TN film industry edits TV crews out of its functions

EXPRESS NEWS SERVICE

CHENNAI, JANUARY 7: After helplessly watching box office collections slide to bottom, the Tamil Nadu film industry has decided to fight back. It has announced a boycott of the small screen which it holds responsible for its current plight.

From now on, it has resolved, it won’t allow TV channels to cover film poojas, audio cassette releases, 100th day celebrations and art and film functions.

The Tamil Nadu Film Distributors’ Federation, TN Directors’ Association, Theatre Owners’ Association and Artistes’ Association have jointly floated the Tamil Film Industry Federation on December 31 last and passed many resolutions to save the ‘‘dream industry’’.

Sun TV officials declined to comment on the issue as its chairman and managing director Kalanidhi Maran is abroad. Star Vijay Head of Programming Suresh Iyer said the small screen provided a great opportunity for filmmakers to promote their products. At the same time, he said, ‘‘this latest move will not affect our business as our programmes are not film-based.’’

The film industry has also decided to restrict trailers to a mere three minutes, including song sequences, and to distribute the same trailer to all channels.

‘‘People have lost the urge to go to theatres after too much exposure to satellite channels. This has cut down our sales throughout the state,’’ said TN Film Distributors Federation president L. Suresh.

Ticket sales have gone down by 50 per cent in the past few months after the introduction of KTV by Sun Network, he said.

Even on festivals, collections don’t go up anymore as the average cinema-goer prefers to watch TV instead of pushing and shoving at theatre ticket counters. ‘‘Shankar’s film are famous for songs, Vijayakanth’s for stunts and Prabhudeva’s for dances. If all these are repeated on all the channels, the average cinema fan loses interest in going for movies,’’ producer-director Chitra Lakshmanan said.

However, these restrictions would be on a trial basis for a period of one year and would be reviewed. The federation also restricted cine artistes from giving interviews to TV channels. So far the industry has stood together in this crusade with not one artist breaching the ban.

Industry people have another grouse against the small screen which they say is making money mainly through film-related programmes.
For example, on one satellite channel, of all the Diwali releases, the Vijayakant starrer Thavasi was right on top followed by Kamal Haasan’s Alavandhan, Balachander’s Paarthale Paravasam, Vijay’s Shahjahan and Surya’s Nandha.

So, another resolution by the federation urged the channels to rank movies based on their crowd-pulling capacity alone.