Overkill By Stars: Bollywood’s Bane

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.