While we are sitting here and judging a film’s aesthetic sense, there is a producer there waiting to give back his ‘Kandu Vaddi’ to the financier. Kollywood’s historical trend of suicides has just taken a new form over the last few years. Alongwith several heroines and a multitude of support actresses (‘extras’, as they are badly named), producers are joining the suicidal attempts. Before Mani Ratnam’s brother G. Venkateswaran it was another producer (whose name I comfortably forgot). With Khaja Mohideen (Roja Combines) attempting for a suicide, the issue has attained alarming levels of importance in kollywood.
The aesthetic sense of a film is considered to be the last words in cinema business, atleast with the majority of kollywood. There are many other widely discussed aspects of cinema business which we audience tend to overlook as we compare kollywood cinema with bollywood and kollywood. The production and post-prodcution costs are something that every film producer incurs. Also like Bollywood and Hollywood, we do have a good amount of highly/overly paid super stars, universal heroes, ultimate stars, supreme stars, illaya thalapathis and vaigai puyals, all flapping their wings to fly high on the market rates. Their price tags are just so high that they must be having an internal guilt for the rest of the life. With this extra component, the film’s cost shoots up badly.
The argument usually from the star actors’ camp is that their names sell the movie even before the movie is shot. Why shouldn’t they be looking for a considerable share of profit which the producer is going to pocket ? So as the vicious circle progresses in every cinema industry, we at kollywood are attaining the multiplexes era much later than bollywood. Infact, it is still building up. So what’s wrong with multiplexes. the multiplxes are nothing but a hole in the audience pocket. The vicious circle is like this – actors hike his rates – producer pays him the rate he asks to get his dates – the movie’s total cost shoots up – if hit – producer bags a hugesum of fortune – if failed(as in most case) – producer ends up paying hefty interests to financier – finally attempts to kick-the-bucket. The point to note here is that the actor who gives three failure movies in a row would still stay for another two or three movies because they were booked earlier to the current movie’s failure or the producer’s flock him because of the blame game he plays.
All that aside, these costs, ends up in our pockets. These multiplexes start charging a 100 plus for every damned movie and the ‘rasikan’ is left to either buy the ticket for a three digit value or run away to evening bazaar to get his hands on the duplicate VCD. The producers instead of blaming the STARS for all these, should take a collective decision of not paying hefty sum to the actors(which at many a case wouldn’t happen) or should stop producing movies with stars(which also wouldn’t happen). I think more than the producers it’s in the hands of directors who can influence a producer by not going for a star and rather getting a new artist for his movie. This also couldn’t be done by many directors except the star directors. Imagine if only Anniyan was made at 2 crores, with all the hit that they claim it is, Anniyan would have earned enormous profits.
Looks like after Kamal and Khaja Mohideen’s meeting the issue is resolved and Kamal is getting back Hunt and Play. But I should pretty much stop rambling here because I’m sure that none of what is said above would happen. Even if they happen they wouldn’t have a Tsunami effect. After all, the only wish is to relish good kollywood movies and as we have seen with an array of examples like Mullum Malarum / Sandhya Raagam / Mahanadhi / Anbe Sivam that good movies needn’t be a costly venture.
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