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Will the marriage between
Reliance and DreamWorks last, asks Shakuntala
Rao
The buzz had been making rounds for months: Steven Spielberg and David Geffen’s production company, DreamWorks SKG, has a deal with Reliance ADA Group to set up a new studio. "The union between Mumbai-based Reliance and Spielberg’s DreamWorks team caps two years of speculation and feuding between Spielberg and the brasses at Paramount", reports New York Times, "Reliance hopes to help bring a ‘new sensibility’ to Hollywood." Reliance ADA has been working to build up a name in Hollywood. In May, the company, controlled by Anil Ambani, signed deals with eight Hollywood production houses run by A-list actors, including George Clooney’s Smokehouse Productions, Tom Hanks’ Playtone Productions, and Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment. Western media companies have looked to fast-growing emerging markets, including India, for expansion, but Reliance Entertainment-DreamWorks deal represents the first significant capital flow in the opposite direction. While Reliance claims that the core purpose of the deal is to allow talents (producers, directors and actors) to make the movies they want to make, it is also Ambani’s ambition to create a company that will be one of the world’s largest entertainment concerns. Hollywood and Bollywood have been increasingly flirting with new partnerships. The omnipresence of Aishwarya Rai on mainstream US and European television and print advertising, Hip Hop star Snoop Dogg’s cameo in Singh is Kinng and the scheduled appearance of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Sajid Nadiawala’s next production are indicative of a growing intimacy. India’s culture is no longer just about Ravi Shankar’s sitar or Satyajit Ray’s neo-realist cinema. Indian cultural milieu is now controlled by an uppity middle-class with massive disposable income, a large diaspora that has economic muscle, and a film industry whose global popularity is beginning to rival that of Hollywood. What will this imminent marriage mean for the audiences? As one of my American colleagues asked with a smile, "Will we see Julia Roberts or Angelina Jolie in an item number?" Possibly. Least one can say is that the partnership is bound to be interesting. Hollywood and Bollywood filmic sensibilities remain dramatically different, especially when it comes to a filmmaker like Steven Spielberg. Always considered to be a visual renegade among his peers, Spielberg’s movies have grossed billions worldwide but have simultaneously been considered imaginative and technically masterful. He has tackled just about every theme: dinosaurs, aliens, futuristic sci-fi, World War II, children’s stories, creepy crawlies, animation, and, once would have been unthinkable in Hollywood, the Holocaust. Forcing item numbers into films like Poltergeist, Schindler’s List, or Close Encounters of the Third Kind will be difficult for Anil Ambani. Time will tell if this marriage will work but we wish the couple luck and hope they produce quality progenies for multiplexes near you.
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