Outsourcing Hollywood to Bollywood

We have heard a lot in recent years about “outsourcing”: the idea of moving production to cheaper overseas locations. But while India has received outsourcing in software production and in call centers, and other industries, so far the Indian movie industry has been relatively unaffected. I suspect that this may soon change. India produces more films than any other country and they can produce films for a fraction of the cost of a Hollywood production. It is just a matter of time before someone begins seeing a way of tapping in to this capability.

I speculated about this in a comment to a nice post about Hindi films by Sunil Laxman, (who writes and excellent blog). I thought that there are two possibilities for Indian-American cooperation in film:
1. Serious movies made in English set in India and starring popular American and Indian movie stars.
2. Fun song-and-dance movies made in English designed to appeal to Americans that have never seen a musical.
I thought the recent film Bend it like Beckham (2003) showed that there was interest in movies that stared Indian actors and dealt with Indian themes, and such a movie could cross over and appeal to mainstream western audience. Bend it was an enormously profitable movie, and I suspect it made the director Gurinder Chadha very wealthy.

Last weekend, my wife rented the forgettable Bride and Prejudice (2004) made by the very same Gurinder Chadha. She was definitely thinking that there is a market for Indian style song-and-dance in the western market. The movie was based on an old Jane Austen novel, and it was kind of fun to see how they transformed it into story about modern India. But the lead characters were badly miscast. This is especially surprising considering that Chadha found the rising star Keira Knightly and as the wonderful Parminder Nagra who found some success in the T.V. show ER. In Bride, Chadha cast the no-talents Aishwarya Rai and Martin Henderson (playing an American and he is not even American) in the lead roles. This was a blunder. If she had cast the lead roles properly, it could have made double the box office. Even then, the movie did make a profit, and it proves that there may be a market for turning the typically Bollywood song-and-dance into something western audiences could enjoy.

I think that there is an enormous market for serious films set in India with Indian actors (and maybe a few American actors) made in English and dealing with real issues. These movies could be made for less $10 million and make money both in India with the English-speaking minority and in the U.S. and other English speaking countries. I would wish that Chadha would move in that direction. Bend it like Beckham was sort of like that in that it was not a campy Bollywood masala but a movie that cast Indians (or desis) in lead roles and dealt with themes relevant to Indians.

On the other hand, maybe there is a market for super campy masala type films. The genre needs a good Mike Myers-style parody. This whole genre is so silly anyway, it really lends itself to an over-the-top spoof. Here are some possible running gags.

Have fun with the dubbed songs:
1. Have the woman sing with the men’s voices and the men sing like Lata Mangeshkar.
2. The hero and heroine eat at a Chinese restaurant and then the break out into Chinese song which neither one of them understands.
3. Put a scratch in the CD moment: suddenly the music changes in mid song to another song and the hero tries his best to lip sync to the changes.
4. Have the song suddenly end, the hero and heroine keep mouthing non-existent lyrics and someone walks up and asks them, “What are you doing?”

Have fun with the classic break into dance routine: the music switches on at inappropriate times and everyone is force to dance:
1. The hero is running away from the villain. His only way to escape is to switch on the music and force everyone to dance, and he secretly dances away.
2. Have ridiculous things dance: cows, (Amit would love this), elephants, whatever.
3. Have the “match fixer villains” try to fix a cricket match by switching on the music while India is batting, but it backfires as the batsmen’s footwork improves.
4. Have the hero and heroine get a little too intimate for the Indian censors – and then the music starts forcing them to try to continue kissing while dancing.
5. Have office workers “dancing” while doing mundane office things like sitting at a desk in front of a computer or whatever.
6. This would be cool: have what would look like a typical crowd city street with all kinds of pedestrians, cows, autos and whatever and suddenly everyone breaks into dance. (We have to have dancing cows).
7. Have a major battle sequence where people with swords are killing each other and then the music starts and they start dancing (including the corpses), and the music stops and the continue killing.

Would anyone like to add to the silly song-and-dance gag list? Please comment.