he come from?” But when I met them and explained that I had put out the ad only because I needed to establish my credentials, something they didn’t need to, they saw reason.’

But it wasn’t so simple. Charm and flattery were just a small part of Screwvala’s defence. ‘When I met Karan [Johar] and Adi [Chopra], I simply pointed out that we have to make the pie bigger. Despite the number of films the industry chruned out each year, the total revenue for the movie business was less than what was made annually by the biggest Hollywood studio! And it wasn’t because there wasn’t a market. It was because most of it was slipping out.’

By the end of the evening, Screwvala turned the young ‘old’ guard into compatriots who were quick to grasp what he was alluding to: the huge untapped potential of the Indian movie business and how they could build it and gain from it, if only they worked together.

And they did just that, as co-producers or for marketing and distribution of movies: Ronnie’s UTV joined hands with Karan’s Dharma Productions several times; and Adi’s Yash Raj Films and UTV also fought the case for film producers against multiplex owners on revenue sharing in 201 1.

In a sense, this episode reflects the kind of businessman Screwvala has been and how he has made a mark in India’s movie business.

Often compared to Warner Brothers’ founder, Jack Warner, the man credited with making parochial American movies global, Screwvala has done in India what Warner did so many decades ago. This is interesting indeed because he only stumbled upon the virtues of the movie-making business rather late in life.

Between 1998 and 2011, Screwvala went from being an underdog, a nobody, to one of the most successful and powerful movie barons in the country. He wasn’t part of the group of film-making families and stars who had been running the Indian film-making business like a closed club for decades.

Yet he managed to change not just the kind of movies made in India but also how they were made, distributed and sold.