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Audience for English movies getting smaller?

A LANDMARK: Crown Theatre in Kozhikode.

Shortly after watching a preview of Titanic in Chennai, A.R. Prakash, proprietor of Crown Theatre, Kozhikode, called up his younger brother A.R. Vinod and said, "It is an excellent film and people will like it; I think we could show it for three weeks."

Prakash's prediction proved wrong. Titanic lay anchored in Kozhikode for the next six months.

"The film ran for 189 days in fact," Vinod recalls. "We certainly did not anticipate that kind of a success for an English movie in Kozhikode."

That was in 1998. Those were the days when Crown showed almost exclusively English films. Times have changed. So much so that the year's most talked about Hollywood movie, Da Vinci Code, had to wait for more than a month to get a screening at Crown after it was released in the rest of the country. Two Bollywood blockbusters, Fanaa and Krrish, stood in the way, as Crown, had shed, reluctantly, its tag as the "English only' cinema.

"We are forced to show Hindi movies, just to stay in the business," Vinod says. "We would have loved to show just the Hollywood movies, if there was an audience for it."

Many film buffs of Kozhikode also wish if Crown had retained its earlier identity. Says the corporation councillor H.A. Musthafa, who has been watching films at Crown from 1962. "It is extremely disappointing to find that they are not showing as many English movies as they used to," he says. "I have seen so many classics at Crown over the last four decades. I must have seen William Wyler's Ben Hur six or seven times. And I remember the same director's The Children's Hour (also known as The Loudest Whisper) along with the playwright K.T. Mohammed. I was taken to the Crown for the first time by my father; now I go there along with my children, who, unfortunately, seem to like Hindi movies more."

"Of course, it is the Hindi films which are doing better business for us now," says Vinod. "It was with Rangeela in 1994 that we broke the tradition; we had been showing only English films from the 1970s onwards. But we had meant Rangeela to be just a one-off affair; we were pressured by the distributors [to screen more Hindi movies] ... But after the highs of Titanic in 1998, we realised that the audience for English movies surely was getting smaller and smaller in Kozhikode, because of a variety of reasons, such as video piracy and the spread of cable television, where you have exclusive channels for Hollywood films. So in 1999, we showed Kachche Dhaage and many other Bollywood films after that. Recently, we had a Malayalam movie as well: Balram vs. Tharadas."

With Crown having gone multi-lingual, the English film fans of Malabar have no cinema to go to now, to watch their favourite movies. The fact is, people from districts other than Kozhikode, such as Kannur and Wayanad for instance, used to come to Crown.

"So many people have told us that they are disappointed that they could not see as many English movies as they used to at Crown, but we are helpless," Vinod says. "But we will continue to show as many English movies as possible, even if that means making some losses."

P. K. AJITH KUMAR

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