Bollywood’s Script Thieves

The Hindi film industry is notorious for lifting stories. Is there a solution?

When Manoj Tyagi gave up a career in banking to join the ranks of film writers in Mumbai a decade ago, he was introduced to what he calls “DVD meetings”. Tyagi, who wrote Page 3, Corporate, Jail, and directed Mumbai Salsa, recalls gatherings where producers, directors, and writers “sat around and talked about movies they had watched the night before”. The purpose of these meetings was to plot stories and lift ideas from the DVD or portions of the movie they’d just seen.

Tyagi says that when Indian filmmakers see a successful foreign film—or a music video—they think they can remake it. “They believe it will work because seeing is believing. Not many people can visualise a document.” He imitates them when he says, “Yaar, maine dekha, yaar, aur box office ka result bhi saamne hai. Iska pata nahin kya hoga, kaise hoga. Iss se achcha tu ye bana de. Ek star bhi ready hai karne ke liye.” (“Dude, I saw this movie, and it worked at the box office. I don’t know about the script you’ve got, but you could remake the movie I saw. There’s a star ready to work on it.”) If it wasn’t a DVD, it was a screenplay. Usually, someone else’s screenplay. “The first time we copied was when we made Dil Hai Ki Manta Nahin,” says the writer Robin Bhatt, who formed a successful association with Mahesh and Mukesh, his brothers. “Aamir gave Mahesh a book called 20 Best American Screenplays, and asked him to read the first one, It Happened One Night. Mahesh very conveniently passed it on to me. I read ten pages and said, ‘Mahesh, this is Chori Chori.’ But I realised that Chori Chori did not use the climax of the screenplay. I told them that we should take the entire thing as it was. Let’s not fuck with the original script.” Bhatt says he couldn’t procure the movie when he adapted the script. But in a remarkable coincidence, he says, he finally saw it on a hotel channel while the movie was being filmed in Ooty. Aamir and Mahesh rushed to watch it with him.

When it comes to plagiarism, the big moviemakers get rapped regularly. Which is why some bristle when Sagar Ballary is spoken of as a leading light in Indian cinema’s new age. Before he became famous, Ballary assisted Rajat Kapoor on the tight-budgeted Mixed Doubles. Two years ago, Ballary directed Bheja Fry, an indoor comedy about a fateful encounter between an idiot and a smart music industry executive. The film made 30 times its production budget. But critics found uncanny resemblances with another film; they decided that Bheja Fry had its roots in The Dinner Game, a French film about an idiot. Ballary is undecided about whether this is fair or unfair.

He defends himself by declaring that his movie made Rs 15 crore on a budget of Rs 49 lakh. “The French film was fantastically produced,” Ballary says by way of distinguishing between the two. “Here, the characters, nuances and dialogues were different. I didn’t have that kind of money. I couldn’t ask for a particular kind of tree in the frame. As for The Dinner Game, the comedy was subtle and very highbrow. My friends told me that if I hadn’t made Bheja Fry, they wouldn’t have understood the French film.”

He also observes that the French film might not have been original. Among the Bheja Fry memorabilia Ballary possesses is a bound book that contains the movie’s screenplay in English and Hindi. “If you read the English one straight, it’ll read just like the French film,” he says. Ballary has acknowledged The Dinner Game’s influence, but to see naked proof of it is still startling. For that reason, producers have asked him to keep it locked away. “Rajat was surprised when I told him I was doing this for my first movie. He said ‘are you sure?’” Ballary was certain, but it bothered him. “I wasn’t very comfortable with Bheja Fry being my first film. I had another screenplay ready. It was an original screenplay. But it needed more money, and nobody, absolutely nobody, would have ever given me a chance to make it. They would have asked who the hell I was. The fact that I had to make something original was heavy in my heart. But believe me, you have to understand it from the perspective of a filmmaker who wants to make a film, and is dying to make his first film, and is dying to open any door that allows him to make a film. The only way to make a film then is by doing this, and saying ‘okay, this is what I’m working on—are you interested now?’ That is how it really was. We could’ve done a new story. But I’m positive that with my status as a mere Rs10,000 assistant, I would’ve never got myself a financier.” And then, “Even my father wouldn’t have produced that film if he had Rs 50 lakh,” adds Ballary.

There are many reasons why the Mumbai film industry steals ideas. People interviewed list laziness, fear of originality, budgetary constraints, and a lack of investment in writing talent among the causes. Others say lax copyright enforcement facilitates imitation. But most explanations have a subtext: people who copied did so because they had to. They did it because producers wanted it that way. The question is, why do producers want it that way?

A prominent film writer says writers don’t do enough to make producers see things their way. And that’s where DVDs are more than handy for references. She says more research, or a good presentation, could go a long way towards showing producers what the writer means. Dibakar Bannerjee, who directed Khosla Ka Ghosla and Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, says the approach works for him. “It comes down to how prepared you are, and how you translate it to the producer. I understand that there are neanderthal producers out there, but there are also a lot of film savvy ones. For a future film, for example, I’ve created a 100-page visual treatment note using over 200 archived photos. I have two songs and some theme music. You need to be prepared.”

Being prepared isn’t necessarily enough. Preparation entails details, and a large number of people interviewed for this story say the industry does not have an appetite for details. A costume supervisor who does not want to be named for fear of being ostracised, says that she usually takes six weeks to research the look for a film. People know this, but when they approach her for jobs, they disregard the research time she requires. Sometimes clients ask her if she can do a project in a week or two (or tomorrow, if possible). She recalls that on one film set, as she straightened an actor’s costume between fight scene takes for continuity, the action director screamed at her for interfering. “They tell me ‘itna rigid mat ho, kuchh farak nahi padta hai’. They think people are stupid.” The overwhelming priority, she says, is to just get the job done. She shakes her head. “They don’t care about what works, just what fits the budget.”

“The balance sheet is more important than ethics and principles.” Sanjay Gadhvi, the tall, lean director with the charming smile, doesn’t strike you as a cynical man. But after a decade of making films, he says he has lost his idealism. Gadhvi directed the Dhoom series, which resulted in immense demand for power bikes. He also made Mere Yaar Ki Shaadi Hai, which bore a strong resemblance to My Best Friend’s Wedding. In 2001, Aditya Chopra of Yash Raj Films asked Gadhvi if he would direct a movie with Uday Chopra—Yash Chopra’s son and Aditya’s brother—in the lead. A source familiar with the request says that Aditya wanted a film like Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge for his brother, with the hope that the movie would do for Uday what DDLJ did for Shah Rukh Khan.

Aditya found that platform in My Best Friend’s Wedding, but Gadhvi consistently told the media that the Yash Raj movie was not lifted. An admission then would have inspired a lawsuit from a Hollywood studio. Making the film for Yash Raj, Gadhvi says, was a career decision. “I could have said ‘no’, that I didn’t want to make it, but man, I got a chance to make a movie. Was I going to miss it? No. Agar tum Howard Roark banne jaaoge, it takes you longer.”

Stolen films do not necessarily do well in the market. “Ninety-five per cent of these films fail anyway,” Kamlesh Pandey, the writer of Rang De Basanti and Delhi-6, says. “By stealing, they think they are minimising risk.”

There is, in fact, an added risk: litigation. Makers of two recent Govinda films copied and paid for their sins heavily in out-of-court settlements. Partner, the Govinda movie based on Hitch, was the first high-profile case of multinational studios hitting back at Indian script thieves. When Sony Pictures India got wind of the making of Partner, they approached the producer. Kersi Daruwala, who runs Sony Pictures in India, says he doesn’t know what happened with the case, but industry folk say the matter was resolved between the producer and Sony. The second Govinda film was the unauthorised remake of My Cousin Vinny. Within two days of finding out, studio lawyers drafted an agreement with Ravi Chopra to legalise the remake (Bandaa Yeh Bindaas Hai).

There is now a perceptible decline in the number of overtly lifted films. Gadhvi says that aggressive litigation of rights holders is not the only reason. Earlier, he says, western studios that didn’t know the market demanded exorbitant rates for remake rights (approximately Rs 7-8 crore, according to Gadhvi). He says that their rates are more affordable now. So Indian producers are able to buy the scripts.

Also, good businessmen normally prefer truce to war. “We want to be in their good books,” says a representative of the Motion Picture Association of America in India. But the new cordial relations have led to a peculiar problem. Since matters are being settled out of court there aren’t enough plagiarism cases in court. Which has stalled the shaping of an effective Intellectual Property law, according to a lawyer. “They know the (Hindi film) industry runs like a family. Besides, Hollywood has started seeing this (selling remake rights) as a revenue stream.” But there is still an Indian mindset which has not been changed by the new circumstances.

As an industry insider puts it, “If I can have it for free, why do I need to buy it?” A writer speaking on condition of anonymity says that the head of a large-family run studio frequently pitches ideas to writers as if they are his own. In the chance event that the writers find out that some of these story ideas are lifts from obscure movies, the boss tells them, “But this is your interpretation of that film. It is not the same film.” “And forget American films,” the writer says, angrier and angrier. “When they copy a regional film, do they pay up or no? Do you really believe that the inventors don’t deserve money?” The writer believes that the people who do the copying ultimately have a choice. They could ask the producer for the rights. And if it doesn’t work in one go, they could ask again. “Ultimately, you took the short cut.”

Most film writers in India, it seems, are incapable of defending their own salaries. Senior writers like to point out that a contract drafted by the Film Writers Association for its meeting with the Producers Guild and the Indian Motion Picture Association is likely to improve work conditions for writers dramatically. One clause specifies minimum wage: Rs 3 lakh for story, Rs 3 lakh for screenplay, and Rs 3 lakh for dialogue. This is a pittance in most movie budgets, but most writers earn less than even this. Pandey, an accomplished writer who earns considerably more than the proposed minimum wage, says he finds the minimum writers’ fee too low. He says that the writer should be the star, and their status should be reflected in the money they earn. But his high estimation of a writer’s place in the film industry is not shared by his less accomplished peers. They freaked out when they saw how much the model contract would get them, and had the base pay reduced to Rs 2 lakh, fearing that a high salary base will lead to fewer jobs.

“There used to be writers who went above their title,” says the film writer Robin Bhatt, “Men like Salim-Javed. Very few do that these days.” Bhatt’s resume contains blatant lifts as well as original scripts. “The decline started in the 70s,” Pandey says, “when the good writers stopped writing.”It became about the star. “Writing and writers were neglected, and producers had no option but to steal.” For most film writers of modest talent, there is intense pressure to pilfer the works of greater talent because it is a professional necessity to keep themselves competitive. “The problem is that not everybody has real talent in this industry. The filmstars have done it in a way that there’s no incentive to do original work. If they see Mel Gibson making an entry one way, they want to do just that. And because that’s not a big deal to write, anybody who sucks up to actors can become a writer,” Pandey says.

About The Author

Rahul Bhatia