Word: bollywood
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...That's a question that applied to Khan too, but no longer. He has blurred the once sharp line dividing India's truly gifted actors from its movie stars. He is the one who can do it all: big-budget Bollywood films as well as small independent films in the U.S., Europe and India. Khan's specialty is adding a layer of unexpected depth and tenderness to an otherwise opaque character - the interrogator in Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire, a Pakistani police captain in A Mighty Heart, the remote immigrant father in The Namesake. Danny Boyle, the British director of Slumdog...
...meet him on the roof of a bland, concrete hotel in Roorkee, he has already charmed and cajoled the manager into opening up the roof terrace, lighting it with movie equipment and fetching a badminton set so he and his crew can amuse themselves in the evenings. (Read "Bollywood's Viral Videos...
...City of Joy with Patrick Swayze; and Roshan Seth, who played Jawaharlal Nehru, the foil to Ben Kingsley's Oscar-winning portrayal of the Mahatma in Gandhi. All had healthy careers as character actors, but their potential as dramatic leading men was never really fulfilled, in Hollywood or Bollywood. "I feel very sad about it," Khan says. But he seems to have escaped that fate. "Everybody here calls me about him," Nair says from New York. Khan had a small part in Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited and appears as Natalie Portman's love interest in New York...
...Khan's burgeoning international reputation is perhaps more remarkable because he has established it without leaving Bollywood. During the late 1980s and 1990s, when Indian film went through a particularly low moment, many of Khan's friends left the industry in disgust. "I was absolutely disillusioned," recalls one of them, Vipin Sharma, who emigrated to Toronto to work in documentaries. Bollywood had become dominated by "masala movies" - spicy escapades guaranteed to titillate rural masses with increasingly outlandish plots, tawdry lovemaking scenes and bombshell heroines. Distributors would literally call the shots, sitting in on previews with directors and saying...
...didn't have to. Other roles soon followed as the economics of the Indian film industry radically changed. Studios in Bollywood, as in Hollywood, discovered alternatives to the high-risk, high-reward blockbuster. India's new malls featured smaller, luxurious multiplexes to appeal to the urban middle classes, a far cry from the bare-bones cinema halls and marquees of small towns and villages. "You went from 1,000 seats to 100 seats, where it was easier to show films that did not require 1,000 people to break even," says Gupta. Studios could make healthy profits with smaller budgets...