Bollywood and Scriptwriters

Its been almost 8 months since the writers strike in the US and it has literally brought the entertainment industry to a halt.It has resulted in one award event reduced to being a mere announcement and threatened to stop the giant cog of televised soaps and movies. Whats most interesting to me is how much power and sway the writers guild holds over the big studios and how all the big actors have shown solidarity with them. Can you imagine the same situation in India or Bollywood? I doubt there is even a guild, much less a suffrage movement for better pay. And that for me is one of the key reasons why Bollywood continues to snitch ideas off popular hollywood fare and still regarded as its poor cousin , that makes exotic song and dance dramas.

A movie or a film is nothing but a visual representation of a good screenplay which in turn is derived from a worthy script. Whats perplexing and mindboggling for a moviegoer is that an industry as big as bollywood does not give the due to its scriptwriters. More than half the movies go on floor without a finished script , half of them without a script. And theres only so much creativity you can experience on the spur of the moment. We often hear actors blowing the trumpet of having bagged an AUTHOR backed role. Yeah well this Author has been perhaps the most neglected feature of bollywood , marginally faring better than the spotboys themselves. Of course there are exceptions , I can already hear some of you say Salim-Javed , the golden combo that shaped the phenomenon called Big B(angry young man) but does any other name come to mind? No , yup thats the difference. There they take 1 year, erhaps more haggling for the right script , here we take the same amount of time to haggle for star dates. They demand higher wages , here they demand wages , sometimes out of misery even a token compensation.

The fact is that as we celebrate bollywood going Global and try to find out new markets in the quest of more money ,recognition and fame, there is also the danger that all of our “Inspirations” are going to be discovered and bollywood exposed for what it has sadly become , a recycling unit of movies. And industry that does not give the writers its due is doomed for sure , if not today then tomorrow. With the advent of professional business houses entering the entertainment market , I hope they invest in good scripts rather than trying to fool the viewer with the same star face in varieties of an”Inspired movie”. After all there are only so many times one can see King Khan raise his arms in front of the alps and still be swept away.

The Motorcycle Diaries

yup i watched it today. Awesome in every sense of the word. Quite a break from all that razzmatazz slick action and slapstick comedies that have been thrown at us all through the summer of 2007. There’s an old world charm about the movie. Its 2 central characters just put their lives on hold and take off on trans-continental ride through South America , to experience and feel the world around them. Its this theme of the movie that appeals to every person’s dream of just taking off on an adventure away from the city life to one of self discovery. The narrator of the movie Ernesto Guevara who also wrote the motorcycle diaries touches upon the various problems that plagued South America in 1951(year of the trip). He makes the trip with his 29 yr old friend Alberto Granado, a biochemist whom ernesto jokingly refers to as the Sexual Ambassador of Argentina due to his dream of banging a girl of every nation they cross en-route to the final destination.

Guevara and the 29-year-old Granado set off from their hometown of Alta Gracia astride a 1939 Norton 500 cc motorcycle they named La Poderosa II (”The Mighty One, the Second”) with the idea of spending a few weeks volunteering at the San Pablo Leper Colony in Peru on the banks of the Amazon River.

There are quite a few moving scenes in the movie , one of them being an encounter with a couple who had been stripped off their lands and were hoping to find work in a Mine Company (a hell hole in those days). Ernesto gives them the only money they had on them , the money given to him by his girlfriend to buy her something , the money which he had refused to part with against all odds even when he was laid down with high fever.

Many facets of ernesto’s character are laid before us in the movie. He’s shown to be extremely honest , idealistic and very humane guy who can empathize with the pain of the people left homeless , who lost their lands and those who dream of a united South America. I guess the journey forms the basis of formation of the revolutionary that Guevara became in his later years and whom the world famously came to know as ‘CHE’(yeah hes the bearded man on ur tshirt , and that photo has been named as the most famous photograph of 20th century).

It is a movie that you have to watch in the language it was made - Argentinian or whatever they call their language in Argentina coz that retains the authentic flavour of the movie. I think its a pity it wasnt released here , I am sure at least all the college guys could really have identified with the young idealistic but reckless and adventurous Guevara and his older eccentric womanizer friend Alberto.

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