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Book a seat at Bollywood
Book Review
Arati Menon Carroll / Mumbai December 02, 2007
Lights Camera Masala starts out by fittingly quoting (acclaimed director) Stanley Kubrick as saying, “The truth of a thing is the feel of it, not the think of it.” This book certainly has plenty of “feel” to it. When Divya Thakur, an increasingly in-the-news Mumbai-based multidisciplinary designer was engaged to provide its creative content, her first thought was that she wanted a book that would challenge the medium and enhance the readers’ experience. “I wanted a book that was visually engaging,” she recollects. That, and to have “a structure to it that was most relevant to the subject”".
 
And so she set out designing a book that would be the literary and graphic manifestation of a contemporary Hindi film — dreamlike, glossy, technicolour, larger-than-life and bordering on the bizarre. Aesthetically borrowing from clichés of pop art (think Warhol’s Campbell soup cans with film stars on them) the book’s sections are enlivened by the sudden appearance of a pull-out poster of Deewar, dummy fan mail to Abisek Bochchon [sic], a star-studded pinwheel, a celluloid strip or a stuck-on popcorn box that contains a best-of listing. “Just don’t call it kitsch; kitsch is incongruous, this is unapologetically colourful,” Thakur requests.
 
Innovative design is backed by the witty penmanship of Naman Ramachandran and the intrusive-by-design and very evocative photography by Sheena Sippy. As screen writer Salim Khan says in the book, “[Bollywood] is fired by imagination.” So the book seems to have let its imagination run riot. Through the fictional eyes and ears of Ravi and Vijay, two characters derived from the 1970s on-screen personas of an angry, young and slightly rough-around-the-edges Amitabh Bachchan and a dapper, comic Shashi Kapoor, it’s an anecdotal dive into the manic and often haphazard ways of making contemporary cinema in Mumbai. Like the “maddeningly unplanned and unstructured way” in which writer-director Anurag Kashyap shuts himself away for days to watch films and music videos continuously before he scripts. Or the way Karan Johar actually casts before he writes.
 
There’s a sub-script within that — conversations between Ravi and Vijay, who are embarking on making their first movie by taking inspiration from visits to sets, take the physical shape of a typed movie script which is pasted through the book. “That’s the kind of book I wanted, an organic book with all kinds of paper folded into it, using different printing processes, typefaces and paper quality,” explains Thakur. Caution was thrown to the wind as the India Book House production team pulled out all the stops to deliver the product while containing rising costs. Chief among her inspirations were author-illustrator Nick Bantock’s art-and-text trilogy Griffin & Sabine, a voyeuristic journey into love and mystery told through a series of beautifully designed postcards. The other was British designer Paul Smith’s You Can Find Inspiration in Everything, where words and images crash together in an eccentric and visually engaging manner.
 
There’s plenty of star power for those so inclined, as the Bachchans, Khans (the lot of them), Chopras et al sit back and let their guard down for a bit as they talk their walk. Despite being sponsored by the International Indian Film Academy, Lights... commendably is not slavish in its critique of the industry. There are unapologetic mentions of plagiarism, like the similarities between portions of Munnabhai MBBS and Robin Williams’s Patch Adams. There are also acknowledgements of the fatigued girl-meets-boy formula, and how several directors make do with line-by-line narration and no bound script (something that apparently drove Aishwarya nuts when she starred in Hamara Dil Aapke Paas Hai). Good-natured caviling aside, the heart of the message is clear: for all the seeming pandemonium of a film shoot, where the industry lacks in efficiency it makes up in human resources, and heart.
 
The book ends with a section that’s a bit of a plug for IIFA, but then you can safely overlook that and declare this a commendable attempt at designing a book to be just as entertaining as Hindi cinema. Did we mention the book went on to win Gold award for best book design at the 2007 New York Festivals?
 
Lights Camera Masala
Making Movies in Mumbai
Author Sheena Sippy Naman Ramachandran Divya Thakur
Publisher India Book House
Pages 252
Price Rs 1,995

 
 
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