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MUMBAI, March 14

AT Frames 2003 on Friday, the discussion on `The Business of Filmmaking', chaired by Shyam Benegal, had a lot in common with the day's India-New Zealand cricket match.

If the Indian team yet again betrayed its capacity for unpredictability, the contention of a few attending the talk was that corporatisation too is only as bad or good at courting box office success as traditional film making.

The name of at least one leading corporate was mentioned by critics as being in the list of 2002's failed producers. To that extent, from a financing angle they seemed to put their money in the same tired themes as individual film producers.

"Even corporate financiers are driven by the old financier's mentality. Nobody is identifying a good script," filmmaker Mr Vinod Pandey said.

In fact, the industry wasn't always unorganised. Years ago, Bollywood had a thriving studio system, was organised and had a healthy degree of success at the box office. But what happened, as filmmaker Mr Ketan Mehta pointed out, was that over the years entertainment was identified as an elite need. It never merited priority in the Government's eyes and with the onset of a closed economy, began to develop a technological gulf with the developed West.

Shortly thereafter, the existing studio system crumbled and the industry declined into an unorganised pattern of business. Its occasional fling with organised industry — if that pedigree alone be the key to success — has been neither great nor without irritation to genuine creativity. Filmmaker Sudhir Mishra argued it well, with a laconic touch.

"In the 80, they started telling you that the film industry is an ancillary arm of the music industry. So, you had music companies telling you how to make films. Then they told you it was an extension of the carpentry business, so you had set designers telling you what to do. Then they said it was an extension of the costume business. Now, somebody was saying it is an extension of a barber shop...."

There is a danger in corporatisation, he pointed out, in that at present for all its faults, Indian movies are still the only ones capable of giving Hollywood a run for its money here. Why lose your individuality then? Mishra highlighted the real illness as the cornering of production power in Bollywood by a few, seen for example in the trend of father making film to showcase a son or daughter. "It is quite feudal in India," he said.

Conceding benefits in corporatisation if "it leads to democratisation," he said, "I hope it won't be like the Mahabharat, where only the Arjuns get to make films and the Ekalavyas can't."

Sounded a lot like cricket. You can't drill predictability into a good innings. Late evening, Mohammed Kaif and Rahul Dravid were proving just that.

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