Learning from Spielberg
Hollywood legend Steven Spielberg wowed a roomful of Bollywood’s top filmmakers in Mumbai on Monday. The occasion was a byproduct of a successful business tieup between Spielberg’s Dreamworks and Anil Ambani’s Reliance Entertainment.
Now successful creative tieups between Hollywood and Bollywood greats may follow. Spielberg is reported to be planning a film based at least partly in India, with Indian actors.
The value of the traffic in ideas that result from such collaborations is immense. Spielberg, for example, is known to choose films on artistic merit rather than commercial considerations. But that doesn’t seem to get in the way of his films making a lot of money. Besides winning two Oscars, his Lincoln also netted $250 million-plus (roughly `1,250 crores — an unimaginable amount for an Indian film, where `100 crores is the height of commercial success). One reason why US films make as much money as they do is that they have audiences around the world. They also act as vehicles of American culture worldwide.
In its early days, India’s film industry was truly international. There were the British, who still ruled the country, German technicians and artists from the length and breadth of undivided India, from Peshawar to Rangoon. Bollywood was born out of the creative collaborations between these disparate talents. One only hopes it will now graduate to the next level with a new era of internationalism.
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