Here’s a  piece I did for the March 9, 2007 issue of India Abroad.  

If you live in the United States and are not Indian, but you have nonetheless become enamored of Bollywood movies, you’re able to get your fix one way or another.   If you live in or near an urban area, likely there is at least one Indian neighborhood with DVD stores and maybe even a cinema screening Hindi movies.   Even if you live further afield, say in the pristine countryside of rural Maine or wide open Montana, thanks to Netflix, you can feed that hunger with fresh red envelope arrivals every few days.   Moreover, anyone with a good Internet connection and a decent ability to do a Google search can enhance their film-viewing experience by trolling for gossip or cinematic scholarship or even like-minded companionship in discussion groups.

We know there are others out there like ourselves, but I began to wonder, do the people at Yash Raj pictures or the local Indian cinema know we exist and do they care?   Do they want our dollars and our eyeballs and those of others like us?

Or is it not necessary to court the firangi flock, when you are in the largest movie industry in the world with a population of one billion possible consumers plus the diaspora population in everywhere from Iceland to Ireland, and the big pockets of desis in the Middle East, UK and US as well?

Moreover, is it right or wrong to want to?   Does a filmmaker too anxious for a phoren audience run the risk of being called a disloyal sellout?

Some, like Amitabh Bachchan, while he is gracious when accepting the French legion d’honneur and will say he is touched by these demonstrations of appreciation, will also say, in essence, why do we need to obsess ourselves with crossing over and winning Academy Awards, when we are different from them and we should only worry about pleasing ourselves and if the rest follow, then fine.

With all of these questions and more, I set off to find out what’s the situation right now and what are the attitudes of those involved in the business.   I’ll caution you up front that numbers are not easy to find, when looking for the non-Indian segment of the Bollywood moviegoing population.

I chatted briefly with Steve Swesey, the Director of Corporate Communications at Netflix, and he told me “We don’t dice subscriber information by race or ethnicity, but of the 1.5 million DVDs that Netflix ships daily (that’s some 35,000 to 40,000 titles), six percent of those are foreign films.”   And no, out of that six percent, it wasn’t possible for him to give me a breakdown of how many are Indian films slipping into the nation’s mailboxes every day but Sunday.

On a much smaller scale, I asked my own local Indian DVD rental guy what percentage of his customers who come in for Woh Lamhe and the Filmfare awards don’t have bloodlines to the desh and, aside from me, and one other women I ran into by accident one Saturday last year – both of us equally astounded to see the other – I learned that that’s it, no more.

Gitesh Pandya, the editor of BoxOfficeGuru.com and a media consultant to several film distributors, said “It does seem that Bollywood films in the last couple of years have slowly been reaching a non-desi audience in the US.   It’s still primarily South Asians who fill the theaters, but I’ve noticed many people of other backgrounds taking interest in Bollywood cinema and curious to know more.   There is a tremendous audience of foreign film lovers in the US, and India makes some terrifically entertaining films, so there is an immense amount of untapped potential.   I work with American film journalists all the time and most are eager to know more about Bollywood.”

“In order to effectively tap into this American market,” he continued, “Indian companies need to improve their marketing and distribution efforts.  This is hard because film producers in India are afraid of piracy and do not send prints to the US early enough to hold press screenings a week in advance of the release.   More American press would cover Bollywood films if they could see them earlier and not just a day or two before the opening day.”

In terms of box office, Pandya says “Bollywood films now routinely gross more in North America than in the UK which marks a major shift in which Western market is more lucrative.   I see the North American market getting even bigger in the near-term, as long as quality films keep getting made.”

Lokesh Dhar, who is in charge of UTV’s North America and U.K. Operations, admits that at present, 98 to 99 percent of the population at Hindi movies in the U.S. is South Asian, and “our main objective now is to grow the audience that we have.”   In order to expand that market share to non-Indians, Dhar says “What we would need to do first is create content that is more appealing to a larger audience, but directors don’t have to abandon what they’re good at, and second, the challenge is the distribution.   That is prohibitive in cost.   Today what we spend is nothing compared to what we have to spend to reach out to the mainstream audience.   There is a huge amount of risk involved which you take if you feel there is potential, which I think there is in the U.K. with Metro.”   Dhar was in London to work on UTV’s release of the post-Big Brother, Shilpa Shetty starrer.

When asked if he saw any upcoming films in 2007 with that potential in the U.S. he mentioned Jodha-Akbar, Ashutosh Gowriker’s historical movie starring Hrithik Roshan and Aishwarya Rai, due for release on October 12.   “But,” he added, “it’s also up to the distributors and how they feel about it and how they want to market it.”

With regard to the theater manager’s take on the matter, I asked Dylan Marchetti, the Director of Theatrical Acquisitions & Programming at ImaginAsian Entertainment, and also the man who oversees the ImaginAsian cinema in Manhattan, what he thought about the current system, especially given his perspective, since his theater screens a variety of Asian movies, not solely Bollywood films.   He said:   “I think filmmakers in general think of their films as global in nature, and not just for Indian audiences.  I think they know adding too many Western sensibilities would dilute what makes Indian films so special, and so instead they’ve honed and polished their craft. An Indian film looks and sounds just as good, and often better, than American films with much bigger budgets.  The distributors have begun to reach out as well.   Now you see reviews of the latest Indian film in places like The New York Times and Village Voice, where before they wouldn’t bother.  Most Indian films still aren’t actively marketed to non-Indians, but that’s beginning to change.  However, Krrish was a great example of a crossover film:   it took the masala of Indian cinema and mixed it with East Asian action, to great success.  And KANK, in telling the story of four Indian-Americans, made New York a real character in the film, rather than just a backdrop.”

Marchetti continues: “I think the biggest difference, distribution-wise, is that Indian films are released day-and-date, usually by Indian distributors who have set up shop in North America, rather than months or years after the original release, which we see with most films from other countries.  It’s very smart: it removes the issue of piracy and DVD importing, and also ensures the American release capitalizes on the buzz and marketing for the Indian release.  Filmmaker-wise, again, I don’t see much difference between Indian directors and, say, Hong Kong directors. They’re out to make the best film they can, and if it catches on globally (as most good films will), even better.”

With regard to marketing, Marchetti explains his company’s philosophy and theater’s approach:   “One of the founding principles behind ImaginAsian Entertainment has always been to take Asian and Asian American content and bring it to all audiences: Asian or not.  And we certainly follow that ethos at the theater.  We market the Indian films we play to our very diverse audience; if we’re playing a Japanese film one week, and an Indian film next week, everyone that comes to see the Japanese film is going to see a preview for the Indian film.  And we send our theater street team out with fliers and promo materials, which we create and target for English-speaking audiences, to cover the city.  We also run promos and information about the film on our national cable television network, whose viewers are often non-Asian, to raise awareness of the titles.  Most times we do this hand-in-hand with the distributors, who know the value of the exposure to new audiences we’re bring to their films.”

According to Marchetti, the strategy has borne fruit: “We’ve had great success marketing to non-Indian audiences at the theater, and the audience is definitely growing.  I like to visit the theater and talk to crowds after the movie, and increasingly I’m seeing non-Indian couples come up to me and say “˜This was my first Indian film, and I’m hooked!  When are you showing another one?’. They’re always delighted when I tell them that we usually show two or three per month- audiences that love foreign films know that for most countries, Asian or European, there’s often only one or two films from that country released in a year, whereas there are dozens of Indian films per year.”

When in New York mid-February, Karan Johar attended a screening of his controversial, and financially successful, 2006 release Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna to a group of New York University film students.   The event, the second Hindi movie one of its kind in less than a year, had been orchestrated by Professor Richard Allen, the Chair of Cinema Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.   In spring 2006, Allen was the man behind a four-day conference at the university on The Social and Material Life of Indian Cinema.

At the question and answer period after Kabhi Alvida, it was evident that Allen is smitten with Karan Johar’s work.   When asked about what he thought was the potential for mainstream Hindi movies to appeal more broadly to an American audience, he said: “All this talk of crossover.   I don’t really understand it, because what appeals to me about Bollywood film is precisely what does not easily cross over: the melodramatic idioms I was talking with Karan about (these belong more to Hollywood of the 50s), the lack of narrative economy (Bollywood films are “baggy”, they are consumed more like a Broadway show than a film), the song sequences (song is a central idiom of Bollywood films), the “inflation” of stars (again, Bollywood is a star cinema more like classic Hollywood than contemporary Hollywood which is more “character acting” driven). These are, to me, the four main reasons for lack of crossover. So directors aspiring to crossover begin to abandon these idioms.”

Allen explained:   “Karan told me he was making a film without songs and no more than two and half hours (and probably it won’t involve stars). The result will be a film that looks a lot less like a film made in the traditional Hindi film idiom.  Of course directors have done this before.  Ray, Benegal and the so called middle cinema, some of which “crossed-over” – Ray especially – but not to a popular audience.  And I think if Bollywood films do cross over, they will end up doing so in the same way….that is, they will address a niche middle class art cinema crowd.   There is an interest among some students but as you saw at this event, the audience was mostly South Asian.”

Karan Johar is quick to state “I’m definitely not targeting a non-Asian audience.   I’m hoping that happens in the course of word of mouth.   We’ve definitely been going from strength to strength in the last five years.   I do understand our format is very different. We have songs and dances, which is more dramatic than usual, we have an interval at the half mark, which enters the narrative where we slow down and start again.   We format our structure completely different from the way the West functions on celluloid.”

He expands:   “My sensibility is more urban, but I definitely target an Asian audience, but they could be anywhere in the world, they could live in Bombay or in New York; that is immaterial.   I’ve never been a filmmaker to target the non-Asian audience.   Everything that’s been happening outside of the Asian parameter has truly been not only a blessing in disguise, but also icing on the cake.”

When asked about his take on Indian films ending up in less than perfect theaters across the U.S., Johar said: “I think we haven’t been able to penetrate a theatrical chain in North America.   It’s possibly the only part of the world where we are lagging in that department.   I think there’s such a flow of films that Hollywood has, with the studio system prevalent, that we really are very low on their priority list and I can understand that.   We get absolutely no screen in the main chains and it’s a real struggle.   New York was a struggle but finally we managed that.”

He continues:   “In the United Kingdom we play at the huge chains at the Odeon chain, at West End cinemas, and every English mainstream chain carries an Indian film, that’s not the same scenario in North America.   We hoping to achieve that in time to come, we’re hoping we make a big impact and a bigger noise about our cinema so we find a base in the international distribution chain and theatrical network in North America because that’s where we’re really lagging, and I think that’s where we haven’t been able to penetrate in North American they way we would like to.   There’s a definite lack of knowledge vis-à-vis our cinema in this part of the world.”

In New York, we are continually knee-deep in all things Indian, and increasingly, also filmi.   The massive ABC Carpet & Home furniture emporium is hosting a month-long series of events devoted to Indian design, crafts, culture and spirituality.   One night in late February, Hesh Sarmalkar, actor and Director of Events for the Asia Society, gave a lecture on the subject of Bollywood: Then, Now and Beyond.   Sarmalkar found himself speaking before an audience that he estimated to be around 90 percent non-Indian, running the gamut from French and Italian people, to a “hip 25-year-old American.”   As he guided his group through the Lumiere Brothers and Phalke and Guru Dutt through to Sanjay Leela Bhansali and Karan Johar, he found them to be “respectful”, and familiar to the extent that when they saw a clip of Govinda and Sanjay Dutt in David Dhawan’s Haseena Maan Jayegi, one person commented “Oh, yes, this is Bollywood”, but many admitted “I have never seen these older movies!”

On the prospects of Hindi movie expansion beyond South Asian audiences in the U.S., Sarmalker reasons “Bollywood does need the overseas audience, with only one or two percent of films doing well each year.”   He does admit that the songs in movies, which are “culturally linked and become the soundtrack to people’s lives,” could prove problematic for some people.   “When you look at with non-Indian eyes,” he said, “they can interrupt.”

Anupama Chopra has a special place from where to consider the Hindi film industry.   Her mother is a scriptwriter, her sister a director, she herself has been a film journalist for over a decade, and if all that were not enough, she is married to Vidhu Vinod Chopra.   In addition to writing for India Today, she also writes about Bollywood for Variety and the New York Times.   I caught up with her on Academy Award Sunday in February and asked what she thought about the question of expansion beyond the South Asian audience.

“I don’t think there is any mainstream successful filmmaker in India who will dilute what he or she does to reach out to mainstream audiences in America,” Chopra said.   “Karan Johar he told me a great story about how Harvey Weinstein came here a few years ago.   He said “˜We all met and we all chatted and he didn’t call us and we didn’t call him because we don’t need them.’”   This is a completely functioning independent industry where directors are one-man-studios and they make movies which are watched by 3.6 billion people around the world, so are they going to kill themselves trying to appeal to an American audience? No.   They’re never going to risk alienating the Indian to talk to the American.”