Profile: Ronnie Screwvala
MUMBAI — In Bollywood-mad India — where more films are made and more movie tickets sold than anywhere else on the planet, where wild fans fling money as their idol appears on the movie screen and crazed groupies erect temples with their favorite movie stars as deities — Ronnie Screwvala is something of an anamoly.
He’s also a huge hit.
Screwvala’s films do not star heroes with standard six-pack abs and unexplained costume changes. Nor do they dance wildly around trees or suddenly break into song.
They do not fight off the bad guys, or mouth melodramatic dialogues while rescuing the girl and/or a long-lost brother. They don’t even weep copiously at the mother’s deathbed, or do all of the above, during the course of a three-and-a-half-hour, formulaic film.
Screwvala, a rank outsider with no film background or movie connections, is slowly reinventing Bollywood and, in the process, clawing his way to the top of the Bollywood power list.
For the last five years his company, UTV, has tamed the chaotic, prolific Bollywood film industry through smarter business practices, leading the way in corporatizing film-making, drawing foreign investors, bringing in fiscal discipline, choosing unique plots — and then aggressively marketing the films.
UTV has beaten family-led rivals like the Johars and the Kapoors to become India’s second biggest studio after Yash Chopra’s YashRaj films.
“Ronnie represents the changing face of Bollywood,” says actor Priyanka Chopra, who played the lead in UTV’s 2008 hit "Fashion." She also stars in the company’s much-anticipated summer release "Kaminey" (lowly person).
The trim, neatly dressed Screwvala, 53, is certainly not your typical Bollywood celebrity. He says he has no time to waste on “schmoozing with movie folks." His English is impeccable but curse words roll unexpectedly off his tongue.
Screwvala describes himself as a "creative catalyst" in an industry where the director-led studio model era is ending.
“In an industry with strong, incestuous relationships, we had to take the path less trodden,” Screwvala says, sitting in his trophy-lined offices in the nondescript, warehouse-dominated Worli Naka neighborhood in Mumbai. “We could never hope to penetrate (the market), so we had to find a new genre, new scripts, new relationships and a new audience.”
So Screwvala’s directors and stars sign contracts (an anomaly), scripts are chosen for their novelty and not their formula (another anomaly), while production schedules and budgets are drawn out before shooting begins.
Then there’s the money.
The norm is Bollywood is to spend $200,000 on making a film. Screwvala typically budgets $10 million or more. And while many Bollywood films lack any kind of marketing whatsoever, Screwvala sets aside 40 percent of his budget for marketing.
“He has broken all Bollywood rules,” says Sunil Lulla, the CEO of Real Global Broadcasting which, along with UTV, co-produced "Aamir" (2008), a low-budget, man-on-the-run thriller about a London-based doctor. Despite the lack of Bollywood trappings like a female lead and songs, the film was a big hit.
UTV’s runaway hit "Rang De Basanti" (the colors of spring), meanwhile, features a patriotic Indian freedom fighter. It had no female lead and barely any song and dance sequences. Its protagonists, a group of disillusioned young men, die tragically. Yet the film, which cost $6 million to produce, raked in $31 million in ticket sales.
“We made history look funky,” explains Screwvala. “The narrative was so real that the audience was left asking, who the f&%@ is Bhagat Singh?!”
Last year’s hit "Joghaa Akbar," a period romance between the Muslim emperor Akbar and a make-believe Hindu princess, earned UTV a four-fold return on investment in two months.
“Ronnie’s success rate of the last 24 months is unparalleled in Bollywood,” Lulla says.
Screwvala was the first in Bollywood to recognize the financial power of globalization. He agressively marketed the overseas rights to his films, and led the way in luring foreign investors to his projects.
Fresh off a trip to American director Manoj Night Shyamalan’s home in Philadelphia, Screwvala threw his weight behind Shyamalan’s $57 million film "The Happening." He has partnership deals with Disney, Fox Searchlight, Sony and Will Smith’s Overbrook Entertainment.
So, has Hollywood changed the way it looks at Bollywood, after the recent success of "Slumdog Millionaire"? Screwvala doesn’t think so.
“Hollywood is too obsessed with itself, ” he says. “I would rather make movies on my own terms rather than do it standing behind a Hollywood studio."
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