Director pays the price for forgetting to add inaccuracies related to exploiting ‘artistic freedoms’
Bonnet Bots Untrue News Service
Not having a marketing budget for historic period films may be the norm in the industry, but producer-director Itihas Kapoor had to pay a big price for not planning a PR budget for his latest film, ‘The battle of Panchavat’, as he failed to exploit his artistic freedom to the fullest extent. Sources revealed that the marketing budget was absent as some political party always gives free PR by protesting against period films that are based on historical characters, real or imaginary.
Period films are currently a rage in the country, with lot of producer-directors making films on historic events, battles and even cricket matches. However, due to lack of information, or just for the kick of it, some details are modified, and can hurt sentiments of certain political parties, which gets the film a lot of publicity. Bonnet Bot believed this was only accidental, and hence decided to find out more.
Bonnet Bot investigates
“This is the ususal scenario in this genre”, said Taran Chopra, MD of Success Rule Films (SRF), on condition of anonymity. ‘The PR cost for films is very high these days. Moreover, if the film is based on historic settings, the film sets are more expensive, leading to added costs. So, in historical films, the producers generally keep increasing their artistic freedom till at least some political party raises a voice, so that we are assured of free publicity for the film release. A PR budget is never planned, by design, and it is only this that makes the genre viable. After all, strategy is all about what NOT to do”
“But artistic freedom is an abstract term. How do they know where to stop?” inquired Bonnet Bot.
Taran continued, again on the condition of anonymity, that generally, someone files a PIL and then the free publicity knows no bounds. He continued,“It is always worthwhile to pay one mediocre lawyer to keep delaying the frivolous suits than to pay the sky-high PR costs to expensive TV channels and revenue-hungry websites like site1.bonnetbots.com”.
“However, not all period film makers are lucky enough to get a court order scenario that guarantees free PR. In such cases, the producer-director has to make do with whatever publicity they receive courtesy the political groups that they manage to offend. But if this last option fails, they are at the mercy of the viewers and content quality, which is totally unpredictable. This is what has happened to Itihaas Kapoor’s film…his entire budget calculations failed due to incomplete understanding of the business model of the historic films genre.”
But this didn’t seem to convince Bonnet Bot, who naively inquired, “Doesn’t such attitude deter people from watching such films?”
“There is no emperical evidence for that. Generally the opposite is true. However, sometimes people actually revolt, as they don’t understand some things. For example, in Bajirao Mastani movie, towards the end of the film, Bajirao’s family separates him from Mastani, who is put in jail, in chains, and the pain of separation is almost entirely responsible for Bajirao’s death. In real life, she wasn’t chained in jail, but was under house arrest. And she had nothing to do with the cause of his death, which was an unknown fever, which is thought to be an infection or even heat stroke. Now people may object that this is a complete twist to the conclusion of his life, but they completely fail to understand how it could be a Bhansali film if the separation of the hero and heroine is not dramatized and emotionally appealing. They are not artists, how can you expect them to understand artistic freedom?” he questioned Bonnet Bot.
At the time of going to Press, Itihaas Kapoor was planning to add a controversial dream sequence song as a ‘surprise’ item, hoping to rub off at least one major political party wrongly, to save his film.
Disclaimer: The above article is NOT real news. site1.bonnetbots.com is a satire and entertainment website. The news is untrue, and may seem real only because of the strange fact that fact is stranger than fiction.
Image credit: Venkat Sudheer Reddy, Unsplash.com