Money blues hit Kollywood hard

With daily wage payments affected, shooting activity is run on a combination of trust and credit

November 20, 2016 12:00 am | Updated November 17, 2021 06:08 am IST - CHENNAI:

As an industry that by and large runs on daily wage payments, the film and television sector in Tamil Nadu is finding it increasingly tough to cope with the cash crunch following the demonetisation announcement.

Every day, wage settlements are made for the bulk of the crew, which include light men, make-up and costume assistants, carpenters and drivers, as well as payments for conveyance and petrol. With demonetisation reducing liquidity in the economy, cash is simply not available for payments on a daily basis.

Feeling the pinch

“Film financiers, who used to play an extremely important role, are now feeling the pinch of demonetisation and decreasing amounts of liquid cash have affected payments for the daily wage workers. While the shooting schedules of top heroes will continue, it is the smaller films, which play an important role in employing daily wage workers in their units, that will be affected, said Shankar, a production executive from Shalom Pictures.

“It is not feasible to expect workers who are recruited for only a day or two by a film unit to take their payments through cheque. Many film units are asking them to work on credit for a few days and workers now are even accepting cash payments in old currency notes which they can exchange, as long as the amount due is small,” he added, throwing light on how the industry was continuing to function.

V.R. Kumar of Prisem Films said soon after the announcement regarding demonetisation, the shooting of a film he was producing had to be stopped. “We resumed only a couple of days ago. For workers who are attached to various unions, we credit the amount to the union and they take care of the disbursement. The smaller, individual, daily payments are however becoming tough to settle,” he said.

Making a case however for the emergence of better fiscal discipline and structure, S. Sashikanth, of Y Not Studios, currently producing two movies, said that the current scenario could give way to the industry going the ‘corporate’ way. “Given that financiers will now be edged out for a while, cash transfers will decrease and cheques and wire transfers will become the norm, leading to structured functioning.”

For many, banking on goodwill, trust and the hope that the situation will change shortly seems to be the best way forward.

With stricter schedules in place for the television industry given the number of episodes to be canned in a week, stoppage of work or disruption of shooting schedules is tough to deal with, many TV actors said.

“Most daily wage earners are sticking on and continuing to work so far owing to the goodwill or trust they have in established production houses. If not daily, wages are being settled at least once every few days,” said Maanas, an actor in the Tamil small screen industry.

No complaints

Stating that there had been no complaints so far due to non-settlement of payments, Siva, from the Film Employees Federation of South India, said that people were continuing to work with production units based on trust. “A few producers are managing to settle wages through part payments or by stating that the wages will be paid soon and there have been no issues raised. However, if this continues, we are anticipating that there might be complaints in the first week of December,” he said.

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