Secrets of film writing

From Xerox to Canon and finally to ABN Amro bank, Tyagi, an MBA, hopscotched through corporate life with dreams of writing stories, but little time in between deadlines and a mortgage. ‘‘When you come from a conservative family, films are the last thing they’ll let you do. But destiny always has a different plan,’’ says the 35-year-old Delhiite.

For decades, writers only rolled up in the credits and CD coverlets. Today, as the stories walk from HIV to a cross-border love affair, and multiplexes with triple-flavoured popcorn conquer single-screen cinema halls, writers’ bios have changed. Take a look at the people behind forthcoming films, and you’ll find few FTII grads.

Tyagi finally made it to Mumbai for keeps in 2002, with a new job and a swish Rs 10 lakh deal, plus car and housing. With the insurance policy of a corporate job, he did the rounds. ‘‘It was very frustrating. I’d find a number from somewhere, go meet them and eventually, nothing would work out.” That was before he met Bhandarkar. Their association first produced the critically-acclaimed Satta in 2003.

Corporate workhorses and engineers, it seems then, are turning in their suits for cinema. Take folks such as 26-year-old Anshuman Sinha, an engineer from Delhi, who’s writing for Ram Gopal Varma. Sinha, a lanky six-footer with wild hair and a trademark bandanna, even spent a semester at the National Defence Academy before walking out.

‘‘I’ve never really stuck to anything as much as I have to writing,’’ he says. Sinha’s days work back to front. With three deals in the bag with various producers, he sits up every night from 10 pm to 6 am, writing and rewriting. His girlfriend gingerly fits into a 7 pm to 9 pm slot—after meetings and before the scripts call for attention.

Or 25-year-old Mumbaikar Akarsh Khurana, who used to make a living as a marketing executive for Columbia Tristar before he joined Rakesh Roshan as a co-writer for the sequel to Koi Mil Gaya, or Sridhar Raghavan, a former journalist, who’s writing three films for Rajkumar Santoshi.

Thirty-five-year-old Raghavan, a Pune native, has been flexing his literary hand since turning journalist at 19. Of his earliest scripts, one was the story of a young gangster obsessed with Amitabh Bachchan, another was about an old man who gets tired of life in Mumbai. ‘‘Suffice to say, I couldn’t find producers for either of those brilliant ideas,’’ he remembers. Many tales later, after giving up journalism for TV production, this former crime writer found a director who was looking to make a police drama—Khakee.

‘‘We now have writers who lend authenticity to the scenarios they write about. The different backgrounds and experiences are giving the films a little more flavour, as opposed to technically perfect films with no soul,’’ says Bhandarkar.

Take 36-year-old Raoul V Randolf. The marketing graduate has some five scripts in the offing—Sachins’ 11 explores a boy’s passion for cricket, while Maya, The Illusion is a narrative about a film director torn between commercial and art cinema.

Randolf is the classic upstart. He’s got the sound bytes: ‘‘I write small, big films.’’ And he’s studied the pitch, combined with a certain flair for direction—a quality which will come in handy when he finally gets behind the camera for his “magnum opus’’. ‘‘This a great time to be writing, if you have good narrative skills,’’ he says. His own have taken at least three scripts closer to production and secured a commissioned project with Ashutosh Gowariker; besides, Maya will star his dream lead Irrfan Khan.

As a starting film-maker, Randolf has been through the grind of cold calls to secure producers. ‘‘If Sachin (Tendulkar) read this and came forward to do a cameo, my film would get made tomorrow,’’ he says. And in an industry which infamously works on recommendations, and where everyone’s a someone of a someone else, Randolf says his brazen marketing skills helped him get his work read. ‘‘My trick is once I get their attention, I sit them down and make them read the script. Sometimes it’ll take two hours, and you’ve got to impress the secretaries as well if you want it to happen.’’ Why give up a nine-to-five, then? Because, says Randolf, at his poetic best, film-making is ‘‘a passion, an incurable disease’’.

Varma’s The Factory and Bhandarkar’s productions are usual targets for upcoming film-makers with nothing more than a story to go on. ‘‘Every day, I get calls and SMSes from some 20 writers, wanting to work with me. I couldn’t possibly talk to all of them,’’ says Bhandarkar. And, on any given day of the week, 60-odd scripts are registered with the Mumbai-based Film Writers’ Association. But, even among the unapologetically commercial companies like Yash Raj, the cast of writers have taken a sharp left.

Over the last four years, Jaideep Sahni, 35, has been on a very successful career trajectory in Tinseltown—with credits from Jungle and Company for Varma to Yash Raj’s Bunty Aur Babli and Khosla Ka Ghosla, with Anupam Kher and Boman Irani.

The Delhi-born writer was a computer programmer and marketing man for NIIT, before relegating science to a hobby. He joined Contract advertising and finished up five years later as assistant creative head before breaking off on his own. He turned lyricist after jam sessions with Euphoria’s Palash Sen, and writer after discovering the screenplay for Gandhi in a New Delhi bookshop at 27.

Sahni calls scriptwriting a programmer’s dream: ‘‘A script is like a program, it gives you the framework towards an eventuality.’’ He scrawls flow charts and connectors on notepads and admits having a seriously low threshold for boredom.

The one-time communications consultant has just wound up the lyrics for another Yash Raj feature, Salaam Namaste. But going on pure facts, there’s no telling where the man will be next year. ‘‘After life imprisonment, a career is the worst punishment you can give a human being,’’ he says of his reasons for chucking stability at every turn.

There’s no airy-fairy discourse on inspiration here; deadlines demand output and output demands an audience with your desktop. ‘‘I only get activated about 48 hours before a deadline, and then I’m on a roll,’’ says the man who taught himself to screenwrite from downloads and books.

It’s not an education that works for everyone. And in times when every parent dreams of IIM and a newsworthy recruitment package for their kid, casting the golden parachute aside doesn’t make sense to most people. But then, says Tyagi, ‘‘it can be a nightmare if you’re constantly wishing you were doing something else.’’

So, from a narrative set in the business world to one about the travails of a middle-class family trying to outwit the mafia, the stories on schedule are getting more eclectic than the people writing them.

For disillusioned bankers: Imagine, if you will, an iMac, Yanni in the background, MovieMagic Screenwriter in the window. Scene 1, the cursor blinks on the first line… roll credits, fade to black. As Sahni says, ‘‘It’s not rocket science.’’