Anil Ambani: Hollywood, here I come

BACKSTAGE

For the last few months, a crack team of three senior executives selected by Anil Ambani has been working on an unusual mandate "" to break into the closed club of Hollywood movies that has been dominated by well-entrenched studios and moody stars who are hard to get as they demand money that is sometimes more than the total budgets of many Bollywood movies put together.

Sure, while Mumbai's tinsel town has made some attempts to break in (Aamir Khan's Lagaan made it to the 2002 Oscar nomination for foreign films), few Indians have managed to enter this exclusive club.

Not anymore. The efforts of the threesome have finally paid off and the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (ADAG) is set to put its imprint on Hollywood. The three men picked by Ambani have diverse backgrounds. Amitabh Jhunjhunwala is a chartered accountant by training, and is Ambani Junior's finance whiz kid. He also runs Ambani's financial arm Reliance Capital and played a big role in corporatising Bollywood, once seen as being run by underworld and other funny money.

Then there is Amit Khanna, chairman of Reliance Big Entertainment, a lyric writer, director and producer of an array of Bollywood masala films with close linkages to the industry.

The third person spearheading Ambani's Hollywood foray is Rajesh Sawhney, President of Reliance Big Entertainment. A Harvard Business School alumnus with a fellowship from the London Business School, Sawhney is the driving force behind the group's $1 billion entertainment foray. Prior to joining Reliance, Sawhney was a key member of the Times of India Group creating businesses across several areas: publishing, radio & TV, retailing, Internet, e-commerce, travel and mobile value-added services.

Last week, the group chose an appropriate location, the Cannes film festival, to announce that Reliance Big Entertainment will provide development funds to eight leading creative forces in Hollywood. And they include the top guns of the US glamour industry "" Nicholas Cage, Jim Carey, George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt and Jay Roach. Reliance, apart from funding their production houses, will also look at co-financing their films.

In return, the company will get the Indian rights for these films. Not only that, the group also announced the financing of over 69 Bollywood films with top notch directors across languages.

While working on the deal, Jhunjunwala flew to California regularly to understand how the Hollywood financial model works. The team also closely examined how the Chinese moved in by not only financing Hollywood films but also producing and even distributing them across the globe. They also hired Creative Artists Agency, a Hollywood agency that helped them broker deals with Hollywood biggies.

Since Sawhney realised they needed to have some control over exhibition in the US market, he struck quiet deals earlier this year to operate a 200-screen exhibition chain covering over 28 US cities.

Khanna, of course, used his knowledge of making movies to rope in virtually every top Bollywood name under the Big Entertainment banner, such as Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Vipul Shah, Madhur Bhandarkar and Shyam Bengal, to name just a few.

The Hollywood dream, of course, is one part of Ambani's strategy of addressing the convergence between entertainment and telecom. Will it pay off? Ambani's crack team will be paying close attention, even as they work on other deals for their boss.