Word: bollywood
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...films having more trouble finding an audience than the music and books? America's current cultural insularity aside, the musicals are a hard sell. At three hours-plus, with family-loyalty plots out of the hoariest Hollywood weepies, and all that singing, a Bollywood epic is too old-fashioned for the art-house crowd and too sedate, too girlie, for young males...
...which makes Bombay Dreams a big risk for Broadway: a $14 million musical with no stars, a score by a composer famous in most of the world (see box, below) but not in the U.S., and a story set in the Bollywood milieu unknown to Broadway's conservative audience. Producer Andrew Lloyd Webber hired writer Thomas Meehan (The Producers, Hairspray) to cut a lot of in-jokes, pump up the mother love--domesticate the Bollywood beast. Will the transplant work? The show has a $6 million advance; and at a preview last week, the audience, perhaps 25% South Asian, seemed...
...crossover, you need a movie that just happens to be Indian, that pours a familiar tale into an Indian milieu. That's Marigold, the story of an American starlet, stranded in India, who works in a Bombay movie to get airfare home and falls for her Indian leading man. Bollywood is not the genre here; it's just the backdrop for a fish-out-of-water plot. Says Steve Gilula of Fox Searchlight, which distributed the breakout hit Bend It Like Beckham: "American popular culture is good at absorbing influences from around the world. But we embrace the elements...
...traditional Sikh family values to achieve soccer stardom, is the model for this transcultural form. The film, made for about $6 million, earned $32.5 million in North American theaters and an additional $44 million abroad. It has also given Chadha a chance to try making the first crossover Bollywood-style musical: Bride and Prejudice, with Jane Austen's Bennet family transformed into Anglo-Indians and Bollywood goddess Aishwarya Rai in the lead. "It's got the love story, it's got the songs, it's fun--like a Grease," rhapsodizes Rick Sands, COO of Miramax Films, which will distribute Bride...
Beckham had another perk: it landed Nagra a continuing role on ER. (Finally! An Indian doctor on a U.S. hospital show.) But while contestants on The Bachelor go on a Bollywood-theme date this week, few South Asians are on the big or small screen in the U.S. (The Simpsons' Apu doesn't count...