Encounters at the Margins of Hollywood: Casting and Location Shooting for Bhowani Junction

After World War II, changes in film production finance encouraged US studios to take advantage of foreign financial incentives and locations. Bhowani Junction (1956) typifies many of these runaway productions, but an explanation of its financial logic provides only a US-centric perspective, failing to account for Hollywood’s increasingly global position. Archival material provides the basis for interrogating Bhowani Junction’s casting practices, textual ideology, and the impact of its location shooting in Pakistan. The confluence of production practices, policy, and aesthetics generates encounters that position Pakistani workers and actors at the margins of production, primarily as extras within the cast of thousands.