Popular cinema halls suspend shows

Kannada film industry may end up harming itself

Altogether 21 theatres in Bangalore that mostly screen non-Kannada movies, suspended operations indefinitely from Monday. This is to mitigate the losses being incurred by the theatres and also to protest the moratorium imposed by the state government on screening non-Kannada movies.

On August 9, the Kannada film industry held a massive protest that brought traffic at some of the nerve-centres of Bangalore to a standstill.

They were demanding an embargo on screening non-Kannada films within seven weeks of their release elsewhere. This was to help the Kannada film industry survive. Following the agitation, the state government passed a law to this effect which assuaged the feelings of the Kannada film industry.

But the Karnataka Cinema Theatre Owners Association has not found the action of the government bearable. Coordinator of the association Dhananjay K V says, "It is equivalent to killing the goose that lays the golden egg."

The entertainment tax paid by theatres screening non-Kannada movies last year was Rs 32.50 crore. The subsidy budget for the Kannada movies comes from this amount. It was Rs 8.5-9 crore last year.

The decision to not screen movies by the 21 theatres will translate into a loss of Rs 2.5 crore of entertainment tax per week for the government. "Trying to make do with old movies does not make sense as people are not interested in watching those movies," laments Dhananjay.

With the moratorium on screening new non-Kannada movies, the theatre owners are losing out in a big way and their collections nosedived. Hence, they have no other option but to close down.

The timing is particularly unfortunate as cinema hall audiences were beginning to trickle back because new prosperity, created by the IT boom, was prompting people to go out for entertainment, like seeing a movie and eating out.

The nineties had decimated cinema hall audiences because of the advent of the VCR. If the closure persists, it will deal a blow to the new multiplexes, set up with large investments, which were about to open in Bangalore.

The action and words in Bangalore have caught the attention of law makers in the United States. This was possible because Variety, one of most influential film journals in the world published from California, carried a news report in its edition dated August 19 "" 'Foreign pics face seven-week delay'. "The article has caught the attention of California's legislature," says Dhananjay.

The article has reportedly been included in the long list of documents collected by California legislators to justify their Bill to ban outsourcing. Apparently, they are seeking to justify their ban on outsourcing to India by citing Indian restrictions on the screening of Hollywood movies.

The biggest immediate losers of the closure of cinema halls are those who make a living by either running the cinema halls (their temporary employees) or catering to the needs of cinema goers by running services like cafeterias and parking lots. The plight of the latter is all the greater as they mostly work on daily wages.