Abhilasha Ojha meets Shravan Shroff, who decided to start his own chain of multiplexes after being denied tickets for a film...
As we settle in for this interview at the Trident, Gurgaon, Shravan Shroff orders a glass of draught beer. I settle for a lip-smacking herbal mocktail with mint, lime and honey while the photographer wishes for some cold coffee. Shroff, with a laptop casually slung in one hand, has touched down at Delhi’s airport barely 45 minutes ago. He is to return by a late night flight to Mumbai, the city where he was born and brought up, and where his family runs a thriving film distribution business under the banner of Shringar Films.
But Shroff, managing director of FAME, a chain of well-known, branded multiplexes which posted a turnover of Rs 100 crore last year, knew he desperately wanted to break away from the family business. “I desired to do something on my own. I didn’t want to be known as ‘daddy’s son’ and I was clear about it,” he says, rolling up the sleeves of his smart striped blue shirt.
By his own admission that’s exactly the way he does business: with his sleeves rolled up. Shroff travels 20 days in a month to different destinations, including the B-towns where he personally checks out potential sites for constructing his multiplexes. In fact, just a day before our interview, Shroff was in Dhanbad from where he flew to Mumbai to oversee some work at Ghatkopar, where a FAME multiplex will open early next month.
Now in Delhi, he will return to Mumbai once again before he continues his sojourn to Bharuch. “We will,” he says sipping his beer leisurely, “launch seven multiplexes in different cities, including in Dhanbad, Bharuch, Pune and Chandigarh, the last of which will have two multiplexes.”
With 61 screens in eight cities and seven more multiplexes in the pipeline, it’s not surprising that Shroff has been in the news lately. Some reports have suggested that Adlabs Films (which has a 50 per cent stake in FAME) is showing interest in a possible takeover of the company. Shroff chuckles heartily. “I’m proud that Adlabs should show this level of interest in the company,” he says.
However, he insists, he follows his father’s philosophy in matters of business: “Do business with someone who is a couple of steps lower or a couple of steps higher than you. But never with someone who is 100 steps ahead of you. It will never work out in the long run.” He asserts that current rumours of Adlabs taking over FAME is just media hype. “A couple of years ago, there had indeed been an offer on the table. It was lucrative in terms of money, but I rejected it. For me, FAME is a child I’ve reared. To give it up in exchange for even pots of gold was unacceptable for me,” he says.
But in what’s breaking news and exclusive to Business Standard Weekend, Shroff, along with Manish Acharya (who directed Loins of Punjab) and Provogue promoters, announces that he has launched Headstrong Films, a company which will dive into film production. “Within five-six months our script will be finalised,” he reveals.
This BCom student (he studied at Sydenhams, Mumbai), who completed his MBA in Melbourne, Australia, attended film parties as a teenager and watched how much people respected his father. “I always wanted the same for myself,” he says. But a story which talks about the proverbial foundation for Shroff’s FAME goes like this: He and some of his friends, including his girlfriend, were sitting on the steps of Eros Cinema hoping to get tickets for some film. “She wanted me to throw my father’s name, something I never did in my life, to get those movie tickets. When I refused, she stormed out and that’s when I said to myself, ‘There will be a day when I will own not one but a chain of theatres,’” he sniggers.
The girl may have vanished from his life but Shroff’s dream continued. Every time he would suffer from cramps while watching a film, sit in creaky chairs, get bitten by bugs or wait in long queues to find the box office shutters down, he was more determined to own his own theatres. “Everything about the exhibition of cinema irritated me back then. Our films were faring well in numbers even back then but the manner in which they reached audiences was deplorable,” he shrugs.
Shroff, whose first outing as an exhibitor was in 2001 — the first multiplex opened in partnership with Adlabs in Mumbai’s Andheri — when he was 30 years old, says that there’s not been much change in him. “The only difference now,” he quips, “is that I need two alarm clocks to wake me up in the mornings.” A father of two little boys, Shroff wanted to become a pilot once. “My eyesight was poor and by the time I got surgery done, I’d plunged into this business,” he grins. But he reads everything on aviation even today, besides seven newspapers, including most of the financial dailies, that take up a large part of his early mornings.
Despite experts warning that the current inflation might affect ticket sales in multiplexes, Shroff quips, “You’ll always need a barber to cut your hair na? So you’ll always need to be entertained too.” A self-confessed movie buff, Shroff watches films not just in his own halls but in other multiplexes too. And he’s generous in his praise for his competitors.
“PVR’s decision to open a multiplex in Latur was an intelligent move,” he says. He’s recently purchased a portable DVD player, on which he has just finished watching Aamir, the sleeper hit of 2008. On his flight back to Mumbai, Shroff will watch Cheeni Kum. But there’s a slight difference: while for audiences movies equal leisure, in Shroff’s case, he’ll be wondering how to continue recreating the magic of watching films for audiences on ground.
