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>> 51 2 Staging Bollywood Industrial Identity in an Era of Reform In many respects, the filmic exemplar for Bollywood in a phase of transition is Rommy Rolly, one of the central protagonists in Luck by Chance (2009), a film that takes an affectionate and at times critical look at the workings of the film industry in Bombay. Written and directed by Zoya Akhtar, daughter of established screenwriter Honey Irani and acclaimed lyricist and screenwriter Javed Akhtar, the film revolves around the struggles of two young actors who arrive in Bombay with hopes of making it big in the film industry. Taking us behind the scenes of a film being produced by Rommy Rolly, a wellestablished producer-director, Akhtar offers glimpses of various aspects of Bombay’s film world: stardom and film journalism, disenchanted extras and choreographers, marginalized screenwriters, erratic production schedules, and so on. But above all, what the film captures is the way in which kinship and long-standing social relationships structure nearly every aspect of the film industry in Bombay. In fact, the answer to the question that Akhtar asks—how this industry of no contracts, no paperwork, inadequate technology , and limited equipment produces the largest number of films the world over, year after year—would likely be anything but “corporatization.”1 While one could point to several instances in the film that speak to the challenges and limits of corporatizing the Hindi film industry, scenes involving Rommy Rolly’s attempts to secure financing for himself and for his brother-in-law’s venture are particularly telling. Banking on his reputation of having produced a number of hit films, Rolly approaches a corporation that has recently entered the film business in Bombay. In a nondescript office, seated across a table from two executives, Rolly and his brother-in-law Satish Chowdhary make their pitch. Encouraged by the positive response from one of the executives, Chowdhary begins speaking: “That’s fantastic, thank you. And Rollyji must have mentioned that John and Bipasha have been confirmed and dates. . . .” Cutting him short, the younger of the two executives responds, tapping his fingers on the script in front of him: “And we’re happy. But our basic criteria is this property.” 52 > 53 for the Next Act—as indexing a complicated and evolving terrain of media production, one marked as much by unpredictability as by a sense of certainty regarding the “next act.” Drawing on panel discussions, various artifacts circulating at the convention , and trade-press coverage of the convention and this period of transition , my goal here is to complicate the official narrative in which the notion of an interval is understood as constituting nothing more than an interruption and, more crucially, that the “next act” was readily imaginable. Focusing attention on this moment of celebration opens up an opportunity to consider the entire decade—from 1998, when the government granted industry status to filmmaking in Bombay, until 2009—as a formative interval. The interval, in other words, is not just an arbitrary break in a neat and linear narrative of progress toward a seamless integration into the logics of global capital. As Lalitha Gopalan has argued, where Indian cinema is concerned the interval “lies at the bedrock of our comprehension of the structuring of narrative expectation, development and closure . . . at times exceeding the intentions of the filmmakers whose rational choice of the interval may be one among several ways to read the film.”2 I build on this theorization of the interval to draw attention to novel responses and adaptations that shape an industry in transition. I show that the result of a decade of corporatization has been the emergence of a hybrid terrain of media production characterized by family businesses reformulating their industrial identities to meet the demands of new circuits of capital as well as a range of media corporations that have entered the film business only to find themselves contending with the limits of corporate logics in the Bombay film industry. But understanding how the discourse of corporatization has played out in Bombay requires us to go well beyond the issue of emerging models and relations of film production, marketing, distribution, and exhibition. Thus, in tracing the ways in which a range of industry professionals speak of this period of transition, I also draw attention to the construction of industrial identity as a crucial and defining aspect of corporatization. John Caldwell, for instance, has shown us how industrial identity practices (branding, syndication , franchising, and so on) are...

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