To Another Script

Stephen Alter’s book on the making of Omkara profiles Bollywood’s new creativity

Fantasies of a Bollywood Love Thief
Stephen Alter
HarperCollins, Rs 295

You can’t buy a ticket to Bollywood,” writes Stephen Alter in his new book . “It’s just an idea that flashes like a neon sign.” If you’re looking for juicy details and insight into the murky and complex world of Bollywood, you are not going to find much in Alter’s latest book; it is bereft of filmi masala, and it that sense, it is different from anything written on the industry before. Alter remains an observer throughout, and competently chronicles director Vishal Bhardwaj’s journey while filming Omkara. In the process, he documents the changes in the Indian film industry’s style of functioning, with a new breed of filmmakers who work on strict time frames, and meticulously plan every shot. (Bollywood has been notorious for films whose schedules dawdled on for years on end.)

The book begins with the first day of the shooting of Omkara in Uttar Pradesh. Bhardwaj’s first film Maqbool, based on Macbeth, was well received. As Alter notes, that hardly makes the mammoth task of filming a movie, much easier. He goes on to describe a conversation between the shy but irreverent Bhardwaj and himself over pegs of Vat 69 on expletives in the script. (Eventually, the film got an A certificate.)

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Throughout the book, Alter oscillates between this movie, and some observations on Bollywood, already familiar to most. Alter steers clear of the intrigues and clans that govern Bollywood, which essentially remains an industry controlled by a few families, where generations have been involved in films. Alter has held meetings and interviewed most of the stalwarts of Mumbai films like Mahesh Bhatt, Gulzar, Dev Anand and Shyam Benegal. These chapters are tepid at best and even the quote-a-minute Bhatt doesn’t have any salacious lines. The business of filmmaking isn’t vividly recounted and Fantasies of a Bollywood Love Thief is in parts a dry read, never quite bringing out the colour and drama of this crazed, make-believe world. Nor does it address ambiguous areas of finance, distribution and the marketing of movies, clearly enough.

Alter is at his best tracing Bhardwaj and his motley crew across the badlands of UP. He devotes a chapter to the cast taking tips on acting from Naseeruddin Shah, and another to the reading of the script, a process which is, he notes wrily, a rarity in Bollywood. The hero, Ajay Devgan, refuses to read his part, saying he’d rather listen, and Bhardwaj rather nervously takes over his lines. The equations between the actors in a multi-starrer, usually fraught with tension, are described here as healthily competitive. However, the evolution of Saif Ali Khan as an actor is sensitively portrayed. Alter writes extensively about Khan’s additions and improvisations on the set ²and hints that we’ll be seeing a lot more of him in the future. The filming of the hit single Beedi jalaile where Bipasha Basu writhes on a charpoy to Gulzar’s provocative lyrics, will give readers a peek into the realities of filmmaking, and how painstaking the process can be.

Alter retains his fresh perspective throughout. He is amazed at the endless endorsements of the stars, and talks nostalgically of the romantic era of films in the 1970s. But read him for his insightful take on Omkara. And to know exactly where filmmaking in India is going.