By Anand Giridharadas
MUMBAI: An Indian woman in a flowing, beaded gown glides through a pond. As the drumbeats of the Indian countryside patter, a dancing phalanx of tunic-clad women twirls. A mosquito net brushes over the woman's lover. A silver anklet splashes into a pond.
These are scenes from the trailer of a forthcoming movie, "Saawariya." The film, whose Hindi title means beloved, has an Indian director and cast. It is melodramatic. Its characters speak Hindi and burst into eight song-and-dance routines. It is, in other words, vintage Bollywood - but for one thing.
It is brought to you by Hollywood.
The studio behind "Saawariya," Sony Pictures, is the first in what will become a wave of American studios to produce their own kaleidoscopic, song-and-dance Bollywood films. The American studios are keen to make money in India, but in a nation where $19 of every $20 spent at the box office goes to domestic films, the studios are deciding to join Bollywood, not try to beat it.
"The importing of American films into India is not filling a gap," Gareth Wigan, vice chairman of Columbia TriStar, the Sony division that produced the film, said by telephone from Los Angeles. "You're not bringing a dish to a bare table. You're bringing a dish to a table where you have to move a lot of other dishes to fit in, and that's not true in a lot of other countries."
And so begins a strange competition to make the best Bollywood film, pitting Hollywood, the world's most profitable industry, against India's own studios, the reigning masters of the genre, which make more movies and sell more tickets than any film industry in the world.
With movie audiences shrinking in America and swelling here, Hollywood wants to tap into India's market. But Indian-made films captured 95 percent of the country's box-office sales in 2006, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Domestic films are just as dominant in the United States, but they account for just 35 percent of the box office in France, 33 percent in Japan and 12 percent in Britain, according to 2005 data published by two scholars, David Waterman and Sang-Woo Lee.
"There is no country on the planet, other than India and the United States, that approaches that level of domestic business," Andrew Cripps, the president of Paramount Pictures International, said by telephone from Los Angeles. And so Paramount, too, is contemplating Indian productions.
Walt Disney has partnered with an Indian studio, Yash Raj Films, to make animated movies for Indians. The first film, "Roadside Romeo," due next summer, is a parable of Indian inequality, featuring a dog abandoned by rich owners in Mumbai and forced to brave its hungry streets.
And Warner Brothers is developing two Bollywood projects, including one song-and-dance smorgasbord, according to Richard Fox, the head of its international division. In a telephone interview, he said Warner would seek to earn a majority of its Indian sales from Bollywood productions. The studio plans three to six movies a year in the coming years, all with Indian talent.
"We're not coming to change anything," Fox said.
That is Hollywood's Indian mantra. Sanjay Leela Bhansali, the director of "Saawariya," was at first wary that Hollywood would trample him, and was surprised when Sony left him alone. At most, he said, Wigan would offer gentle, helpful suggestions for the script, which is based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's short story "White Nights."
"There was no compromise asked of the film," Bhansali said, staring out at the Arabian Sea from his stylish north Mumbai apartment.
On Saturday, the International Herald Tribune was permitted to view the movie trailer, which had yet to be shown even to Sony executives.
Hollywood is now Bollywood's competitor, but local filmmakers say Hollywood is wise in attempting to mimic it, not supplant it.
"They're doing the right thing," Yash Chopra, one of Bollywood's most revered filmmakers, said in an interview. "To come to a country to make a film is either to understand the culture or break the culture."
Others doubt that U.S. executives grasp the nuances that entice Indian audiences. Tyler Cowen, the author of "Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World's Cultures," said it was unusual for Hollywood "to try to copy the native style so exactly."
"That is unusual for a reason," he said. "It usually doesn't work."
"Bollywood," whose name amalgamates Hollywood and Bombay, the former name for Mumbai, refers to Hindi-language movies made in Mumbai, which account for roughly one-fifth of India's 1,000 or so annual productions.
Cinema is booming in India as the middle class mushrooms and builders erect air-conditioned multiplexes in cities. PricewaterhouseCoopers expects India's film industry to expand to $4.4 billion a year in 2011 from $2.1 billion in 2006.
Hollywood wants more of that pie, whether through imported or locally made content, and this year it had surprising success with imports. Among other triumphs, "Spider-Man 3" made $17 million in India, becoming the most successful Hollywood film in the country's history.
Behind these successes is a trend toward dubbing films not just into Hindi, but also into regional languages like Bhojpuri and Telegu.
But dubbing cannot woo a billion Indians. Uday Singh, Sony's India chief, estimates that a Hollywood movie in English can attract five million viewers. Dubbing expands the upper limit to 30 million, still a mere fragment of India's population.
Now, with "Saawariya," Singh said his Los Angeles colleagues have accepted that only Bollywood fills the seats. He believes Sony will earn 90 percent of its Indian keep from Bollywood-style films.
Hollywood has gone native elsewhere, in France, Germany, Hong Kong and beyond - but never against a domestic industry with so vast and impassioned a following.
For millions of Indians without television sets, movies are the primary entertainment form - as they were for all Indians through the 1980s, when there was just one television channel. For big Indian families with diverging tastes that watch movies together, Bollywood packages romance, comedy, drama and action into a single serving.
Bollywood is interactive. Bhansali recalled taking his maid to one of his movies. During a musical number, she leaped from her seat and began dancing. "You sit down, you're embarrassing me," Bhansali recalled telling her. "I'm the director. People are looking at me."
She retorted that if he didn't want the movie enjoyed as it should be, he shouldn't have invited her.
Perhaps the greatest obstacle for Hollywood is that Bollywood is everywhere here. Actors' images are ubiquitous. Bollywood show tunes engross Indians. There is what might be called a music-industrial complex in India, hooking consumers to the songs on a soundtrack before the film is released.
Nightclub D.J.s play the songs. Phone companies release matching ringtones. MTV plays them incessantly. By the time the movie comes out, its songs are stuck in millions of heads, and watching it is the only path to closure.
"If you take all the pieces of Bollywood out of our lives - the celebrities on the billboards, the songs in the nightclubs, the stars on Page 3 - Indians would find their lives to be completely empty," said Shuchi Pandya, a jewelry merchandiser in Mumbai. "It's subconscious. Even if you don't enjoy Bollywood movies, it becomes a part of your life."
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