Four Bollywood scriptwriters, two novelists, a filmmaker, a film critic and an anthropologist walk into Sulemaani Keeda – a movie about Bollywood scriptwriters.
Originally published on Yahoo! Originals via Grist Media
Sourabh Ratnu thinks there are at least 1,000 scriptwriters between the two Mumbai neighbourhoods of Versova and Bandra. Mayank Shekhar thinks there are anywhere between 1,500 and 2,000. Rahul Patel narrows it down further. Between Mira Road and Bandra, you will find at least 500 writers, he says. Amit V Masurkar is trying to be conservative: at least 500, but could be 1,000.
Of these guessers, Amit is the one who has been obsessing about this subculture for over three years now. His as-yet-unreleased film Sulemani Keeda is about two young men who have moved to Mumbai to write screenplays. You could call it a bromantic comedy but prepare for resistance. You will be shot down by Aditi Vasudev (one of the leads): “Huh, that way even Sholay can be called a bromantic comedy.”
In the tall-tale industry called Bollywood, the writers are the men and women with the tallest tales. They’ve also been directors, assistant directors and sometimes even actors. Some have dabbled in production as well. At parties, they top each other’s stories, they can’t help themselves. An evening that starts in a bar can begin with an argument about whether Anurag Kashyap has sold out or not and continue well into the morning at an after-party. And some of them have gathered here this evening in a flat in Bandra to watch Sulemani Keeda.
It’s been hard to find a room that can seat more than three scriptwriters. Mayank Tewari is our host for the evening, offering his living room – set right above a street on Chapel Road – for two reasons. One, he loves having people over, loves his adda. Two, because of his prized possession: a 42-inch LED TV in the centre of a living room exploding in books.
You can spot 32-year-old Tewari on the promotional material for Sulemani Keeda – frizzy hair, thick beard and glasses – playing one of the scriptwriter protagonists, Mainak. Tewari wrote the sharp, mean dialogue in the Balaji Telefilms production Ragini MMS.
Tewari was once a journalist. Now, he works in Bollywood. His adda costume includes a thin bathrobe, which he wears like Hugh Hefner on top of whatever he is wearing. Today it’s a plaid shirt and calf-length pants.
The last time I was here, Tewari had read aloud Hindi poet Uday Prakash’s zeitgeisty poem about the Bollywood-underworld nexus, Chunky Pandey Mukar Gaya. It is one of (writer-director) Amit’s favourite poems of all the Hindi verse that Tewari has introduced him to in the course of their friendship. (Sulemani Keeda got its name from Tewari’s own eponymous poem.)
Amit met Tewari at an Open Mic night at a bar. Unlike his characters, unlike Tewari and most of the other people in the room, Amit has always been a Bombay boy. He started as a cartoonist for JAM, a youth magazine, and then wrote sketches for The Great Indian Comedy Show. Since then, he has worked as a filmmaker and writer in film and TV. Sulemani Keeda is his debut feature as a director.
Sourabh Ratnu and Nikhat Bhatti, both with more than a couple of films under their belts, have been working in the movies in different roles for a decade or more. They sit on a sofa facing a table while the host and the director of the movie sit less comfortably on metal chairs. Sourabh, 39, is a striking man in a khaki-green shirt. He has a clean-shaven head and a twirlable, thick moustache. He used to be the captain of the boxing team in his college days and looks like it. In this room, everyone has the exact cultural reference to describe Saurabh’s booming, ironic laugh: B-movie actor Joginder Shelly. Nikhat, Saurabh’s writing partner, sits in a white sleeveless cotton top, an orange dupatta and a long skirt, a statuesque woman who looks much younger than her 44 years. Like many of the others they have lived in Versova for years, in apartment buildings full of models, assistant directors, pimps, unhappy mistresses and writers, all convinced that this year is going to be the Big One. And to this end, the writers and directors are constantly sent template messages by actor-slash-models about how lovely it was to meet them and they should definitely work on something together. Versova’s approximately five square km is a steaming bath of cameraderie, gossip, anxiety, wild surmise and the fleeting demon gold.
There’s TV and sketch comedy writer Rahul Patel, who writes for Channel [V]’s Confessions of an Indian Teenager and the web series Jay Hind! Mayank Shekhar, well-known film critic, has also dragged an armchair to face the television. Sarovar Zaidi, anthropologist, only arrived after the screening. The last person to join this party, much after the anthropologist’s arrival, was writer Palash Krishna Mehrotra.
This is a room full of talkers and it is an occupational hazard. Their success has to a great extent been because of their being relentless talkers. You can write a script as well as you want, but your ability to sell it in Bollywood depends on your ability to talk the hind leg off a donkey a.k.a. narrating to producers and stars. “You have to dance like a monkey, act out every scene, declaim every dialogue, in front of people playing Angry Birds on their phones,” a young scriptwriter once told a friend of mine. She said this the day before her first film script went into production. She would still have to dance like a monkey before she sold the next one but perhaps marginally less, she hoped.
As everyone gathers in Tewari’s Bandra living room, a decision is made to drink only after the movie. The fan is now switched off, the windows shut tight to avoid any trickle of sound. Mostly because when audio recorded on 5.1 surround sound is playing on a regular stereo system, the “surround” bits sound lower than they do in, say, a multiplex movie hall.
This is a room full of talkers but they are silent during the screening. The first time I watched Sulemani Keeda was a month before, at a college film festival, where tickets to the movie were sold for Rs 40 and students who didn’t have any classes had filled the entire auditorium. There were also some market research people from a distributor who were trying to understand how to pitch the movie. (They must have figured out by the end of the screening, considering the uproar of laughter in the hall.) Unlike the college crowd this audience only smiles at the jokes. A few sniggers and chuckles make an appearance during every scene that involves the hapless protagonists interacting with parts of the industry – stars, directors, producers, sons of producers. There were no comments during the movie except for a very knowing, mischievous kind of laughter that said, “I know what’s about to go wrong now.” It is the universe around the protagonists – the industry, the landlord, the love interest’s parents and the likes that drew the most reactions from this bunch.
At the end of the movie, everyone applauds. They are keen to begin talking about the film. But before any conversation begins, beverages are sought. “What do we have?” Asked one of the writers. “There’s some vodka, yaar.” Tewari gets up and offers to make the drinks. A couple of us join him to help ourselves.
“I got some beer and put it in the fridge before the movie started.” Mayank finds a giant stainless steel Patiala lassi glass for the beer. “Who wants what?” The rest of us get our vodkas in small whisky glasses.
Standing in a t-shirt and jeans, leaning against the kitchen platform-turned-bar, Mayank endorses Sulemani Keeda’s verimisilitude: “This is the world I’ve been a part of as a film journalist and critic, and partied in ever since I moved to Bombay from Delhi.”
“It is a sweet and unpretentious coming-of-age film,” says Rahul Patel.
Sourabh feels the gritty language of scriptwriters (on display through the evening and entirely excised from this article) is missing from the movie and its comedy. Amit, the director, politely disagrees. Amit is tall and has chocolate boy features except for the bags under his eyes, and doesn’t look 32. He is also the quietest of the lot. He is in a simple shirt with rolled-up sleeves and jeans. His hair is combed. Grit is not his aesthetic. Certainly not in comedy.
When I return with my vodka and amla juice (described by the host as a screwdriver that is healthier for the liver than the average screwdriver), I sit on a window ledge and listen to Nikhat. She has just paused a story (to light a cigarette) she is telling Amit. She resumes: “He made me write a draft and kept me waiting saying that he is still thinking about it. And that he will see me soon and we will work on the next draft. I was dying to rework the draft because I wasn’t exactly happy with it.” They are talking about a producer-director they had both worked with. “He kept avoiding me for a while, whereas I kept hearing rumours that he is having meetings with people to sign them on for his next film. Long story short, I saw my name in the end credits of a movie (which had some big names) at the bottom of the ‘Special Thanks’ list.” Of course, Nikhat hasn’t yet been paid for the work she had put in and the script hadn’t changed much from the draft she wasn’t happy with. Amit laughs, “He is infamous. He owes me lakhs. He still hasn’t paid his catering guy. Not even when much after the movie the catering guy begged for Rs 50,000 rupees for a wedding in his family.”
Curious, I ask them how this works. “Don’t the stories spread? Discouraging people from working with him?” Tewari says, “It has a lot to do with charm. Come with me sometime to meet a couple of them.”
He explains, “The first time you meet some of them, they will convince you that they are about to make the next big thing that will make everyone around them a lot of money. But wait, here’s an unrelated story that will blow your mind. This is not about someone ripping someone off but it will still blow your mind.” Tewari has the air of a man who knows that most of his anecdotes will blow someone’s mind.
He gets up and stands in front of the switched-off television screen. “So when I had just started working with a production company, I was being paid barely anything. I had managed to convince them that as opposed to trying to turn my job as a writer in a 9 to 5 desk job, if they let me take my laptop home, I’d be able to churn out 25 man-days of work in less than 20. So I was hosting a few new friends of mine who worked in advertising. I got a call from my boss who said a Hollywood director was in Bombay and he wanted someone to read his own script to him. At the name of the international director, I dropped everything, I asked my friends to continue hanging out at my place while I had a quick meeting with [a dropped-name]. My new friends were considerably impressed by me: their new friend. When I met the director in a hotel room, he gave me a script. He wanted me to read to him while he lay down on his bed and visualised it or thought about it or something. I put every storytelling skill I had into processing a script that I was reading for the first time while narrating it to someone I really wanted to impress. Five pages into the story, the man was snoring. I looked at him. I didn’t know what to do. But the minute I stopped reading, he woke up. We decided that he would nap for a while and I would return in the evening.”
The others start making jokes about lullabies before Tewari continues: “When I returned that evening, he informed me that he couldn’t fall asleep so he ended up reading it himself. Then he took an hour and a half long break in his balcony from my company while I sat nervously on his couch. When he returned, all he said was – Why don’t good scripts fall from the sky?”
“But they do! I’ll tell you how they fall from the sky.” Sourabh, among this crowd, has had the longest stint in Bollywood. He is being obviously ironic about good scripts. Sourabh’s story is particularly gilded by his attractive voice.
“I was called by a producer and told that a Telugu movie needs to be rewritten into a Hindi film. I said, ‘Fine, send me the DVD and I shall come by and discuss it with you.’ I got the DVD, I skimmed through the film and went for the meeting. At the meeting, I was introduced to a senior writer who had written a lot of mainstream hits. My first question to the producer-director was, ‘Where do we plan to set this film? Things, scenes will have to be changed accordingly after appropriate research.’ At which point, I could see the senior writer get a little ruffled. The producer obviously noticed the same and he asked the writer for his input.”
Sourabh at this point changes his voice to that of a confident chartered accountant who is sure he can save every penny of your tax money. “‘Boss, forty percent scene toh lock hai. We will have to change some parts here and there, like where the boy and the girl meet.’ He pulled a DVD out of nowhere and said, ‘Just like how the girl and boy meet in this movie. After a few such replacements, you have 60 to 80 percent of the movie locked. Baaki bacha 20 percent, woh toh ho jaayega.'”
Returning to his normal voice Ratnu continues, “As soon as everything was locked, I was looking for the exit door and how fast I could run.” But nobody pays attention to this denouement because they are all laughing.
Mayank says he was once approached by a producer who wanted to make a movie about two artist friends. ‘”One friend is here,” said the producer and gestured high with his hand. “The second friend is here,” said the producer and gestured low with his hand.’ The others laugh, knowing where Mayank’s story is going. Mayank says, “Then the producer said: The movie will be about how the one who is lower becomes higher than the one who is higher and how the two deal with it.”
At the starting line, when you join a production house as a junior writer you could make around Rs 20-25,000 per month. All kinds of people do. A friend once told me of a writer who was asked by a TV producer for ideas for TV shows. When he pitched a few about settings different from the domestic one or a crime-based one, he was told that the idea of ‘family’ has to be somewhere in the background. The same writer had been to yet another TV production house before that where he had been told stories don’t work unless they are about milna, bichhadna, phir milna, phir bichhadna and so on. The example given to him? Ye old American sit-com FRIENDS. Another novelist friend was called in to pitch his novel by a producer. After he was done narrating the entire novel, the producer said, “I like it but can we go back to the first scene where the protagonists board a plane? That is solid, we should take it from there.”
I wonder what 34-year-old Rahul Patel, TV and sketch comedy writer, thinks of this story. He feels quite jaded about the industry. He couldn’t continue hanging out after the screening but he called me the next day to talk about his experiences and how much he related to the movie. “A typical Bollywood producer thinks he is a writer who doesn’t have time to write else he would’ve been marvellous at it. He sings praises of your story ideas and scripts. He loves everything about it and then after he is done praising you, he says: I have an idea in my head, would you be interested in writing it out for me? Only because I just don’t have the time to put pen to paper.”
“It has come to a point where now I see all my personal project scripts as visiting cards – an entry point into a conversation that will lead to me getting work.” Rahul completely loved and related to Sulemani Keeda: “Usually I don’t expect films about filmmakers and writers to be any good. They always end up being pretentious and fake. But this one felt like a genuine and sweet coming-of-age film about two struggling writers.” Gun to his head, he says his writing partner Varun Grover would be more like Mainak and he would fit the Dulal character – Mainak is fast-talking and aggressive, Dulal is more subdued and introspective. “But TV is a very mechanical game as opposed to movies. We could be working on two different aspects of the same episode at the same time without spending a lot of time together, over email.”
While everyone agrees that the crazy stories they’ve been telling me are stray events, they nevertheless provide me with context. Sulemani Keeda was not made like this. Chaitanya Hegde, the producer, actually runs a talent management company for writers and directors. He says he took on Sulemani Keeda only because when he was pitching the script to other production houses, “Nobody seemed to get it. They wanted to cast comic heroes and chocolate boys. This film would not have been made if not for friends.” And even he did not sign on before Amit, Tewari and Naveen Kasturia (writer, assistant director, and one of the film’s leads) had already put in hours of edits, rehearsals, casting conversations and shot two scenes on their own to show people the kind of film they wanted to make.
After Hegde signed on, the film Amit and friends had decided they would shoot over three months of weekends and holidays whether they had financing or not was completed in 25 days. After multiple rehearsals and a surgical pre-production process, moments were stolen across the city in which the actors gave quick takes. Tewari’s and Chaitanya’s houses were turned into two locations (the male protagonists’ house and the female protagonist’s house respectively) and friends were brought in to play various parts. They even shot an actual Open Mic event for a scene where Naveen and Tewari were introduced in character (as Mainak and Dulal) simply because costs had to be cut. Amit is happy with this guerilla version. “I don’t think junior artistes would have been able to react so naturally.” When the movie ran out of funds at the post-production stage, Sailesh Dave, Amit’s ex-boss from The Great Indian Comedy Show who now runs production house Mantra/Runaway Entertainment, was there to help the film through.
As Nikhat leaves, Palash Krishna Mehrotra arrives. This breaks the entire film industry madness into sudden Delhi madness. Considering the majority of the writers in the room are graduates from St Stephens, some of the others register a problem with their claims of superiority, which provides for an entertaining and noisy interlude.
Mayank, wants to listen to some music and urges Tewari to use his internet-connected television to play something on Youtube, something pop, he asks. At which point everyone insists that Sourabh Ratnu should sing. Sourabh evades the request. Although later in the evening, Sarovar Zaidi and Sourabh sing a couple of songs together – Samaa and Dasht-e-Tanhai. The group breaks into smaller ones with people moving from one to another, changing topics and emptying glasses. Sourabh and Mayank share a long conversation about growing older, relationships and babies – Sourabh’s daughter has just turned one.
The range of this new wave of discussions starts somewhere around Facebook and social media and extends to a thesis on the connections between psychiatry and spiritual gurus, a debate on whether the 80s were the best decade for writing in Hindi films or not, and the politics and economics of Indie cinema (or as it has been recently dubbed: “hindie” cinema). Somewhere between the different types of industry stories, huddling over refills when the writers spoke of surviving the industry, about “hanging on” and continuing to find work, the conversation briefly converged respectfully on a man who stands near a traffic signal at Juhu Circle, about four kilometers from where most of the writers live. I’ve seen the man a few times. I’ve also seen him a few times in documentaries about Mumbai. Sourabh says, “He stands on one leg, in the middle of all that pollution. He carries a board that reads: Sabse prem karein/Apne dharma pe chalein.” It is not surprising that this agonising optimism appeals to this group of professional suspenders of disbelief. How else do you survive Bollywood and its Angry Birds?
The evening has faded into the night. The party has dwindled and most people have left when Tewari decides to tell me of urban legend fit for the evening: “Legend has it that once a scriptwriter walked into a big Bollywood producer’s office. The producer is magnanimous enough and asks him to pitch a story idea. The writer, being the wiseass that he is, starts with how one morning, a common man wakes up to find himself having turned into a cockroach. A few more lines into the narration, the producer stops him. He doesn’t get it, and says this is not the kind of story that will work, and asks the writer if this is his original story. The writer says, No but I’m trying to adapt this famous writer called Kafka. The producer is unhappy, he dismisses the writer and once the writer has left, he walks to his assistant and asks her to pull out a list of scriptwriters that work in Bollywood, any of whom he might meet for a pitch, “Dekho yeh Kafka kaun hai…Aur uska naam list se kaat do.” Cut Kafka from the list.