Published date: Mar 31st-Apr 12th 1981, New Delhi

THE next time you are talking about Indian films, don’t let your tongue slip into saying “the Bombay film industry” No longer is Bombay India’s film capital. In 1979, less Hindi films were produced than in Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. The Censors in Madras can barely keep up with the rush: last year, they had to certify 486 of a nationwide total of 742 films. The nation’s film capital has shifted to Madras. For good, or so it seems: It has all the ingredients of a fable, the story of how South Indian films slowly and steadily reached the top spot, and Aesop would be happy at how the tortoise overtook the hare. Last year, Hindi films (which are supposed to have a national market) constituted only 19 per cent of the total, while films in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada (which have a narrow, regional market) constituted 63. per cent.

Close to 7 million of the estimated total of 12.5 million filmgoers every’ day flock to theatres in the South (which has 51 per cent of the nation’s cinema theatres). The South contributed well over half last year’s total gate receipts’ of Rs 500 crores.

It was not an overnight phenomenon, this reversal of fortunes, although when it did happen .it was phenomenal. It was not because the South was suddenly flush with untold wealth, because even today Hindi films gobble up a disproportionate 75 per cent of the annual (and accounted for) investment in film-making (which is a staggering Rs 700 crores). It was not, either, because the South posses- sed vastly talented film-makers.

The turn-around came about simply because over the years, hundreds of thousands of people moved in to deliver mass entertainment at a reasonable cost, and, behind the scenes, thousands more laid the foundations of this celluloid empire by wisely investing money in the myriad facilities that would help turn out movies that were technically excellent. Today, even the most mediocre South Indian movie is assured of more than adequate outlets in the region.

Once upon a time: Like all fables, this one began once upon a time when Tamil, Telugu and Kannada films were made in Maharashtra and West Bengal, and Madras just did not exist as a film centre (and Malayalam films were unheard of). It was only three years after the first talkie in 1931 that A Narayanan set up the South City studio in Madras. The studio era had begun, And Narayanan was soon followed by other enterprising men. Enough South Indians had been working in films outside Madras long before the studios came, so that the studio-owners in Madras had access to a trained corps of professionals when they set up shop.

Madras’s film-makers did something else in those early years that gave them a head start: they lured southward talented film technicians from Maharashtra and West Bengal. These people settled down in Madras (and some of them are alive even today) ., They brought badly-needed expertise with them: cameramen like Sailen Bose, Kamal Ghosh and Yusuf Munjee, directors like ML Tandon, Sunder Rao Nadkarni and Dada Mirashi. Even foreign shores were plundered: director Ellis R Duncan from the US, sound-recordist Marconi from Italy.

Gemini Studios was set up in 1940 (even today it is a landmark on Madras’s Mount Road) and ushered in the era of the big studios, Hollywood- style, with actors, directors, cinematographers and an army of technicians on their payrolls, with sprawling gardens tended by horticulturists, and an array of equipment that meant a film-maker did not need to stir beyond the studio’s compound walls. Gemini was followed, in post-War Madras, by BN Reddi’s Vauhini Studios and by AV Meiyappa Chettiar’s AVM Studios. These two, in the Vadapalani area, soon formed the core of a huge film colony, fringed by shacks housing film service shops and an army of extras, technical assistants and minor craftsmen, and dwarfing their smaller competitors. In 1965, this select band was joined by Andhraite LV Prasad, who named his studio after himself. By the time the 1950s rolled around, film-making had become big business in Madras. The Madras movies dealt with social problems, they oozed emotion, they were garish sometimes, but they clicked with their audiences (even last year, 94 per cent of the movies were ‘socials’, and the remainder ‘mythologicals’). Panoramic social documents emerged from the South’s spools, and there were no barriers: a group of Andhra zamindars financed production of a Telugu film on agrarian revolution, Rytubidda.

It was in the ’50s that Malayalam films began to make their presence felt, for they presented realistic portrayals of Kerala and its people. Malayalam film-makers had to depend on fresh talent and a rich literature, unlike Tamil and Telugu movies which featured established stage artistes and dished out conventional kitsch. This creative phase, which peaked in 1965 with Chemmeen, was to peter out in the ’70s when a brash army of young directors peddling sex and vulgarity turned tradition upside down.

Why Madras: The ’60s saw another important development: film-making began, initially on a small scale and then in larger numbers, in regional centres too: Trivandrum, Bangalore and Hyderabad ., But Madras had gained an early lead, and so the best facilities were to be found there. Which is why even today, most of the Southern film artistes continue to live and work from Madras (although Trivandrum has two good studios and recording facilities, playback singer Yesudas refuses to stir from Madras). Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada film folk have been long-time Madrasis- and they happily demand travelling costs to visit their own states for shooting.

“Film-making has spread out throughout South India, and this means that cinema has at last got some regional culture,” says music composer MB Srinivasan, who has won awards for his work in Malayalam films like Swayamvaram and Uttarayanam. “Madras represents a compo- site non-culture. Similarly, Bombay hardly reflects Hindi culture. South Indian cinema has to rediscover its cultural roots.” That will take a long time, because Madras offers cheaper and better facilities (of 474 films last year, Madras turned out 278, Karnataka 65, Andhra Pradesh 43, and Kerala 88).

The coming into power of the DMK in 1967 meant more than political upheaval. It brought about drastic changes in filmdom, for the pernicious “star system” had been ushered in, and films and politics were thence- forward forever inter-woven. DMK leaders CN Annadurai and M Karunanidhi rose from writing film scripts to the state’s chief ministership, and another DMK find, actor MG Ramachandran, too. One man who lost out was Shivaji Ganesan (even today a towering matinee idol) whose first film Parasakthi was scripted by Karunanidhi, but who parted ways with the DMK later on.

The rise of the star system coincided with the decline of the studios. The big studios had already become unwieldy, and the story that illustrates this best is that of Gemini.

When a canny distributor called SS Vasan bought and set up Gemini in 1940, his philosophy was simple: hire the best people, pay them more than anybody else, and turn out better movies. Which worked for more than three decades. Wisely, Vasan did not direct his movies himself, but hired good directors. He avoided mythology and preferred fantasy. He hired the very efficient American William J Moylan as studio executive (and Mrs Moylan superintended Vasan’s vast gardens). Until the ’60s, the ‘folklore and fantasy’ package . Vasan’s films dished out seemed to bring in big profits. But then audience tastes altered, subtly, and Gemini’s creations began to fail, one by one, to click with the masses.

In the end, what mattered was that Vasan did not much care for emotions, which the audiences loved. His films did contain titillation, they were forerunners to the multi-starrers. But Vasan lacked good story material, and when he died in 1969 he was an unhappy man.

Four years later his son Bala subramaniam delivered the coup de grace when he invested Rs 60 lakhs in the Tamil and Telugu remakes of that year’s Kannada money-spinner, Bhoothayana Maga Aiyyu. Although the locations and the script were faithful to the original, somewhere the magic was missing. Both films bombed at the box office, and Gemini suffered a mortal blow. All studio property was mortgaged to the banks, but things never improved. Two years back, Gemini Studios shut down. Today, all that remains of Vasan’s empire is the original distribution office, and a well- equipped colour laboratory. A

far cry from 1948, when Vasan spent Rs 35 lakhs on his black-and-white blockbuster Chandralekha.

THE boom in South Indian films overrode the decline of the big studios, for the star system moved in in a big way, bringing with it hundreds of young and ambitious producers and directors and unknown film stars. The field had been thrown wide open.

Malayalam films symbolised the boom at its best and its worst. Sudden- ly, hundreds of enterprising Keralites who had made pots of money in the Gulf began to produce movies. Over- night, the list of “other than regular” producers (i.e. new entrants) in the records of the South Indian Film Chamber of Commerce (SIFCC) soared. Only 43 Malayalam films had been produced in 1970. In 1973, the number jumped to 123. Sixty-eight of 112 Malayalam films released in 1979 were made by new entrants. Kozhal panam (Gulf money) had arrived.

The results were shattering. Malayalam films began to purvey stories that oozed sex, portrayed mushy love stories, and cost much more than they ought to have. The Kerala government added fuel to the fire by granting a subsidy of R$ 50,000 to every film-maker. (Later, alarmed at the deterioration in standards, the government restricted the subsidy to ‘quality’ films).

But the damage had been done: 47. of 112 Malayalam films released in 1979 carried ‘Adult’ certificates. And quantity was now all-important, not quality.

The only Malayalam film directors who managed to retain both quality and quantity were Bharatan and IV Sasi. Ironically. it was Sasi’s Avalude Ravakal (‘Her Nights’) which set off a rash of cheap, tawdry imitations (see Sasi interview). Says sometime assistant director and now self-appointed industry conscience SR Meenokshi Sundaran: “The new film-makers had access to easy money. They went in for glamour, stunts, sex-remakes of Tamil and Telugu films with base Hindi ingredients-layer upon layer of conflict, a love triangle, and a multitude of heroes, heroines and villains.” Today, Madras’s Arcot Road, Vadapalani, Mahalinga puram and Kodambakkam localities, a contiguous stretch, contain more than half of South Indian filmdom: more than 20,000 people inhabit this teeming tinsel city within a city. Apart from the big studios, there are dingy colonies housing the ‘industry’s untouchables’-stunt artistes, junior artistes (a polite name for extras), cleaning women, make-up and costume assistants, and so forth. Clusters of little shacks manufacture film-set ingredients like tinsel, paper flowers, electric fittings, art deco, and house a profusion of tinkers, welders, machinemen.

Close to three-fourths of these people are members of the Film Employees’ Federation of South India (FEFSI), which forms the southern chapter of the All India Film Employees’ Confederation (AIFEC).

Slave wages Two factors have hit these people where it hurts: new film-makers’ preference for outdoor shooting, and an astounding rise in colour films (35 per cent more colour films were shot last year than in 1979). Black-and-white laboratory workers and studio workers have suffered un- employment and lay-offs. But the biggest culprits appear to be the out- door unit employers, whose men, until last year, were not even recognised as bona fide employees, and were paid measly daily ‘baatas’ of Rs 5. A stark situation compounded by the fact that labour costs in Madras are. anyway one-third those in Bombay.

Today, prodded by men like MB Srinivasan, 19 of the 22 recognised craft unions are affiliated to the FEF- SI, and the battle is on to obtain better wages and treatment for their members.

“Wages in the Madras film industry can be as low as Rs 3 a day for an eight-hour call-sheet,” says Srinivasan. “These people earn an average of Rs 75 or Rs 100 a month. Is this fair? Only by sudden collective action cam we hope to get what people deserve. And our problems are compounded by the fact that Madras is such a multi-lingual centre.”

Multi-lingual is right. Last year, Madras turned out movies in 11 languages (which, apart from the four main South Indian languages, were Hindi, English, Gujarati, Konkani, Urdu, Badaga and Oriya).

Meenokshi Sundaran disagrees with Srinivasan. He is proud that the Film Directors’ Council (set up in 1976) has stemmed the breakdown of commercial cinema. The directors feel that trade unionists and dishonest producers had begun to destroy the industry. (Today, they are on top again, but that is. because the star system was nothing more than a temporary aberration).

“A production assistant earns as much as Rs 30 a day, an assistant director as much as Rs 500 a month,” says Sundaran. “You can’t compare Hindi and Tamil rates. Our area is limited, our net collections are far lower. Sets are costly, and an average colour film costs Rs 35 lakhs to make.”

Sundaran omits mentioning, however, that even a new director gets as much as Rs 10.000 for a film, and matinee idols like Rajnikant command as much as Rs 10 lakhs per film. And Madras’s second and third-tier `film employees are not covered by labour laws, enjoy little protection, and are penniless when they retire.

THE post-1973 boom in film- making in Madras has inevitably brought about a quantum leap in film technology. Today, Madras is perhaps the best place in which to produce a movie east of Suez. It has the largest number of studio floors (Vauhini, for instance, covers 62 acres and has 30 floors). Prasad Film Laboratories possess very good colour processing and animation facilities, and AVM owns excellent recording and dubbing equipment.

Prasad Film Laboratories represents the biggest and the best in this new technology Begun five years back, it can process as many as -four films a week-in any language. More than Rs 2.5 crores have been sunk in the venture so far. It is managed by LV Prasad’s son, A Ramesh, and has over 250 employees on its rolls. The entire complex is housed in a huge, sprawling area off Arcot Road.

Aided by the most modern ‘liquid- gate’ modular printers that are fed by a bank of microprocessors, Prasad Labs’ list . of facilities is long and impressive. Colour prints can be made in one-fourth the time they take in Bombay, positives can be checked at high speeds for defects, and sensitometric strips plot graphs on which colour quality is constantly monitored. The facility that is going to propel Prasad Labs far beyond its competitors, however is a 70mm processing facility, outside London and Hollywood the best in the world. A liquidate optical printer with an Acme camera will enable enlargement of 35mm and Cinemascope prints to 70mm.

Not only that. Prasad Labs will couple this facility (scheduled to go on-stream in May) with superb 24- channel, 6-track stereophonic recording, the best in India. Already, Prasad Labs have done a test reel of Man-mohan Desai’s Naseeb two months back, and Desai was reportedly de- lighted with the results. All of which means that a 70mm movie will cost much less than before. And once again, Madras will have helped India leapfrog into the high-tech movie era.

Meanwhile, the industry has been taken over by a lot of brash, talented and aggressive younger directors, who turn out movies at a speed that would leave Satyajit Ray speechless and manage to retain sufficient quality as far as the audiences are concerned. In Tamil, Bharatiraaja has made seven films in three years, and will have four more released before June. Bhagyaraja has done three films in a year, and Durai has made 12 films in less than two years. In Telugu, Bapu has made 20 films in five years, and K Vishwanath an equal number in double the time. And Malayalam cinema’s enfant terrible IV Sasi has made 44 films in four years: five in Tamil, 37 in Malayalam, one in Telugu and one in Hindi.

But the best indication that new faces do not mean hit films comes from the fact that Malayalam films, which were booming in the late .70s, are today subdued again. Thirty-one Malayalam films less were made in 1980 than in 1979, and one sees less of the “sexy-sweaty” quickies that were once churned out. Nevertheless, 67 per cent of last year’s 474 South Indian films were made by new producers.

New faces do click astoundingly sometimes. One film running for the 44th week last fortnight in Madras was Oru Thalai Ragam. Directed by new- comer EM Ibrahim, all its stars and many of its technicians are strangers to the industry. Yet the story — a young unmarried girl living under the shadow of her mother’s unhappy past, unable to express her love for a young man she meets-is identified with by its middle-class viewers, and it is busting blocks.

Films like this one symbolise the intense creativity and the contradictions that the South Indian film industry is growing up with. Centred around Madras, the industry has developed from a wild adolescence into confident maturity while its older Bombay cousin has already entered a gross menopause. Madras has travelled a long, long way from 1921, when R Prakash made the first South Indian silent film after a short apprenticeship under Cecil B DeMille in Hollywood. Today, Madras could teach Hollywood quite a few things.