‘New Bollywood’ and the emergence of a ‘Production House’ culture

Abstract

This article focuses on the current phase in the Hindi Film Industry in Bombay which is characterized by a new corporate logic coming into play since 2000 that looks at a film as a product, and then goes about packaging it, branding it and presenting it to a predetermined audience. This shift is characteristic of the processes of the mainstream film industry with the onset of corporate-run Production Houses (It is a conscious decision on my part to use the term ‘Production House’ and not Studios.) that came about with the transition of the Hindi film industry from an unorganized industry to that of a corporatized body after being accorded Industry status in 1998 (‘Film Accorded Industry Status’, Business Line, October 19, 2000 http://www.indiaserver.com/businessline/2000/10/19/stories/141918re.htm). I am using the term ‘Production House/s’ despite the fact that film companies use the term Studio in their nomenclature, because unlike the Studios in the early Indian cinema landscape, these are multinational corporations that have an entirely different logic of film production and labour. This logic is what I attempt to discuss in this article. The methodology I have used for arriving at my understanding of how this Production House culture works is informed by ethnographic techniques of qualitative interviews with people working in the Hindi Film Industry in different capacities, participant observation on locations and sets, and using the technique of observing a day-in-the-life of an industry professional at work.

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