Free Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry by Tejaswini Ganti

it’s a positive step” (Aditya Chopra, interview, April 1996). According to Chopra, the consequence of audiences becoming more cinematically literate is that they patronize better quality films, enabling the box-office to be a truly accurate and transparent signifier of cinematic quality: “At least earlier, even bad films used to run. Now, thankfully, no bad film does well, which actually harms us more; if a bad film does well, it harms us more, even when a good film does not do well.
    When a bad film does well, you suddenly get shaken ki [that] ‘Oh God! It’s going to take a lot of time for them to actually understand that [on the one hand] this is not good, [and on the other] this is good’ ” (Aditya Chopra, interview, April 1996). Chopra’s comments about “bad films” running at an earlier time are an allusion to the trashy ’80s and indicate the impact of audience taste upon filmmakers; he represents audiences’ poor choice in films as undermining his aesthetic sensibilities. The implication here, consistent with the audience-based narratives of cinematic quality presented in the previous section, is that more discerning audiences will lead to better filmmaking.
    The other feature of the ’90s media landscape was the regular presence of dubbed Hollywood films. Rather than expressing anxiety about competition from Hollywood films, filmmakers were quite confident in Hollywood’s inability to appeal to the vast majority of Indian audiences. In fact, some filmmakers welcomed their presence as a sort of pedagogical tool for audiences, which would enable Hindi filmmakers to improve their own filmmaking. Screenwriter Honey Irani—who wrote Lamhe — predicted, “The audience which is watching will also improve. They’ll accept new things from us. When they’ve seen, they’ve opened their eyes to see, ‘ arre, arre, yeh bhi ho raha hai, yeh ho raha hai ’ [Oh, this is also happening; this is happening], so when we do some experiment, they will accept it, instead of rejecting it. So definitely it will help them to grow and help us to grow” (Irani, interview, May 1996). Once again an intrinsic connection is asserted between audiences and filmmakers—whereby the evolution or maturation of audience taste has a positive impact upon filmmakers’ own identities as creative individuals and artists.
    If the altered media landscape of the ’90s fostered cinematic quality by helping the “masses” or the “common man” to become more discerning viewers, the other feature of the discourse of improvement was the celebrated “return” of middle-class audiences to the cinemas. Producer/ director Rakesh Roshan was blunt in connecting quality to the composition of the audience, asserting, “First we were stuck with front-benchers, but now directors have a choice” (in Chandra 1995: 122). Komal Nahta, the editor of the trade magazine Film Information , stated that wealthier people were patronizing Hindi films again, evident by the “hi-fi people of Bombay” arriving at the movie theaters in the posh areas of downtown Bombay via their latest imported cars. He also mentioned that college students, who were once dismissive and contemptuous of Hindi films, had started watching them because films like HAHK, DDLJ, and others appealed to their sensibilities. More than the content of films, however, Nahta emphasized the material conditions of film-viewing as the main impetus for elites to return to cinema halls.
    For these last six or seven years, the ultra-rich people—from Malabar Hill in Bombay, Nepeansea Road—they had stopped going to the cine- mas [for] two reasons: first, they saw all of the films on the videos; second, the cinemas were in a pathetic state. Now videos are not there 20 and cinemas. . . [have] the air conditioner [that] is always on. They’ve got the best sound system. They’ve got lovely seats. They’ve got different classes where the highest classes are so high-priced that they are