Nitin Govil

With American cinema facing intense technological and financial challenges both at home and abroad, and with Indian media looking to globalize, there have been numerous high-profile institutional connections between Hollywood and Bombay cinema in the past few years. Many accounts have proclaimed India’s transformation in a relatively short period from a Hollywood outpost to a frontier of opportunity.

Orienting Hollywood moves beyond the conventional popular wisdom that Hollywood and Bombay cinema have only recently become intertwined because of economic priorities, instead uncovering a longer history of exchange. Through archival research, interviews, industry sources, policy documents, and cultural criticism, Nitin Govil not only documents encounters between Hollywood and India but also shows how connections were imagined over a century of screen exchange. Employing a comparative framework, Govil details the history of influence, traces the nature of interoperability, and textures the contact between Hollywood and Bombay cinema by exploring both the reality and imagination of encounter.

Hollywood’s experiences in South Asia reflect a dramatic encounter between the practical realities of industry and the imaginative possibilities of alterity. This entanglement of finance and fantasy stretches back to global Hollywood’s early heyday. In the 1930s, for example, Hollywood’s imperial adventure films sought to engage South Asia as actual territory and narrative theme, following up on the popularity of ‘sepoy stories’ in the 1910s. Among the most popular of the 1930s films was The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), which was also one of Adolf Hitler’s favourites, elevated by his belief that the film’s embrace of colonial and racial superiority could be instructive for the SS (Faber, 2008). Der Führer would be surprised to know that it was actually the Indian rebel’s threat in the film – ‘we have ways to make men talk’ – that would live in infamy as Hollywood’s preferred performance of despotic cruelty. Usually rendered in an exaggerated mock German accent – ve haf vays of m...

... the audience Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (p. [371]-431) and index Subject Motion picture industry -- California -- Los Angeles Motion picture industry -- Economic aspects -- California -- Los Angeles Motion picture industry -- Social aspects -- California -- Los ...

... the audience Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (p. [371]-431) and index Subject Motion picture industry -- California -- Los Angeles Motion picture industry -- Economic aspects -- California -- Los Angeles Motion picture industry -- Social aspects -- California -- Los ...

This article examines Hollywood’s attempts to curtail print duplication piracy in Bombay during the 1920s. The Thief of Bagdad, starring Douglas Fairbanks, was a massive international success for the Hollywood studio United Artists and their newly established Asian distribution network. Perhaps the most famous Hollywood release in India, Thief catapulted its star, Douglas Fairbanks, into the pantheon of Indian screen legends. In the late 1920s, United Artists discovered that Thief was being illegally distributed and exhibited in India and filed a series of legal actions in the Bombay courts. This article examines the extensive legal record of these cases—alongside letters, memos, and other studio correspondence—in order to reveal the topography of international distribution and its legal and non-legal circuits. We argue that Hollywood’s problems in curtailing the so-called “Bombay piracies” demonstrate the contradictions of international intellectual property enforcement at a critical early juncture in media globalization.

nation must come together to unite " (Bush 2001). was quickly enshrined in the lexicon of presidential yuk-yuks by his detractors on the US political left. It would soon become clear, however, that there was some method in his malapropism (if not in his mad-ness). After September 11th of the same year, Bush's tautological reasoning would frame the project of a resurgent American self-justification, where the nation served to both describe the state of social col-lectivity and prescribe the role of the state in securing its formation around the world. Read against the cur-rent geopolitics of military intervention, where effects are manufactured to precede causes, Bush's flaunting of rhetorical convention in order to justify the open jurisdiction of American unilateralism reminds us

Magni passus extra viam - yasadigimiz her gecen gun- icler acisi bir ilerleme halinde karsimiza cikan film sanati ve endustrisinin gunahi ve ahlak bozuklugunu gosteren sahneler icermesi nedeniyle derinden ofkeliyiz... Her gun milyonlarca insanin bu filmleri seyretmeye gittigini soylememize bile gerek yok; bu sinema salonlari uygar ve yari-uygar ulkelerde her gecen gun daha da cogaliyor; bu filmler yalnizca zenginlerin degil fakat toplumun butun siniflarinin bos zamanlarina sunulmaktadir ve sapkinligin en populer bicimini olusturuyorlar." -Papa XI. Pius, 1936- "Hollywood, dunyadaki ABD'nin en guclu silahi ile 400 milyonluk halkin boylesine kulturel olarak dollenmesi isini ustlendi. Film ustune filmler, iki savas boyunca Hindistan'a gonderildi - filmler bize rumba ve samba yapmayi ogretti. Filmler bize kumrular gibi sevismeyi ve kur yapmayi ogretti. Filmler bize oldurmeyi ve calmayi ogretti; filmler bize 'Hi' ve 'Gee' (merhaba ve hay Allah anlamlarina...

Why is Hollywood so successful? Overwhelming almost every other national cinema and virtually extinguishing foreign cinema in the multicultural United States, Hollywood seems powerful around the globe. This book draws from political economy, cultural studies, and cultural policy analysis to highlight the material factors underlining this apparent artistic success. This new edition brings the arguments completely up-to-date by taking into consideration important developments such as 9/11, shifts in the exchange rate, transformations in U.S. foreign policy, and significant developments in trade agreements, consumer technology, and ownership regimes. Each chapter has been substantially revised, and major new sections on India and China have been added.

Abstract It is now over 15 years since Arthur Andersen collaborated with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry to issue the first ‘Entertainment Industry Report,’ an annual publication designed to gauge the net worth and growth potential of the Indian media industries for the global investment class. Arthur Anderson was supplanted by other transnational accounting services and management consultancies to produce the glossy trade report in association with India’s largest and oldest business organization. Published in March, the report has become a key reference for journalism and cultural policy, a vehicle of industry self-promotion, and an index of the industry’s corporate maturation and the overall economic health of the nation. While each report’s claims on accuracy are widely accepted, this article pays close attention to the visualization of data, reading the reports as critical to an emergent financial logic that jostles uneasily with the history of trade practices in the Indian creative industries.

When “industry status” for the Indian film trade was announced at Bombay’s Leela Kempinski Hotel in 1998, Dilip Kumar joked about the aspiration toward a new corporate ethos. “We in the film industry are prone to be fictional in our approach to life,” said the old movie hero, “we are very bad at accessing the mathematics that are involved in industrial jurisprudence .... I have a mortal fear of mathematics. Whenever any figure work is involved, I get frightened” (Kumar, 1998). Given the irony that hindsight often brings, Kumar’s cheeky temerity now sounds like a prologue to the decade that followed, as big numbers came to dominate film industry discourse. As the twenty-first century opened for business, Indian media statistics circulated through the press, industry, and academy, enabled by the proliferation of reports produced by Indian business lobbies in collaboration with international management consultancies, like the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII), the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), the US-India Business Council (USIBC), Arthur Andersen (AA), Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler (KPMG), Ernst and Young (EY), and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC). A decade known colloquially as “the noughties” and “the Ohs” was presided over by a trail of zeroes criss-crossing the pages of glossy industry co-productions. The procession of statistics, marching together with industry acronyms in a dazzling parade of letters and numbers, was orchestrated for globally interconnected investment communities hoping that the fortunes of the film industry might rally along with the SENSEX. Integral to this new speculative economy, numbers composed a future-oriented discourse. By mid-decade, the subtitles of entertainment industry brochures provided dreamy, tumescent figurations of possible futures: a 2005 report was subtitled An Unfolding Opportunity; a 2006 report, Unraveling the Potential; A Growth Story Unfolds for 2007; and by 2008, Sustaining Growth. A 2009 report, finding that the Indian media industries would not grow as projected, offered instead the more sober and succinctly titled Outlook. Nevertheless, by the end of the decade, these reports, despite having different points of origin, were all committed to the specificity of estimates. FICCI/KPMG’s 2009 Industry Report predicted a rise in the number of Indian multiplexes from 850 in 2009 to 1,254 in 2012, while the total Indian box-office of US$ 1.6 billion in 2008 was projected to rise to US$ 2.5 billion by 2013. The 2009 PWC report claimed that the Indian film industry would grow by 11.5 percent over the next five years, swelling from Rs 107 billion in 2008 to Rs 184.3 billion in 2013, while domestic box-office receipts would increase by 10.2 percent cumulatively over the next five years, from the present size of Rs 81 billion to Rs 132 billion in 2013. In a remarkable conceit of precision, the USIBC/EY 2008 brochure reported that piracy cost the film industry US$ 959 million and 571,896 jobs in 2008. Roundtable (Prophecies)

... Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures. Lakshman, N., and R. Grover. 2008. ... Nitin Govil is an assistant professor of communication at the University of California, San Diego, Department of Communications, 9500 Gilman Drive #0503, La Jolla, CA 92093–0503. ...

... While films like Metropolis (Lang claimed that the film was inspired by his first glimpse of the New York ... 14 Yet at the same time that a legitimation crisis has emerged in the representation of disaster ... we will share the little girl's remark when she is shown images of the city's past in ...

Chapter 5 Bollywood and the frictions of global mobility Nitin Govil Look at Titanic—it'sa ... malls and multiplexes, TV game shows, fashion runways and dance extravaganzas, to soft-drink and fastfood ... in order to realize its 'original'Indian identity in the global present (Varma, 2004 ...

Hollywood's Effects, Bollywood FX Nitin Govil What happens when Hollywood and Bombay meet, Siva only knows. —Time, 1959 As a narrative that we renew continually, that we reconstruct with the collaboration of others, identity should also be understood as a copro-duction. — ...

... incidents, and invoked by regulatory guidelines on aircraft noise, pollution and waste disposal. ... four decades later, when an American cinema proprietor, David Flexer, at Inflight Motion Pictures ... a system for showing films on airlines, partially motivated by his own in-flight boredom ...