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The lone ranger
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For over 20 years, he has been the representative for Fox and Paramount studios. His knowledge of Hollywood would give even a competent critic an inferiority complex. PRADEEP SEBASTIAN meets A. Premchand, the best man for the job.
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Photos: Sampath Kumar G.P.
Nobody does it better: Premchand reels off statistics that would put the suited marketing types to shame. — Photos: Sampath Kumar G.P.
"PLAZA, WHICH was modelled after the Piccadilly Circus in London, opened with Broadway Melody in April 1936. Blu Moon in 1971 with Seeta Aur Geeta, Blu Diamond in 1974 with 27 Down, Lido in June 1965 with Cleopatra, Galaxy in November 1971 with Sharapanjara and Hello Dolly, Symphony in 1978 with The Great Waltz. BRV, Opera, Liberty, New Empire, Imperial, and Rex opened in the 1930s. Liberty was called Globe then. BRV, by the way, stands for Bangalore Rifle Volunteers. Opera opened as both a dancing hall and a movie house. As early as the '50s they turned from playing Hollywood movies to Tamil movies — mostly with MGR. Imperial and New Empire followed suit — one playing Malayalam soft porn and the other, old Hindi revivals. Cinemascope was first introduced in Liberty in 1954 with The Robe. It played in a six-track mega optical stereophonic sound. In 1960, a 180 degree screen called Cinerama was first introduced in Kapali with This is Cinerama and then Seven Wonders of the World."
That was Premchand's off-the-cuff, unblinking, unfaltering reply to my: "Would you know when Bangalore's English movie theatres got started?" He is our one surviving legacy from an ethos that has vanished — the great movie going era of the '70s. Movie reviewers in the City — like me — depend on this dapper, slim, knowledgeable man with his phenomenal, passionate memory to get us the right movie stills, inform us about previews — and, most importantly — get the studios and the theatre owners to acknowledge us as film critics, not gate-crashers. In turn, the distributors and exhibitors look to him to promote a movie in the City and to keep tabs on the day's collection.
For 41 years, A. Premchand has been the representative for Fox and Paramount studios in Bangalore. (The other studios also take his help from time to time because no one knows the territory like he does. Not very long ago, some suited marketing types tried to muscle their way in on his turf but they simply couldn't cut it.)
I have often seen Prem stride quickly from one theatre to another, checking the print and sound, dropping off movie stills and production notes with the managers, and chatting with whichever newspaper reviewer he ran into at the show. And he did it the old way — with no office, no staff, no marketing jargon, no suits, no ties.
But before he was any of this, he was a movie buff. A very privileged and lucky one — he actually grew up in the premises of a movie theatre. "My father, B. Anand, was the zonal manager of the Army-run theatres, and BRV was one of them. This was between 1960-69. I would spend all my time here, watching the same movies over and over again, dreaming of becoming a cameraman. I would also help my father think up captions (sic) for the newspaper ads and in making the banner and hoardings that would go in front of the theatre. I remember once — in 1965 — that police had to be called to control the crowd for Goldfinger.
Bangalore had gone wild over that Bond movie. After my father died, I had to take up a regular job, but I asked Fox if I could work for them in my spare time as a hobby, and they said yes. And so my evenings and weekends were spent sending telegrams to Fox late in the night to inform them of the ticket collections for the day. These days, of course, I just e-mail them."
PS: I remember that for a long time there were no Hollywood movies playing in Bangalore.
P: From '71 to '75, actually: Indira Gandhi banned American movies to protest the Nixon government's support for Pakistan. Theatres were then forced to show only films from Britain and Europe. NFDC was formed around this time — to import foreign films and to finance Indian art films. And that's how we got to see Crazy Boys of the Games, Fear is the Key, Red Sun, Cold Sweat, Murder on the Orient Express, Caravan to Vaccares. Often, these theatres wouldn't have an English movie to play. Rex, for instance, had to play Chattakari to fill the gap but it was a hit. Then, when the ban was lifted in 1976, it was done with a clause — you could import only 100 American films a year. That lasted for a whole decade. From 1975 to 1985.
So we missed out on a lot of movies then?
Oh no, they all came back and played in our theatres eventually. In fact, it was during their revival, the re-runs, that many of them did extremely well because by then their reputation had grown.
Movies like The Day of the Jackal, The Great Escape, Lawrence of Arabia and Guns of Navarone, to name just a few. But the movies that we never got to see were those that were banned.
Like what? And why?
Either for political reasons or because the censors objected to the violence and sex. Midnight Express, Zardoz, Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom. More recently, Fight Club, American Pie, Alien Resurrection, 8 Mile.
But who or what decides which movie plays where?
Those days, each studio had a theatre. Paramount had Plaza, Warner Brothers and MGM had Imperial, Columbia and Fox had Rex, and United Artists and Rank had BRV. It's more or less the same now, except that movies from different studios can plasy in different theatres. Also, with so many of those old theatres closing down, studios have had to move home. The studios and theatres have been shuffled. When Imperial stopped showing English movies, Warner Brothers moved to Galaxy, which had just opened. Even a casual moviegoer must have noticed that Plaza has always played Paramount and Universal movies — Love Story, The Godfather, The Ten Commandments, Psycho.
I have always been curious about how this whole thing works — who makes what money and how much?
Well, you basically have the distributor who, in most cases, is the studio (Fox, Paramount) and you have the exhibitor who is the theatre owner. It works with percentages. For blockbusters — super specials, they call them — it is 70 per cent for the distributor and 30 for the exhibitor.
But as the weeks go by, the percentage for the exhibitor increases. Which is why theatres would like movies to play for longer. Or the exhibitor takes on a movie at a flat rental rate. These days, it is quite common for the studio to sell the print to an independent distributor. Different independent distributors bid for the film and the highest bidder gets it.
Movies don't play as long as they used to, do they?
It is all rather ironical: from the '50s to '80s when movies at theatres did staggeringly well, nearly every movie would at least play for a minimum of three to four weeks!
People saw the same movies over and over again. And these would be movies that came months, even years, later than when they were first made. To give you example: Jaws was released in '75 but came to India only in '80. ET opened in '82 but played here in '84. This was fairly common. Or it would take four to six months for a movie to make it here. Now, when movies come here within a month of their release in America, the movies don't run that long.
What do you think has happened?
A lot of reasons, I think. Back then, going to movies was the one big outing — the one solid entertainment you could look forward to — but now there are more things to do. And then there's cable television — you can watch in the comfort of your home. Not to forget video piracy and how that has affected theatre attendance. Also, I must mention another crucial factor: the price of tickets because of the high taxes in Karnataka: 70 per cent, while in Tamil Nadu it is only 25 per cent. I remember paying 80 paisa to see Guns of Navarone when I was in school. Of course, I sat right in front — we called them bucket seats. It was only years later that I realised the cheap seats were called that because they were near the red buckets filled with sand that hung close to the screen in case of fire.
I must have seen nearly everything that showed here: all those legendary Hollywood classics. but I'm confused now about which theatres I saw them in. Could you...
Okay. Let's see. BRV: The Magnificent Seven, The Graduate, The Party, In The Heat of the Night, Lilies of the Field, the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns, The Pink Panther series, the early Bond movies. Plaza: Ten Commandments — a phenomenal run, Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window, Love Story, The Godfather trilogy, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Grease 1 and 2, Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Bullet Train, the Brosnan Bonds. Blu Moon: McKenna's Gold (revival), Ice Station Zebra, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Nicholas and Alexandra, Coma, Poltergeist, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (revival). Blu Diamond: Butterflies Are Free, 40 Carats, Abba, which ran for 29 weeks, and the Back to the Future movies. Imperial: Quo Vadis, King of Kings, To Chase a Crooked Shadow, Ben Hur, Kelly's Heroes. Galaxy: Tora, Tora, Tora, Patton, Star Wars, The Exorcist (25 weeks), Enter The Dragon (ran for a whole year), Mad Max 2. Lido: Cleopatra, Sabata, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, Lawrence of Arabia, Fiddler on the Roof, ET, Jaws, Battle of the Bulge, Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines, It's A Mad, Mad, Mad World, Grand Prix, The Guns of Navarone, Khartoum, Oliver! Ryan's Daughter, Cromwell, The Day of the Jackal, Dr. Zhivago, Dirty Dozen and all the Roger Moore Bonds. Rex: Bridge on the River Kwai, The Great Escape (revival), The Odessa File, Puppet on a Chain, Papillion, Our Man Flint, Silent Movie, 100 Rifles, The Omen (15 weeks), Fast Forward, The French Connection, The Secret of Santa Vittoria, A Passage to India. Symphony: Alien, Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, Visiting Hours (an unexpected sleeper hit), Eye of the Needle, Conan the Barbarian, Blue Thunder. Liberty: Magnificent Obsession, South Pacific, Three Coins in a Fountain, Birds, Marnie, Cape Fear (the Hitchcock original), Charade, Spartacus.
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