Elizabeth comes home, courtesy a washing machine
KAVEREE BAMZAI

NEW DELHI, MARCH 3: What happens when India's biggest Hollywood expert has to pose next to a washing machine? And then his film, Elizabeth, to be released on March 10, is compared to golf, an inanimate sport; a musical, Evita; a Mercedes Benz, as well as a washing machine. Well, if you're Shekhar Kapur, who at one point was better known for the suiting he modelled, then you accept all this with fairly good grace.

Even when on Friday, Anand Bhardwaj, the Vice-President of Electrolux, the company which flew in Kapur, uses the premiere of the much-delayed film to carry on about the virtues of his company's products: ``We thought for programmes of a premium nature where the consumer is an urban, metropolitan lady, what better way than to associate with self-willed, determined women such as Queen Elizabeth and Eva Peron?''

Even if, like Reid & Taylor, which associated itself with The World Is Not Enough, you have to spend in the vicinity of Rs 4 crore to promote the film and launch your product line. As Aditya Khanna of Chanakya Theatre points out: ``James Bond is a generic name which even a Hindi audience can identify with. It's a signifier of having arrived in life.''

Which is why, says distributor Uday Kaushish, ``companies are waking up to the potential of associating with high profile films, which have already proved their worth abroad. They're getting a tested product.''

So whether it is Videocon putting in Rs 2 crore to promote Titanic in 1999 (which was passed up by Pepsi because they weren't too sure whether one of the biggest Hollywood grossers in India, at Rs 50 crore, would be successful) or BPL backing Toy Story in 1998 with Rs 2 crore of TV and print ads (not too successfully though because the film was a turkey), Hollywood has become the latest source of commercial piggyback riding in a cluttered media environment.

So it helps a brand like Electrolux, which is lesser known than its sister brands Kelvinator, Voltas, and Allwyn, to be associated with the soon-to-be-Dad Kapur, ``one of India's finest contemporary directors.'' Who happens to be working on five films simultaneously -- Anant Singh's Mandela, Phantom of the Opera with Andrew Lloyd Webber which might cast Antonio Banderas as Phantom and Ricky Martin as well as Leonardo Di Caprio, the sci-fi Isaac Asimov trilogy for Fox, and the Dreamworks' Air Pirates ``which I call The Last Buffalo Hunt and others call Lady of the Clouds''.

But the film he is most likely to start in Morocco in July is a Paramount-Miramax co-production, Four Feathers, starring the hot, hot, hot Jude Law. He's also working with Lloyd Webber on a musical Bombay Dreams which will be set in the city's slums and will have music by A R Rahman.

Kapur agreed that he hadn't really changed his stand on censorship, it's just that ``the two cuts, one of the word quinny, and the other of a love-making scene,'' hadn't really made any difference to the final film. ``I fought tooth and nail till the tribunal was set up. After that, I could do nothing.''

Copyright © 2000 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.