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Magazine
Those poster moments
JERRY PINTO
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Cityscapes are plainer now. The Supreme Court judgment has made hoardings part of history. Remembering a time when posters dominated the skyline.
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In Bollywood, the public hoarding was symbolic. It was as significant as seeing one’s name up on lights in Broadway.
Photo: AFP
Towering over Us: The cityscape seems empty without them.
The watchman is puzzled. Why do we want to meet the men who once painted hoardings? He himself was a poster painter. “There was no work so I took up this line,” Sachin Radia says, pointing to his uniform. “Nowadays who wants painted
hoardings?”
No one does. No one in the film industry, at any rate. Last year when the retro-chic “Om Shanti Om” was released, some of the hoardings did look like they had been done by hand, but this was a skilful piece of trompe l’oeil. A computer programme had reproduced the effect of a hand-painted poster.
Changing values
The Supreme Court judgment on hoardings may just be the last nail in a coffin that was already closing. It isn’t the actions of those who want the noble lines of Mumbai’s heritage buildings on view that will kill the last of the commercial studios that painted the huge hoardings that once dominated the skyline of the city. It’s market forces.
The mechanics of promoting a film have changed radically with the coming of the new breed of directors who seek to cater to those audiences who will be able to pay Rs. 300 for a ticket at a multiplex. Thus, every film now has a media partner: a newspaper, a magazine or a website. An FM radio station will be called in to make sure the music gets into constant play rotation and a television channel will get ‘exclusives’ with the stars in a complex network of bargaining that will make sure a new star-heavy film will block out unsexy news like by-elections or farmer suicides. Then the fan sites get into gear. Often the swankier productions will have their own dedicated website with free downloads. The mobile phone companies will organize the ringtones. Posters? So yesterday. Hoardings? Those are for television, now.
Significant role
This is a pity because hoardings have played a significant role in the life of Mumbai as a city. No one has even begun to attempt a social history of the hoarding. The Bollywood vamp, Bindu, for instance, would often put up a hoarding at strategic locations, wishing her fans a happy Diwali.
In her forthcoming autobiography, the actor Leela Naidu remembers how a poster of one of her films saved the poet Dom Moraes from a kicking:
The idea must have seemed good on paper. Dom Moraes, the young poet who had won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize, would return to his city and the BBC would follow him around with a camera. It was to be called ‘Return of a Stranger’ and it was to be produced by one of the BBC’s senior-most producers Tony de Lotbinière. At the same time, they would be shooting a film called ‘The Bewildered Giant’, which represented their view of India in 1969.
As they drove through Bombay, Tony outlined his ideas to Dom. Dom would revisit his childhood friends…
A look of consternation must have spread over Dom’s face.
“You do have childhood friends, do you not?” I can imagine Tony asking. He was not what you might call a terribly patient man. He smoked Kerala cheroots as if he were committing the acts of violence that he was not allowing himself. But when they did not suffice…Dom told me that Tony had once kicked his butt, actually, literally, kicked his butt when, in a scene set on the sands of Goa, Dom hadn’t risen as quickly as Tony wanted.
Their car, Dom told me later, was just then passing the Opera House. And across the road from it, there was a huge poster of me in profile. “I know her,” he said, relieved.”
And so the film proceeded.
Symbolic
In Bollywood, the public hoarding was symbolic. It was as significant as seeing one’s name up on lights in Broadway. Dev Anand recounts the moment in his autobiography, Romancing with Life (Penguin India):
One day, as we were travelling together by train in Bombay, Guru Dutt suddenly gasped, looking at a poster on the station platform.
‘That’s you!’ Hum Ek Hain was about to be released. The posters were up.
By the time I looked back, the local train had moved on, and I could only see the poster as it passed out of sight. I could not register anything of its contents.
‘It’ll probably be boring for you, but I’d like to get back and see myself hanging at a railway platform, like I had seen Ashok Kumar’s banner once!’ I told Guru Dutt.
He agreed to indulge me. We came back in the same train without getting off, and postponed the proposed destination we were off to, at a later time.
Standing at the railway station, watching my face on a movie poster for the first time, with a few people staring at it with pleasant curiosity was a thrilling experience. I looked at Guru Dutt. He smiled and simply said, ‘Good.’
However, there seems to be only three instances that come to mind when one considers the poster inside the Hindi film. There Antara Mali, enjoying the poster of her first release in “Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahati Hoon”; there’s Kunal Khemu on the terrace of his building, enjoying his first poster in “Superstar”; and there’s Amitabh Bachchan looking sardonically at the poster of his wife who has abandoned him to become a film star in “Do Anjaane”.
This is perhaps because Bollywood is not terribly keen on self-reflexive movies; the only one to make any box-office noise so far has been “Rangeela”.
Part of history
There have been other moments in which film posters have taken their share of: When Sunjay Dutt’s launch film “Rocky” was released, the traffic police requested the producer and director, Sunil Dutt, to take down the posters that were on the Mahim Causeway, a stretch of road that links the island city of Mumbai with the northern suburbs and the hinterland. The sight of the young Tina Munim in a bathing costume — albeit a one-piece bathing costume — was causing too many accidents.
The hoardings are now part of history. Printing presses now do the work that hands once did. Few hoarding painters ever struggled for anything greater than a likeness of the star. Design was limited to the poster and even there, it was rare that anything more than the star power of the cast would be deployed to pull in the punters. Thus the hoarding painter’s ‘art’ was killed by photography and improved printing processes that could deliver the huge hoardings with perfect likenesses.
It’s a different city now, a city that has learnt to enjoy its kitsch. Thus the Bollywood poster has now found its way into the upper middle class living room wall while outside, the cityscape is barer, emptier and plainer without those big purple or green faces.
Jerry Pinto has just won the National Award for his book on Helen. He lives in Mumbai.
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