100 years of Indian cinema

Indian Cinema completes a full-blown 100 years & looking back in time Indian Cinema seems no less than a wonderful epochal journey. It was the year of 1913 when the legend of the Indian film industry Dr. Dadasaheb Phalke presented the Indian audience with his first mookie Raja Harishchandra. Little did he realize that he was unleashing a form of entertainment that would probably never loose its charm. The Indian cinema never looked back thereafter. We moved from mookie to the first talkie Alam Ara. The Indian cinema progressed to making coloured motion pictures adding the flavor of music to most recent 3D & special effects features. We saw Indian cinema mature enormously with the advent of time. The bold scenes, anti heroes, unmarried pregnancies, run away brides, thugs, mafia raj, world wars, mythology, animation and social issues all found a place in the Indian cinema; gaining popularity. The moviemakers boldly picked up prevailing issues & threw it in your face. And boy don’t they still do it.

We have also seen the film industry grow commercially at an unprecedented rate. These 100 years have given the film producers, distributors and various other new players that came to be associated with the film industry; an impetus to growth. Cinema has not just provided entertainment but has also touched lives & been a source of income for millions. This is probably the only industry that has made use of a host of technological boons given to the society in one single business all in an endeavor to give a complete movie experience to its audience.  The cinema loved its audience.

Due to this the business of making cinema also saw a sea of change. Earlier the film makers / distributors had a single source of making money i.e the theatrical revenues but as times changed the other forms of entertainment started gaining popularity. The big screen made way for the small screens into peoples homes, the world saw the invasion of internet, technology advanced and piracy made its way into the Indian cinema market. The first Indian chain of cinema theatres was owned by Jamshedji Framji Madan who distributed about 10 films over the Indian sub-continent annually. Marketing of films was not a popular thing back then. Raghupati Venkaiah Naidu was a pioneer in taking Indian films to an International level. He travelled to different regions in Asia, to promote film work.

Cinema slowly started gaining popularity in the 20^th century. The common man could afford movie tickets and audiences thronged to the theatres. The film making business came to be considered as a lucrative industry for both the producers & the actors. Big budget films started gaining grounds and film industry also came to be associated with the notorious Mumbai underworld in the 1980s. Though commercial cinema grew throughout the 1980s, banks & financial institutions shied away from lending money to the film makers and hence the association with the underworld stemmed from financial requirements. That changed eventually.

Each vertical associated with the Indian cinema was growing. The queues outside Cinema halls told the story. The second line of business that is the film distributors (earlier negligible) had started forming their own clout. They had emerged to be the next generation film makers. Indian cinema started forming early contact offshore with its films making inroads into the Soviet Union, Middle East, Southeast Asia and China. Some of the mainstream film stars like Raj Kapoor gained international fame across Asia and Eastern Europe. This was just not true for the hindi films, it was the likes of Satyajit Ray that also gained recognition on an international scale. The Indian films had made to the inside of the foreign lands. The challenge was to market the Indian film on the foreign land.

Parallelly marketing of films as a concept had started gaining ground back home. The1940s to 1970s saw an infusion of romance and action movies. It was during that time that industry saw hits like Sholay, Do Bhiga Zameen & Deewar that made massive collections at the box office possible. Film makers had slowly started realizing the importance of marketing and this gave birth to a whole new association. A full fledged marketing team, a formal marketing budget came to be associated in the Indian film making. We were adopting the west.

Following the Hollywood model, many film and entertainment companies realized the importance of reducing their dependence on the actor/ actresses to make the film a success. This lead its way to the studio model. Under the studio model the production, distribution and the marketing of the film is in the hands of a single entity. One of the biggest challenge in film business is taking the film  to the theaters. In earlier times lot of films remained in cans and never saw the light of the day and this resulted in lot of producers going out business.  With studio model the cost of film came to be recovered from multiple sources, and it came to be seen or still is one way to increase the chances of profitability for each film. The producers formed a clout with the distribution & substantial theatre chains to sell each movie with pre-decided revenue share. Distributors started financing the films at various stages & acquired distribution rights on a global scale. They could acquire films at various stages & market it under its own name. A clout of actors also came to be associated with these organized distribution players. Due to this the actors started charging a comparatively lower fee, which kept the cost of a movie, and the incremental returns were then shared under a profit sharing model based on the commercial success of the movie.

With the advent of studio model lot of creativeness came into movie making. Earlier the moviemakers were selling hope, thrill, emotion in their endeavor to touch lives, but the age of realistic movies was missing. The movie makers were now experimenting with changing times. But these efforts were restricted upto an extent by government owned National Film Development Corporation. This is slowly changing now. We saw a lot of films released in the last few years on social issues which have been appreciated by audiences and have been commercially successful too.

Simultaneously the music industry had started making its way, the television industry was growing & the internet had started penetrating. The world was undergoing rapid technological development & the entertainment industry used each vertical to de-risk its business.  With the entry of 3G and 4G the time is not far away when the consumer will be able to watch movies on their mobile phones. Small beginning has already happened with YouTube and similar other music sites clouding people’s lives giving the viewer an opportunity to watch the music & trailers at a minimal/no cost. This will throw another stream of revenue for the film producers.

The potential of Indian cinema is also seen by the global studios with many of them already present in India. With already lot of organized Indian players present, the structure of the film industry is set to be corporatized which in turn brings in a lot of professionalism and transparency into the industry. The time is not far off when the Indian film industry will be on a global scale like many of the Indian industries. We will have the gleaming lady on the international scale. Who knows the next Brad Pitt or the Ryan Gostling would compete on the winner trophy at the Manikchand Indian Cinema Awards.

Cheers!!!

Snehal