Nothing exemplifies the entrepreneurial spirit of Madras more than the story of the city’s film studios and the men who established and ran it through the 1940s and 1950s.
Going by their scale of operations and ability to roll out the latest advances in cinema technology of the period, these were quite possibly the pioneers in the whole of Asia.
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At the peak of the ‘golden era’, extending from the 1950s to the 1980s, almost any south Indian film had to come to the city to avail of one service or the other.
“Pioneers like S.S. Vasan, A.V. Meiyappan, Nagi Reddy and T.R. Sundaram built studio complexes with sound studios, film labs, editing rooms and distribution departments to reach a whole nation,” says film academic K. Hariharan.
“They had elaborate systems in place like roll calls for employees, salary systems and call sheets for all their actors and technicians, irrespective of their celebrity status. These creative pioneers were not mere studio heads for they were equally adept in writing screenplays and even directing their films.”
The studios made films not just in Tamil, but other southern regional languages as well. Pioneers like S.S. Vasan produced films in Hindi and ensured that the films got a pan-India release.
In his book My years with Boss at Gemini Studios , writer Ashokamitran presents a humour-laden account of the behind-the-screen happenings at S.S. Vasan’s empire, and notes that Gemini Studios — located where the Park Hotel now stands — used to have a steady stream of VIP visitors and casual visitors, alike.
The studios worked on an industrial scale, with Gemini and AVM at one stage having more than 500 employees on their rolls.
It is hard to pin down to any one reason the downfall of the big studios. Often, it was a mix of many reasons: from the rise of stars through the 1970s and 1980s to the audience preferring a ‘Rajesh Khanna film’ rather than a ‘Gemini Film’; in many cases, it was a single miscalculation like backing a wrong movie and spending way too much on it.
Though the golden era has ended, the magic that the Studios of Madras generated lives on in celluloid and now, re-mastered digital.
(The full text of film academic K. Hariharan’s note to The Hindu on the ‘ >Golden era of Madras film studios ’ can be accessed online)