Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry by Tejaswini Ganti Page B

are now looking for a different kind of cinema. The advent of multiplexes has also encouraged this change in mindset. If you have a film that might not necessarily run house-full in a 1,000-seat hall, you now have the option of showing it in, say, a 200-seat auditorium, where it might very well draw a full house” (“The Multiplex Effect” 2003). The November 2007 issue of the English-language film magazine Filmfare featured an interview with the veteran actress Shabana Azmi: “What the multiplex has done today is release the producer from having to cater to the lowest common denominator. The multiplex has demonstrated that Indian audiences are not [a] monolith, and it is possible to make niche films that can become successful” (Ghelani 2007: 130). In November 2009, at a panel discussion titled “Re-Framing Indian Cinema,” held at New York University in conjunction with the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Annual Film Festival, director Shyam Benegal spoke of the impact of multiplexes as thoroughly groundbreaking for Indian cinema. He reflected on how, until the advent of multiplexes, every film that was released needed to be able to fill at least 80 percent of the capacity of single-screen theaters in order for the distributors to break even: “For years and years this was an enormous problem. We always used to say, ‘Why are we having these huge cinemas? Why does it have to be like this? Why is it that only big pictures can be made, big block-busters?’. . . So you couldn’t possibly make films of a smaller kind; it had become almost impossible. It’s really when the multiplexes started that everything started to change. You didn’t have to look at the audience as one big grey mass” (MIACC 2009b). Contrary to the above statements, I discuss in chapter eight how mainstream Hindi filmmakers conceive of their audiences as comprised of diverse constituencies, whose varying tastes need to be addressed or transcended, not a monolithic “grey mass.”
    A couple of years earlier, for a special feature about multiplexes in The Indian Express , Benegal narrated a familiar history of cinematic decline connected to the advent of technology and class composition of audiences in the cinema hall . Rather than satellite television, however, multiplexes were the technological catalyst for improved cinema. Discussing the 1980s, Benegal wrote, “TV took away the urban middle-class audiences and cinema came to be patronised by the working classes alone— or those who could not afford a TV set at home and those who didn’t have access to TV. At this time, film had to rely on an entertainmentconcept that would gather the largest possible audience—a common denominator sufficiently lowered and spread thin. A kind of dumbingdown was taking place” (Benegal 2007). While mainstream Hindi filmmakers castigated video and working-class audiences for the poor quality of filmmaking generally, Benegal focused his comments on the impact of television and working-class audiences on non-mainstream forms of filmmaking. Describing the emergence of an “alternative cinema movement” in the 1970s, which targeted “the professional middle-classes and educated audiences,” he declared that with the spread of television and the retreat of middle-class audiences from theaters, alternative cinema was “wiped out.” With the advent of multiplexes, the possibility for an alternative cinematic practice was revived once more: “The opportunity created in the ’70s and then lost in the ’80s came back with the multiplex in the late-’90s” (Benegal 2007). For Benegal and his peers, the structures of production, distribution, and exhibition, which depended on pleasing large numbers of people, were viewed as inimical to quality cinema. Quantity— either in terms of seats in a cinema or the number of viewers—is seen as incapable of producing quality. The equation of poor quality and poor taste with large numbers has a long history that