Larger than life

Many times, stars are bigger than the movies they star in — and this kind of ‘star power’ is what drives show business

In the movie business, a star is defined as an actor who can ‘open’ a picture. In layman’s terms, this means that a star is somebody whose fan following is so loyal and so gigantic that people will go to see a movie starring him (or her) even before they know anything about the film itself.

To take an Indian example, Hrithik Roshan is a star. The remake of the 1990’s Amitabh Bachchan movie Agneepath starring Hrithik set a new box-office record when it opened a couple of weeks ago. The crowds had booked their tickets in advance, even before the movie was released only because they wanted to see Hrithik on the screen.

In his heyday, Amitabh Bachchan was the king of the stars. His faithful fans would want to see anything he featured in. Because many of Amitabh’s pictures were not necessarily very good, producers hit on innovative ways of capitalising on Bachchan’s box-office lure. One strategy was to release the movie on as many screens as possible so that the fans could all buy tickets on the first few days of the movie’s release. By the time word got out that the picture was not particularly good, the producers had already sold enough tickets to recoup their costs.

These days, the three Khans are Hrithik’s only rivals in the box-office race. Opinions are divided as to the merit of Ra.One but Shah Rukh’s charisma packed out the cinema halls anyway. Don 2 opened to full houses on the strength of Shah Rukh’s star power. Nearly every film Aamir Khan has made over the last decade or so has been a massive hit. Moreover, many of his movies have been genuinely enjoyable and well made so his name is a guarantee of box-office success. Similarly, though Salman Khan has acted in some really bad films (including Dabbang, possibly the worst movie in the history of the universe), his fans love everything he does so his pictures routinely break box-office collection records.

Because the movie business is so uncertain and audience tastes so hard to predict, producers prefer to rely on stars. They know that even if the picture sucks, the star’s popularity will guarantee an opening.

In recent years, as technology has advanced, star-power has become even more important. When you go to see a new release at the cinema, you are guided — to some extent — by reviews and word-of-mouth. But when you are browsing through hundreds of DVDs to select a few, you don’t necessarily remember how good or bad the reviews of each picture were. More often than not, you’ll choose a movie because it stars, say, Brad Pitt or Julia Roberts. So it is with downloads, Netflix, in-house movies at hotels and the like. The star is often the single-most important factor in deciding whether you buy a movie or not.

While actors love being stars, they are also conscious of the limitations it places on their careers. Take the original Agneepath, for example.

The movie starred Amitabh Bachchan as a gangster who borrowed his wardrobe from Al Pacino in Scarface and his dialogue-delivery from Varadarajan Mudaliar, the real-life 1980s Bombay don. Because Bachchan wanted to extend himself, he abandoned that famous baritone and spoke his lines in a hissing whisper.

The critics loved it and even today, the “Vijay Dinanath Chavan. Gaon ka naam: Mandwa…” speech is a big hit when Bachchan performs at live shows.

But, in 1990, when the original Agneepath was released, audiences in the Hindi heartland felt cheated when they realised that the star had abandoned his normal booming dialogue delivery style. Word spread that somebody else had dubbed for Bachchan in the film and in some small towns, angry mobs of viewers beat up projectionists at cinemas where Agneepath was released.

A shaken Bachchan went back to the recording studio and re-recorded his dialogues, line-by-line, in his trademark baritone. New prints were rushed to the cinema but it was too late — his Agneepath never found the box-office success it deserved.

Ironically, the version of Agneepath that survives — on video and now in the DVD format — is the original, with Bachchan’s Varadarajan-style dialogues. The redubbed version with booming baritone has been largely forgotten.

(Vir Sanghvi is a celebrated Indian journalist, television personality, author and lifestyle writer. To follow 
Vir’s other writings, visit 
www.virsanghvi.com.)