COLUMN - The age of criss-crossing cinema

People buy tickets at a counter in a multiplex movie theatre in Mumbai November 22, 2008.

Every month, this (extremely) little corner of the website will talk about world movies in India and our movies in the world.

Now a few years ago, a column like this would be irrelevant and people would ask why allow such a non-starter as global cinema to take up the ever shrinking, always valuable world of Indian cyber-real estate (much like real estate in real India).

Back then (as late as the new century), say Nicole Kidman or a Jude Law showed up in a particular year's Hollywood magnum opus, a few posh people caught a night show in the only respectable single screen left in their Indian city that wasn't populated by scorpions and rapists, and the thing disappeared almost quicker than it released.

Indian revenues for Hollywood were smaller than Turkey and in some instances, Bangladesh. Even though we were the second largest movie producing nation in the world, we didn't care what Kevin Costner or Tom Hanks had to say.

And even if we did, we cared at home on video cassette, safely brought to us by the family smuggler along with the weekly Black Label and Esquire magazine. Most legal Hollywood bypassed India because even though they saw the potential of a billion people watching, say "Usual Suspects" on a big screen, finding one's way through the piracy and the labyrinth of our box-office collections was enough to make studio executives jump out of windows.

"One American Warner Brothers fellow tried to get me to sign some contract or something. After I explained to him the Indian ways of movie profit, he started crying," said a theatre owner of an experience he had from the 90s.

It seemed two parallel worlds were happy to sail along without colliding -- Hollywood had those little areas known as America, Western Europe, Japan, South East Asia and Bollywood had quite an impressive collective in South Asia, North Africa, The Middle East, Central Asia and Russia/Eastern Europe (although this increasingly went to Hollywood post the fall of the Berlin Wall).

While their audiences clapped along with Robin Williams, we were quite content with Aditya Pancholi in Ray-Ban sunglasses. By "we" I meant our cinema going masses -- which till the 2000s, was a lower middle-class venture, less an art, more a way for a rural person to relieve stress (taking off shirt and banging head against chair at appearance of semi-naked dancing heroine was common practice).

Our elite and their children, naturally, were in tune with Robin Williams. They stayed home, encouraging piracy, resigned to the (accurate) fact that no self-respecting upper middle-class Indian would go to a movie theatre.

Hollywood and Bollywood didn't touch each other or cross each other's tracks. The global rise of Shah Rukh Khan meant nothing to Tom Cruise and vice versa.

Anything non-Hollywood in foreign cinema, say a French or Italian hit, pretty much had no presence in India except for a mid-afternoon consulate screening usually attended by three bearded intellectuals of questionable sanity and homeless people.

Like everything else the multiplex phenomenon did with our cinema that division broke down. Hollywood studios found clean buildings with carpets where they could release their films without a gang war.

They also found civilised businessmen in clean shirts speaking English willing to deal fairly in splitting revenue -- the era of begging a man in Dubai wearing chains for one's fair share of a movie's profits, was over.

More surprisingly, they also found an audience. And it wasn't the audience that watched their movies on video cassette. It was in the interiors of the country. In places where the Ministry of Surface Transport hadn't been able to get to with a road, Paramount Pictures made it with "Spiderman".

Last year, "2012" and "Avatar" were among the top three highest grossing films in India, against all of Bollywood's talent combined. And the highest numbers were reported from villages where perhaps these movies were seen less as fiction and more as prophesy. The two world cinema cultures didn't just collide; Hollywood gave Bollywood, what the Americans would refer to as an "ass whooping".

Now, this doesn't mean everyone in Vishakhapatnam is suddenly a Leo DiCaprio fan. David Dhawan and Raj Kumar Santoshi and old school-Bollywood still control the national aesthetic with their brand of what they call "movies" but with the impact the big Hollywood studios are making here (and all of them have set up shop), they aren't going to be crying again at the Indian box office anytime soon.

This article will try to document those trends along with what Bollywood does to hit back at Hollywood's playground (attempt 1: four words and a number - Anil Ambani. Steven Spielberg. 447 million).

Also, never in the history of our urban spaces has there been a larger opportunity to see (non-Hollywood) foreign cinema.

From DVD clubs to film clubs, to libraries, to specialty divisions of Indian media houses, on any night our hipsters have their choice of Turkish-German noir or Moroccan thrillers or Parisian romance. Sadly, no longer is the Max Mueller Bhavan or the Alliance places of art house film refuge.

Now, a Truffaut screening claims its place on a Wednesday afternoon next to Hrithik Roshan at Andheri Cine-Mall and demands (and often gets) an audience. We'll try to see that trend as well and what our cinema can or can't do at film festivals and other stages of global cinema.

There was a time when Shah Rukh Khan danced, Hrithik Roshan flew, Tom Cruise spied and Angelina Jolie swam and no one invaded the other's fan base. This is not that time. Nor is this the time of cross-over cinema, whoever had to cross over with whatever, has already done that (Monsoon Wedding, Slumdog, Bend It Like Beckham, The Hangover, I could go on).

This is the age of criss-crossing cinema. The globe as one melting pot of stories, stars and audiences. How, why and with what effect is what we'll ponder and reflect on every month.

(Anuvab Pal is a playwright and screenwriter. The views and opinions expressed here are his own and not those of Reuters)