MTV's spoof movies promise more than cheap laughs - they may one day generate big money, like the genre does in Hollywood.
Guess who’s the new buck-toothed wonder in tinseltown? MTV veejay Cyrus Sahukar. I couldn’t help but ask him whether his bite felt after all right after doing a, uhm... Darsheel Safary, in Bechaare Zameen Par. In what must surely be the biggest gag the channel has ever pulled off, MTV has been dedicating airtime to three entirely home-produced spoof movies.
But before dismissing the channel’s effort as marketing pfaff, it does pay to take a step back and give that effort the attention it deserves. These MTV spoofs may just mark the beginnings of a new genre in Indian cinema.
If you have been channel-surfing lately, you will have stumbled upon the following titles, which need no elaboration by themselves — Bechaare Zameen Par, Jadoo Ek Baar and Cheque De! India. They are part of a self-concocted film festival around MTV’s Fully Faltoo theme. “Humour is part of us,” says Ashish Patil, GM and VP, creative and content, MTV India.
MTV claims that their version of Sholay in 1999 was probably the birth of the spoof genre in India.
It was also the birth of the Fully Faltoo theme and featured the entire ensemble from the Bollywood cult movie : Jai, Veeru, Thakur, Gabbar Singh. And thus was born a classic, immediately recognised as such by the advertising industry. “We feel we brought Sholay to a whole new generation. People probably went and saw the original because of us,” says Patil.
It was seven years before the next production came out, and this time the target was Dhoom. MTV admits that “it was a shocker” how Ghoom was received. It claims that Ghoom beat the 2006 Football World Cup in terms of ratings, and that a spontaneous decision saw it being experimentally screened in Inox multiplexes. It eventually ran for three weeks in five cities. The tale doesn’t end there: Sahara Movies bought the TV rights and Gold Video picked up the DVDs. And all this success came astonishingly cheap: MTV refuses to divulge numbers, but says the production cost of Ghoom was “probably 0.001 per cent of the original”.
This boast cannot be ignored, because it echoes trends at the Hollywood box office in the spoof genre. Spoofs of the James Bond franchise have been particularly high grossers. The Naked Gun series grossed $215 million, and the Austin Powers trilogy $472 million. Spaceballs, the 1987 parody of Star Wars and Star Trek, grossed $38 million after a spend of $22 million. Importantly, most spoofs, especially low budget ones, end up becoming DVD and television rights sellouts.
So what does it take to make a successful spoof in India? MTV says a wig will do, and this was demonstrated not so long ago when Cyrus Sahukar popped up as the iconic Semi Girebaal. But, says Mahesh Aney, who directed Bechaare Zameen Par, on a serious note, “The production quality is always the best. It is shot for the big screen. We even use the same locations as the original. You need to be careful. It is a question of which film to work on. You have to take the essence and work on it. It is very easy to slip into toilet humour.”
Sahukar adds that “The shoot was a lot of fun. You end up having a laugh, but it is tiring. I come from a school of comedy which is based on satire, but I was happy to go along with this because I do love spoofs. There is a joy in everyone laughing. There is something quirky in all of us.”
Aney, who has also directed Movers & Shakers and was the cinematographer for Swades, says the spoof of Taare Zameen Par demanded extreme caution, because nobody wanted to be caught parodying something as serious as dyslexia. “It was like walking on glass. You need to be extremely subtle.”
The three Faltoo movies by MTV were shot by different crews and the channel refuses to discuss budgets. Only the direction and the scriptwriting is outsourced. Aney estimates costs at Rs 4 crore for a script that he says he has ready. The catch is finding a producer, as he laughs, “A producer asked me, who is the hero in a spoof? I said the hero is the script.”
Hyderabad-based film critic Rakesh Mehar, however, is not very impressed with what he has seen of the spoof genre so far — in Hollywood and Bollywood. “Spoofs are difficult. Getting laughs is easy but what you are saying is important,” he says.
One successful example he recommends is Shaun of the Dead, a parody of Dawn of the Dead. “Good parody needs to be familiar with its connecting genre. In this movie, a British production, you see a certain affection for the zombie genre.”
Do you remember the beginnings of spoof on Indian television? It started really small, with the caricaturised southern superstar Rajinikanth popping up on Channel [V] as the now-iconic Quick Gun Murugan. “First I’ll finish the sambhar, then I’ll finish you! Mind it!” Yes, we took him seriously.
Murugan will be making a comeback — on the big screen. It will feature Telugu actor Rajendra Prasad as an English- and Hindi-speaking south Indian cowboy, whose duty, it seems, is to protect vegetarianism and cows. Directed by the original creator of Murugan, former Channel [V] head Shashank Ghosh, there is the promise of plenty of attitude, song and dance, pink and yellow outfits, melodrama and duels in traffic jams — all to stop the villain restaurant owner who wants to create a McDosa chain using beef. Get ready with that bowl of sambhar.
