Word: indianized
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...Breaking Out Khan is not the first indian actor to win acclaim in the West. Before Khan, there was Naseeruddin Shah, a star of Indian parallel cinema's realism; Om Puri, co-star of 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...
...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...
...happened, though, in those years that Khan toiled in television. The film industry caught up with him, and in the nick of time. Khan was ready to leave the profession when he was offered a part in The Warrior, a 2001 period piece filmed in India by a British-Indian director. It was the first time a director asked him to "do nothing," and he finally felt free. "That changed my life," he says. "I couldn't work in television after that...
...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...
...those talented actors who don't dance and aren't leading-man handsome. "It's very deep," Nair says of his impact. After watching Khan's performance in Maqbool, Sharma moved back to Mumbai and restarted his career as an actor. He recalls thinking, "This was something different in Indian cinema...