What works in bollywood

* A shoot in the South of France for a romantic duet? Not an option if it is for Shahid Kapoor; can be considered if it is for Saif Ali Khan; and a sure-shot yes if it is for Salman Khan.

* A small-budget film with “sex” in its title,unknown actors in the cast and Dibakar Banerjee as the director? Take a risk. Spend as much as you can on marketing,even if it exceeds the production cost.

* A star with ridiculously high fee? Promote him more than his film. When the audience rushes to the theatre,giving the movie a 100 per cent opening,he will thank you for the stupendous marketing you’ve done. At that precise moment,dangle a multi-film deal before the hero and he will,to your utter delight,reduce his fee per film.

These are the unwritten rules of Bollywood. In its movies,anything goes — there will be incessant rain in Las Vegas,reincarnated heroes will mouth lines from previous lives and resplendent heroines decked in Spanish skirts and scarlet flowers will nurse a handsome quadriplegic with a death wish — but when it comes to finances,Bollywood has become smarter. Its pin-striped set — CEOs of its big production companies — lets on how they made money out of the outlier movie of the year,Love Sex Aur Dhoka,and why they didn’t get the jitters even when Kites went adrift somewhere on the US-Mexico border.

The youngest Bollywood CEO who matters at the moment is Dhilin Mehta: his company,Shree Ashtavinayak Cine Vision,has delivered the year’s biggest hit,Dabangg. Dwarfed by a gigantic Salman Khan cutout propped behind his desk,the 28-year-old gives the first principle of Bollywood: “A foreign location can be justified only for A-listers like Salman.” Shahid,for one,wouldn’t go with New York or Newfoundland.

“If a director wants Shahid in his film and insists it be shot in the US,our production director will tell him that a foreign location can’t be agreed on unless Shah Rukh Khan or Salman is in it,” says Dhilin of the “permutations and combinations” that happen behind the scenes. “If the director is unrelenting,our marketing director will bring to the table the amount recovered from Shahid in the past and compare it with the recovery amount of Salman. Then the director is given an option: choose between Shahid and a foreign location. We wouldn’t make a Rs 70 crore film with a B-grade actor.”

That is why you saw Shahid dancing in the fields of Bathinda and on the roads of Manali in Dhilin’s Jab We Met. “While discussing Jab We Met,the board of directors of the company and the director (Imtiaz Ali) said the film should be shot with a big actor in a foreign location. Then we looked at the script again and thought this was a simple story that could be shot anywhere in India,” says Dhilin about the sleeper hit of 2007. “There was no need to go to a foreign location that would require a big star. So we clubbed Shahid with India and made the film.”

In old Bollywood,the rule was: creativity is divine,time and money be damned. In new Bollywood it is: stick to budgets and timelines and don’t go overboard with creativity. Apoorva Mehta,CEO of Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions,says,“A CEO must learn to marry the old values with the new.” The 38-year-old is Johar’s childhood friend,but it was the MBA from London’s Cass Business School that got him the job at Dharma. Having spent five years there,he has learnt to separate the big Khans from the rest: “We have four Khans who are ruling the roost. You can’t make a big-budget film with a lesser actor where the money would be almost impossible to recover. You can’t make Dev.D on a Rs 80 crore budget. I didn’t make I Hate Luv Storys on such a budget either as the kind of actors in it wouldn’t justify the scale,” he says. This year,they had Shah Rukh’s My Name is Khan followed by Imran’s I Hate Luv Storys.

After actors comes marketing. “Marketing can make or break a film,” says Apoorva. “You might have the best film in hand but if you are not able to get the audience excited about it,you are not going to get your weekend. Our industry,like Hollywood,has become a weekend business. The first two weekends account for 80 per cent of box-office revenue.” Marketing budgets have gone up tremendously,with companies such as UTV Motion Pictures spending up to 40 per cent of a film’s total budget on marketing. Siddharth Roy Kapur,the 36-year-old CEO of UTV Motion Pictures,says,“I wear two hats — creative and commercial,” he says,“and the trick is to wear them simultaneously. If you wear only the creative hat,your film could exceed the budget and become indulgent. If you wear only the commercial hat,you might get into a situation where a lot of creative inputs get pushed aside.”

A film is marketed according to its theme and the target audience. So UTV has released the trailer of Raj Kumar Gupta’s No One Killed Jessica on YouTube as it is aimed at a young multiplex crowd,while for Farah Khan’s Tees Maar Khan — which Kapur says is a “film for the masses,which can be watched by an Indian between the age of four and 70” — Katrina Kaif was made to gyrate on Juhu beach.

Hindi film industry got its outre movie in Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex Aur Dhoka. It bent all of Bollywood’s rules: it was digitally shot,had an unknown cast and dealt with a risque topic — voyeurism — with utter irreverence. Tanuj Garg,the 32-year-old CEO of Balaji Motion Pictures,says they went out on a limb there. “Not many people gave Love Sex Aur Dhoka a chance when it was being made. So we had to spend more money marketing than making it. Small films require that sort of marketing to stand out,” says Garg. It paid off.

But the big biz heads know the old Bollywood saying: nothing can predict your Friday fate. In late 2009,Blue,with Rs 120 crore riding on it,sank without a trace at the box office. So did Hrithik Roshan’s Kites and Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Guzaarish this year. The marketing honchos are now trying to “de-risk” the film: that is the new terminology to protect against box-office losses.

“We had sold the satellite broadcast rights of Blue before its release,like we do with most of our projects,and made a profit on it,” says Dhilin,adding that his production house recovers 80 to 100 per cent of production cost by selling broadcast rights in advance so that they are in the “profit zone in the first week itself”. Box-office revenues,he says,have shrunk along with the shelf life of a film. “The concept of ‘housefull’ doesn’t exist anymore,” he says. “The contribution of the box office to the overall revenue generated by a film has gone down.”

Shashank Jare,CEO of Rakesh Roshan’s company,Filmkraft,agrees: “The expiry date of a film is now Tuesday,due to the overwhelming number of screens and the menace of piracy. By Tuesday,you know whether your film is afloat or has sunk.” He had the dud of the year in Kites,but he says,“The film was sold lock,stock and barrel to Reliance after it was produced.”

UTV goes a step further and sells broadcast rights even before or while films are under production. They sold the broadcast rights of Guzaarish to Viacom 18,while it was still being shot. They have inked a similar deal for Tees Maar Khan. “Pre-release rights is a pretty old thing,but the concept of pre-production sales has evolved over the past few months,” says Kapur of UTV. “For 2011,we know the movies we are making and they are in various stages of production. When you know the line-up for 12 to 18 months,you can crack such deals.” Over the past 10 years,he says,the box-office share of a movie’s revenue has fallen from 80-90 per cent to 50-55 per cent. Satellite rights account for 25-30 per cent of revenue,overseas rights 8-10 per cent,music rights and home video rights 5 per cent each,and then there are other minor rights such as airline rights and cable rights. The future though is in the new media,he says: “3G and 4G are coming into play and we’d like to exploit them as possible revenue streams.”

There is just one more element that has to be managed: the star and his (it is still a he) astronomical fee. Star fee is negotiable,says Dhilin Mehta matter-of-factly,“Gone are the days when a film was signed over a drink. When an actor does three-four films with you,we build a business relationship and the actor charges less.” Quite often,the stars are lured strategically. Dhilin cites an example: “We had marketed Akshay Kumar’s Phir Hera Pheri. We promoted Akshay in such a way that there was a 100 per cent opening in the first week. Akshay was happy with us and signed three films,including Khatta Meetha and Blue,with us — and charged less. That’s what we call innovative marketing. Pull the actor towards you to ensure a future working relationship.”

by Irena Akbar with Priyanka Pereira