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Join UsWhat ails this industry? Bad scripts, proposal makers, unreal star prices may very much be the bane of this industry, but a bigger curse for this business, especially in today’s times of corporatisation and the resultant high salaries paid to those working in corporate houses, is the almost complete lack of accountability.
Time was when independent and individual producers made films. If a film worked at the box-office, the producer himself and his entire team or unit could take the credit for it. Similarly, if the film bombed at the ticket windows, the blame lay squarely at their doorstep. However, a lot has changed now. With corporatisation, the decision to green-light a project is never an individual’s. Rather, it is a collective decision. Secondly, as against producers going by their gut feeling or hunch, those working in corporate production houses rely on projections and estimates made on long excel sheets on their fancy laptop computers before accepting or rejecting a film proposal.
That being so, accountability ought to be much more in today’s times than it ever was. For, corporates have made quite a science of the business of art that is filmmaking. But unfortunately, there seems to be almost nil accountability because if that were not the case, the same corporates would not keep repeating the same mistakes. If an individual producer made a flop and realised that his genre was wrong, he’d not try making a film in that genre again, unless he was very sure. Or, if he realised that the director was not the safest bet at the box-office, he would avoid him at all costs. But corporates have no hesitation in backing directors whose budgets spell disaster at the box-office or stars whose fees can indicate, to even a novice, that the films in which they act would more likely fail than work commercially. Obviously, therefore, there is no accountability.
