Overkill By Stars: Bollywood’s Bane

The Facebook and Twitter Brigade

Take, for example, stars tweeting or posting their comments on Facebook. Either stars use these social platforms liberally or don’t use them at all. Most of the stars who do tweet or who are on Facebook, post comments so often that you’d wonder how they managed to stay alive before they became part of these platforms. But today, they must tell their followers that they’ve just woken up, they are going out for lunch to such-and-such restaurant, they are in a shoping mall…. well, ummm…. shopping, of course, that they’ve returned home tired, that the tea they just had was so refreshing, that they need to hit the sack early today because they’ve got to report for an early morning shooting the next day, that they are now going to bed, that they’d like to wish their fans “good night”, that….. the list of comments they post on Twitter or Facebook is endless. It is almost like their fans would die if they didn’t get at least an hour-by-hour, if not minute-by-minute, account of the actor’s life.

Still, have you wondered how none – repeat, none – of these stars has been tweeted or Facebooked (right coinage?) that his/her film has failed at the box-office, that it has not been appreciated by the public, that it will entail losses to its distributors, that it has bombed at the ticket windows? Considering that 80% of the films flop, how is it that not a single star has ever admitted to being part of a failed attempt – neither on Twitter nor on Facebook? Is it that the two social networking sites are only meant to be used by the stars to speak about their ‘achievements’ and not their failures? Or does it mean that the stars, who are on Facebook and Twitter, have never failed as yet, that their films have always made money for all concerned? Many stars come up with such ridiculous comments after their film bombs that you can’t help but pity them. “Luv u guys for liking my film” tweeted one vain star after his film failed to even take off while another wrote on Facebook after his starrer bombed, “Just got a call from my Bihar distributor. He said, people are going mad with excitement in the movie!”

Lack of Honesty

It is this lack of honesty which will do the stars in. Their fans might revel today in the fact that they get to know what their idols are doing everyday, perhaps, every hour, but even they will soon tire of reading half-truths. Honesty is what any reader looks for, whether in a newspaper, magazine, television reportage or on social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter. They will, sooner than later, begin to question the veracity of what is fed to them by way of star updates. Over a period of time, many of them will stop following the very stars they adore today. Just as it happens in the case of films – fans tire of the stars when the honesty in their performance starts declining – their popularity on the social websites will also keep falling if they regularly hide the truth about their films and only post positive comments about them, at many times, incorrect. And the stars will have nobody except themselves to blame for this.

Promotional Overkill

Another area where moderation seems to have been thrown out of the window is film promotion, especially through the medium of reality, game and talent shows on television. It seems to have become almost mandatory today for the stars of every big film to make appearances in one or the other television shows around the time of their release. There’s often no thought that goes behind their television appearance so that all of them look the same and lack innovation. Just because someone did it some time, everybody must do it all the time – that seems to be the dictum that guides the film people who are victims of the herd mentality. And it must all happen in the week of the release of the film in question or thereabouts only. The reason why the promotional campaigns of Aamir Khan or Shah Rukh Khan’s films always have an impact is because they are constantly innovating and thinking up novel ways to catch the attention of the public. Therefore, even if they go overboard and go all out to promote their films, monotony doesn’t set in because they constantly do something new rather than blindly repeating what has been done in the case of other films.

Why just promotion through appearance on TV shows, even the whole marketing game is quite an overkill. Crores and crores of rupees are being spent on marketing and promotion of films week after week but does all this or even most of this translate into box-office collections is the moot question. If money expended on marketing cannot create awareness about or excitement around the film, the spend is a waste. Week after week, one is appalled at the dull, often  dismal, opening of films, but somehow and for some strange reason, producers don’t have the time to stop and think whether they should be spending as much as they do, on promotion and marketing. Because the others are doing it, we must also do it, seems to be the guiding maxim for ad spend. Unfortunately, in India, there’s no thought that goes behind the kind of promotion which would be appropriate for the films made. The marketing campaigns are almost always the same, whether the film is a teenage love story, a mature love story, a family drama, an action fare, a comedy, a mass-appealing film or a class fare. That’s because every producer thinks, he has made a film which would appeal to every segment of the audience base, every strata of society. Market fragmentation? What’s that, he is apt to ask. But lakhs of rupees, sometimes crores, can often be saved if a producer takes a more dispassionate and honest view of his movie and realises that it may not, after all, be worth targeting that section of the audience which would, in any case, not be interested in his film.

Lack of moderation is also visible in the dealings of producers with stars. The obsene fees paid to most of the actors makes one wonder whether a producer makes a film to earn profits for himself or merely to increase the bank balance of the stars working in it. Agreed, saleable stars are in short supply and, therefore, command and demand the prices they do! But why would a producer take the tension and trouble of making a film, investing many crores of rupees, if, at the end of the day, he is not sure of how much money he’d make or whether he would at all make any money but is dead sure that the one he employs (the hero of his film) would make far far more money after working for him – and this, in film after film?But the majority of the producers today, including the corporate houses, are doing just that – producing movies to enrich the actors while impoverishing themselves. If only producers knew how to pay stars in moderation, their economics wouldn’t be so lopsided. Of course, no single producer can bring about a change but collectively, there’s a lot they can do provided they have the will to do it. As in the matter of remuneration, so also in the producers’ interaction with the stars, there’s always the urge to massage the egos of the artistes and place them on a pedestal that should be reserved for no one except the gods. But most producers actually treat their stars like Gods – again a classic case of absence of moderation. It’s not as if this can’t change. It can! However, if producers have decided to be subservient to the stars and remain that way for ever and ever, so be it.