Long Life of a Short Film
(The Making of BOMgAY
- in 4 parts)
by Riyad Vinci Wadia
PART 1 :
http://www.planetout.com/pno/popcornq/movienews/2000/07/07/wadia.html
I wish to share with you the story of why and how I came to produce BOMgAY, a
short film that had the dubious distinction of becoming India's first "gay"
film. As I sit to write this I realize now that the "why" is more important than
the "how." For in the "why" lies the real beauty of this endeavor. The "how,"
which was so important to discuss at the time of its release, has paled in
significance with the passage of time.
In the summer of 1996, I was in my prime. A newspaper profile had dubbed me the
"Young Turk" of Bombay's independent cinema industry, and I half believed it. My
reputation had been built on the fact that at 27 years of age I had already
produced and directed a feature-length film that had garnered international
acclaim, and that I was a scion of an illustrious family that had a 60-year
history in film production. My grandfather, JBH Wadia, was a pioneer
producer-director who had founded the erstwhile Wadia Movietone Studios in 1933.
As I carried the mantle of my family's reputation, I was well aware of the
charade that I was perpetuating by appearing as a dynamic filmmaker all set to
steer the course of my inheritance well into the next century. When asked, I
would talk with great flourish about the several projects I was working on and
the great stories I wanted to tell. The reality was that I felt I was in the
creative doldrums, an impasse that had set in two years earlier after the
initial success of my debut feature, Fearless -- The Hunterwali Story.
What I didn't realize then was that this doldrums was a necessary phase and that
actually I was drifting with a purpose. Not that the drift was on calm waters;
in fact, quite the opposite. You see, in the aftermath of the release of
Fearless at the London Film Festival in 1993, my personal life underwent a sea
change. Having achieved in one shot all my life's ambitions -- monetary success,
fame, respect of my peers, etc. -- what was left was just one issue I had to
deal with: my gay identity, locked deep in the proverbial closet.
This was driven home to me in that winter of '93, in London. I was staying for
the duration of the festival with an old family friend who was gay. He and his
boyfriend of ten years lived together in central London and led a picture-book,
openly gay life that I had read about but until then never witnessed. While I
was deeply closeted, I was very comfortable with my gay identity on a personal
level. It was the act of expressing my gay identity and all that it would entail
for my family and my social environment that made it difficult to take the
no-turning-back decision to open that closet door. Temperamentally, too, I was
loath to do things in half measures, which meant that if I was to ever discuss
my gay identity I would first and foremost have to reveal it to the persons
closest to my being, my parents. Once they knew, I believed I would be
comfortable with the concept of letting anyone and everyone know. For then it
would not matter to me what people thought.
My observation of my London hosts' bliss and my need to finally find that bliss
for myself was sharply put into discussion when a letter arrived at the London
Film Festival desk with my name on it. It was from (the late) Mark Finch,
director of the San Francisco Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, inviting my film and
me to attend the 1994 edition of that festival, all expenses paid. The lure of
ten days in that fabled city, my film headlining at the fabulous Castro Theater,
with me being the center of attention in the gayest spot on the planet was too
much for me to resist, and I accepted instantly. It was only a few days later
that my bravado started to crumble. How was I to explain to my family (with whom
I lived in Bombay) and my friends (not to mention the Indian press, which seemed
to be hanging on my every word) that I was going to show a film at an
exclusively lesbian and gay event? In a deeply closeted society such as exists
in India, where even issues surrounding heterosexual sexuality is seldom
discussed in the open, this was surely asking too much.
On my return to Bombay I hid the news of my acceptance to this festival for a
few days. Then a fax arrived from Mark Finch discussing travel arrangements and
other such technical details and I knew the time had come to take a deep breath
and face the consequences. I gingerly mentioned the news to my parents, speaking
a little too fast and a little too disinterestedly. They took in the news
without too much ado apart from the query of why a gay film festival would want
to show a film on the life of my grand-aunt, Fearless Nadia, who was not gay. I
had anticipated this and casually showed them a review that had appeared in
Variety which praised the film and mentioned that its camp subject and feminist
heroine would be of interest to gay and lesbian audiences worldwide. I also
threw in the fact that now that the film was made I needed to recover money, and
every potential market should be explored. Thus, using capitalism and media
manipulation, I thought I had managed to evade turning the handle on the closet
door. But I felt anger at myself for having cheated the issue. In the festival
entry form I had marked affirmatively one of the boxes alongside the question,
"Is the director of the film gay?"
A few days later -- the 26th of December, 1993, to be precise -- as I was alone
with my mother driving home in her car, we came across a beggar woman carrying a
beautiful child in her arms. My mother wistfully looked at the child and
wondered aloud as to when she would become a grandmother and have a baby to play
with and love. I can't say what came over me. Perhaps it was the weeks of
tension of debating whether I should say I was gay, or perhaps it was the
occasion I was seeking to finally rid myself of the shackles of needless
duplicity, but I blurted out that she shouldn't look to me for that to happen.
Without missing a beat, she turned to me and bluntly asked, "Why? Are you
otherwise inclined?"
My coming out was rapid. One day my mother, the next week my close friends, the
following fortnight my brother, a few days later my father, and within two
months my general social circle. Over the next eight months I was travelling the
world from festival to festival, San Francisco and Los Angeles to Cannes and
Toronto to Hong Kong and Tokyo. Alive, free, exhilarated and gay, gay, gay! The
pink champagne bottle had been popped and the bubbles were overflowing. I found
and lost love, became a fixture at gay bars, and discovered Lycra. I started to
read and become aware of gay issues and reevaluate my life and its direction. I
quickly became aware of the silent yet powerful gay mafia that ran the
international film world and started to bask in being the new boy on the block.
It was during this time that the seed was planted in my head to make a gay film
based in India. Both Mark Finch and later David Overby (a programmer with the
Toronto Film Festival) encouraged me by spending some precious hours giving me
insights as to how the gay distribution network worked. The more I travelled
internationally, the more I came out to straight friends in India, the more I
realized that I had a story that needed to be told cinematically -- a subject
that needed to be addressed publicly now that I had addressed it personally.
PART 2 :
http://www.planetout.com/pno/popcornq/movienews/2000/07/14/wadia.html
By the summer of 1995 I had written and discarded some 50 ideas for gay stories.
As I discovered for myself the gay world that lived and thrived in the shadows
of the gullies of India's urban underbelly, I kept changing my mind on the exact
angle from which I wanted to tell the story. A collaborative attempt to work on
a television project with filmmaker Kaizad Gustad introduced me to the work of
R. Raj Rao, a writer and poet who had just released his book of short stories
One Day I Locked My Flat in Soul City. A slim volume, I read it in a matter of
hours. This book was the first work I had read from an Indian author that was
able to capture the essence of being a homosexual in India. It told its stories
primarily from a middle-class point of view, a point of view that I found
interesting to read and document. I didn't waste time. I traced Raj to a
university in Poona (a couple of hours' drive from Bombay) and a few weeks later
had acquired the rights to adapt his book for the silver screen. We decided to
write the screenplay collaboratively, meeting on weekends.
As we went about this venture, we found it wasn't as easy as we had hoped.
Struggling to write and make a living proved to be difficult for both of us. One
weekend Raj would have commitments, the next weekend I would have to be
elsewhere. All this meant that our writing process became way too extended and
we lost the thread. I became disenchanted when, after the initial rush of
creativity had worn off, I found that raising the money for making a gay film
from India was not going to be as easy as I had envisaged. My friends in the
international gay festival mafia, who had seemed so close and easily accessible
when I was on the festival circuit, suddenly seemed very far away now that I was
once again stuck in Bombay.
By the summer of 1996 the gay feature project had almost stalled. With a need to
keep busy, and at the prompting of some friends, I started to occupy myself with
other projects. One such project centered on transgender issues in a patriarchal
society. Titled A Mermaid Called Aida, this was a documentary on Aida Banaji, a
notorious transsexual from Bombay. Intended for television release, the making
of this feature length-film was a bumpy and long-drawn journey. It gave me an
opportunity to focus on gender politics and sexual identity, and very soon the
buzz in the film industry in Bombay was that I was a director working on bold
new films.
Then one afternoon Raj called me and asked if he could come around to show me
some poems he had recently written. He had been invited to attend the writing
program and workshop at Iowa State University and was keen that I film him with
a video camera reading some of his poems. He wanted to have some visual material
to take with him, as the other writers who were invited to the program would.
That evening as I read the three typed pages of poems, a shiver went down my
spine. Raj's poems were so explosive, so in-your-face gay, and so incisive about
the urban gay milieu that he and I had been trying to capture in our screenplay.
What wasn't working in our prose came alive with vitriol in his poetry. I was
determined to make something of this work. My decision was further bolstered by
the fact that I had just completed some banal ad film assignments that had
brought in some money -- money that I could use to fund a short film project. I
called Raj the next day and said I was keen to make something of this material
but not just have him read his poems against a backdrop. I was keen to explore
the poems with my own vision and bring to screen the power and passion of the
poems as I had encountered them. Raj was agreeable. His only request was that I
have the film ready in time for his departure to the United States 18 days
later!
There are some moments in one's artistic career where the mind, the soul, and
the medium all mesh together to create a work that comes from the heart. For me,
the making of BOMgAY was that moment. The confluence of 27 years of being in the
closet, two years of being hedonistically out, and the confidence of regaining
pride and self-worth all came together to shape a film
PART 3 :
http://www.planetout.com/pno/popcornq/movienews/2000/07/21/wadia.html
Because of Raj's deadline things moved at such a speed that even today I am
amazed that we were able to create what we did in such quick span. Perhaps it
was this very speed that allowed the film to come from the subconscious and not
from some calculated or thought out plan. After putting the phone down on Raj I
called up my friend Jangu Sethna. Jangu was one of the few gay men in Bombay who
had been out since his childhood in the early '70s. He had worked in film
production in various capacities over the years and had a keen sense of the
urban gay culture of Bombay. He had switched careers in the early nineties and
had become a respected landscape artist. I was keen to collaborate with Jangu
and asked him to come on board this project as my associate director. A few
hours later we were sipping coffee and he and I started to furiously discuss
ideas on our interpretation of Raj's poems.
The next morning we had our storyboards down on paper. We felt good. We had let
our stream of consciousness flow wild and true and we had come up with images
and story lines that came from our collective experiences. I was clear about one
thing when we started the ideating process: we were not going to fall shy or act
coy just to please some societal norms. We were going to make a short film as we
saw it. The only restriction would be the budget. I had earmarked a total budget
of two hundred thousand rupees (then equivalent to approximately $5000). We were
determined to shoot on Beta, as film would have been prohibitive and a far
lengthier process, difficult to achieve in our timeframe. There is an inherent
difficulty in translating the objectivity of poetry to the subjectivity of film.
A poem offers unlimited variations to interpretation to a single reader each
time that reader goes through it. In visualizing the film Jangu and I were
freezing once and for all a visualization of the poems as we saw them on the day
we drew the storyboards.
Now came the tough part. Putting together a team of professionals to work on a
film that's bound to gain some notoriety is not easy. In India making a film
that will shake mountains or threaten the peace is not considered avant-garde;
it's seen as being childish. "Five thousand years of cultural evolution" is a
phrase often thrown at any attempt to contest the status quo. I was keen to
involve as many people from the gay community in Bombay as I could but found
after a few initial phone calls that most fought shy of coming on camera or
working behind the scenes for fear of being clearly identified. It was the old
syndrome: if you work on a gay film then you must be gay. Just as, "If you had a
friend who identified himself as gay, ergo you were gay." This prompted me to
call in some of my friends who were clearly not gay. I brought in Neha Parikh, a
senior production manager, and got her to make the initial phone calls. This
worked wonders. She got Tejal Patni, a heterosexual, who was the "hot" new
videographer in Bombay. He was then producing a popular fashion show on Channel
V. We contracted Ashutosh Phaatak, also a heterosexual, to do the music score.
Ashutosh, now a major music director in India, was then starting out and had
just the musical sensibilities I felt this film needed. Plus he had really cute
hands.
Casting was proving to be tricky; I decided to tackle this myself. When I was
very young my grandfather had shared with me a trade secret. He told me that he
always went for the most difficult aspects of a job first and then finished up
with the easier tasks. In our case, getting an actor to perform in the nude,
with some frontal nudity; we knew was going to be the make-or-break aspect of
our film. If we could convince two actors to do this for the sequence we had set
in the public library then we were assured that our worries were over. I called
my friend Rahul Bose. He was an actor of some repute in India, having performed
on the legitimate theatre and done one feature film. That film was Dev Benegal's
independent masterpiece English August, where Rahul had played the central role.
There were some sequences in the film that were clearly homoerotic and Rahul had
done some nudity in that film, too. I decided to play reverse psychology on
Rahul and told him I was casting for an experimental art film and wondered if he
had met any actors that he could recommend to me for the principal roles. I told
him about the library sequence and said I need a really talented and fearless
actor for that sequence. Rahul immediately suggested himself but I told him to
consider it as he had a high profile and it may not be wise of him to take on a
role that could have adverse effect on his career. It is to his merit as an
actor that he saw through my bluff and told me to fuck off feeding him that crap
line. That same afternoon he was at my office and we went over the script. He
loved it and was all ideas as to how he would do it. I offered him both choices:
to play the "sodomiser" or the "sodomisee" (sic). Sensing that the latter was
the more challenging, he opted for that.
Once we had an actor of Rahul's standing in the film, the rest of the roles
filled in easily. My pitch to others went, "Well, we have Rahul in.?Now do you
want to do it?" And they did. There were some that accepted to do the film in
the name of "the cause" as well. Within 48 hours of starting the venture we had
shaped the film as an "important" work of "socio-politics" that "needed" to be
made. My own coming out in Bombay society and the fact that I was making the
film under the venerated banner of my family's company, Wadia Movietone, also
added legitimacy. For the narration of Raj's poetry we requested the Nation
Award winning actor Rajit Kapur to lend his voice. Rajit is one of the leading
actors in India's art and independent film scene and that year had made a splash
in Shyam Benegal's The Making of the Mahatma, playing the role of a dashing
Mahatma Gandhi. When Rajit agreed to participate in our venture I was overjoyed.
It showed that the film we were making was being taken for all the seriousness
that we had intended.
Getting permissions to locations was especially benefitted by the fact that we
were a recognized film unit and not some new kids on the block out to have fun
or disturb the peace. Within six days of starting we were on a roll. There were
a few glitches -- some actors that dropped out at the nth hour and some
locations (especially the underground bathrooms and shooting on the train) that
had to be used "guerrilla" style. The most stressful shoot was the library
sequence where the librarian supervising the location had to be distracted and
led away while our actors got nude and simulated sex. The librarian kept trying
to hang around the set and the actors (Rahul Bose and Kushal Punjabi) became
adept at slipping in and out of clothes every time he would reappear without
notice. At one point the librarian caught on to what was going on and started to
scream, saying, "You are making a perverted porno." Jangu Sethna expertly
handled the situation by reasoning with the librarian, "How can Wadia Movietone,
the maker of great Indian cinema films for over 60 years, be involved in
something so base!" The librarian then accepted our lie that we were making a
social service film about ragging on college campuses! I had to sign a letter
stating the same and only then did the librarian agree to let us proceed.
While such incidences in retrospect seem funny, the real threat of being caught
by the law making this film was felt by all of us at the time. It was a fear
based on the fact that we were breaking the law. To start with, we were making a
film about homosexuality and quite openly depicting acts of homosexuality --
crimes punishable with life imprisonment in India under the Indian Penal Code.
We could also have been booked under several other laws for making what could
easily be termed "lewd," "lascivious," "perverted" films. Our actors could have
been hauled to jail, as could the crew and our suppliers. This threat was not
taken lightly by us and we went through the entire shoot constantly keeping an
eye out for any potential trouble. Section 337, which states that carnal
intercourse against the course of nature is punishable by life incarceration, is
a law that has seldom come to the courts but is used repeatedly by the police
and the state to threaten, coerce bribes from, and subjugate the public. A relic
inherited from the English colonial period, this law has seldom been discussed
because to discuss it would invite a description of sexual behavior, something
that most Indians shy away from.
When the shoot was completed we rushed right into post-production and because of
the sensitive nature of our material I decided to edit the film on an Avid
system myself. What initially emerged were six short films ranging in length
from 30 seconds to two minutes. All together they made for nine minutes of
running time. Jangu and I were very excited with our work; we knew we had done
justice to our vision. Our next concern was how we planned to present it. We
showed the six vignettes to friends, both straight and gay, and listened to what
they had to say. Most felt that we would need to put these films into some sort
of context. I, too, felt that if I was to screen these films for a more general
public then I would have to find a way to deflect the films' strong images (and
Raj's very strong poetry) by some sort of covert gimmick. I decided to set the
six films in a sequence and inter-title these with a quasi socio-political
construct. While the language of the inter-titles was academic, the thoughts
expressed in them by me were heartfelt. They helped give our film a veneer of
respectability that otherwise would have been seen as simply provocative. Our
final film was now twelve minutes long.
PART 4 :
http://www.planetout.com/pno/popcornq/movienews/2000/07/28/wadia.html
Now came the all-important decision: to get the film sent for censorship or not.
We debated this for a long while and came to the conclusion that it would be an
exercise in futility. The film not only contained images that would be seen as
profane but also had language that was unacceptable to current censor laws. We
knew that all we would achieve would be to create controversy and that was not
our intention. Instead, I devised a plan that I felt would be much more
effective. The plan rose out of my understanding of advertising and marketing,
trades I had experience with as an ad filmmaker.
There is a hierarchy in the media and arts. Film is at the top of the hierarchy,
followed by literature, followed by journalism, followed by visual arts like
painting and sculpture. Film is at this exalted pedestal because it has the
potential to reach the widest audience and cut across social and educational
barriers. It is also seen as the medium that is the most expensive and
collaborative to work with, hence any idea that can be made into a film must
have passed through much discussion and consideration before making it to its
final form. While this is not entirely true, especially in the Mickey Mouse
world of video production, it is a reputation that the film medium generates.
And it is this reputation that allows film to be used for propaganda in the most
effective way. And it was with a propagandist stance that I went about marketing
and screening BOMgAY.
In December of 1996 I had finished work on A Mermaid Called Aida as well and I
requested a friend at the prestigious National Center for the Performing Arts (NCPA)
to let us use that venue to premiere both my recent works. Like New York's
Metropolitan Museum complex or Berlin's Volksbuhne, the NCPA provided me with a
platform that allowed my work to be seen as art, and that, too, as serious art.
For the screening we invited a select band of journalists, film critics and
television crews and some friends and crewmembers. I was rather nervous. Two
years of living a life as an openly gay man and my reputation as a filmmaker
were finally going to come together at this screening. It was a decision I had
taken without too much preparation, rather letting it evolve in fits and starts.
The screening went off splendidly and both films were well received. There were
several questions asked and the session went on till late, ending up in the
gardens outside the theatre complex.
One of the debates that surrounded the film was my claim that the film was
"India's first gay film." Many came forward and said this was not true. They
cited a film called Adhura ("Incomplete") which was made a few years earlier by
one Ashish Balram Nagpal. I investigated this claim and found that this film was
actually a pilot for a television series that never got screened. Furthermore,
it was a story that revolved around a bisexual man and had a brief and rather
derisive homosexual subplot. I stuck to my claim. That is not to say I was in
any real way proud of my achievement. I wish gay films had been made many years
before I came to make BOMgAY and that, too, in abundance. That would have gone a
long, long way in helping me and so many, many others in not having to struggle
as hard as we still have to in context to our identity and cultural and social
acceptance.
Over the next several months the film received reams of newsprint. It opened up
an extensive discussion on homosexuality in India and it brought the "g" word
into people's homes. I was invited to guest on talk shows and lifestyle programs
where lengthy excerpts of BOMgAY were screened. Within a few short weeks I
started receiving letters from gay men in small towns and faraway cities,
wanting to know how they could get a hold of a copy of the film. I was
approached everywhere I went by men who would come up to me and tell me of some
gay guy they knew, some friend they wanted to give the movie to. It seemed to me
that before my very eyes a whole new gay world was coming alive.
BOMgAY
Strangely, in all the press that the film received there was not one reaction
that was negative or derogatory. It surprised me that no one seemed to find the
film objectionable or worth raising any ire over. In fact, the most severe
reprimand the film received was from gay activist Ashok Row Kavi who reviewed
both films in the Times of India. He wrote that BOMgAY painted a portrait of
south Bombay (read "westernized Indian") gay life and was far removed from the
realities faced by most gay men in rest of India, especially men who lived in
underprivileged socio-economic classes. I agreed whole-heartedly with Ashok on
this. My film was never intended to be a realistic portrait of an Indian gay
community because, as I saw it, there is no such thing as the Indian gay
community (or, to stretch the discussion, there is no such reality called
India!). An Indian in my opinion is a person who dwells in a geo-political
entity called India. That's where the similarity between one Indian and another
ends. At its lowest common denominator, India is an amalgam of several universes
and time zones. A geo-political entity in which the 14th century and the 23rd
century coexist and whose citizens are not from any cohesive culture. BOMgAY
tries to portray the emergence of a small gay community that dwells in Bombay
that chooses to interpret the word 'gay' as practiced and loosely defined by the
cultural, social, and ideological expressions as seen in the western hemisphere.
Of course this interpretation is mutated with the ground realities of living
within the other cultures that exist with Bombay.
With BOMgAY and the resultant media frenzy, the press was hungry for more
gay-related stories. It legitimized the efforts of social activists, and once
and for all declared that India had a gay community which had a voice in the
arts. Where once gay issues were seldom heard, now there is some reportage
almost every day. More and more gays have come out of the closet in recent times
and have started demanding some semblance of rights. While the road to acquiring
these rights is a long one, the thought of a revolution is no longer
fantastical. Following soon after in the steps of BOMgAY were a slew of films.
Some of these films directly were the result of the hype that surrounded BOMgAY.
Deepa Mehta's Fire brought lesbianism into focus (inciting riots and becoming a
political weapon in the hands of right wing fundamentalists), and Kaizad
Gustad's Bombay Boys had a confused gay protagonist, too. Wheelchair-bound,
Bombay-born writer Firdaus Kanga starred as himself in Warris Hussain's Sixth
Happiness with scenes of his homosexual awakening being playfully portrayed.
Even Bollywood has nodded to the emergence of an urban gay identity with Subhas
Ghai's Taal, featuring a very camp queen choreographer (played by real life gay
choreographer Mahesh "Pankola" Mahboobani) prancing around the leading lady. The
most recent film to bring gay and bisexual issues to its central story line is
Dev Benegal's Split Wide Open, which has just been completed and will premiere
in the spring of 2000. Rahul Bose stars in this as well and plays a street
hustler who is educated by a gay Roman Catholic priest. Further gay images are
to be found in recent television serials and music videos and short films, most
produced in Bombay.
The most startling gay Indian film since BOMgAY is a stunning documentary by
22-year-old Nish Saran of New Delhi. This young filmmaker is representative of
the new generation who have grown up in a world where being gay is no longer
revolutionary, yet a world that still does not accept homosexuality. In his
film, Nish confesses to his mother on camera about his being gay, and tackles
issues of HIV/AIDS and fear of ostracization. The film recently had private
screenings in India and has regenerated media frenzy on gay issues, this time
bringing into sharp focus the need to discuss sexuality in a time of medical
catastrophe.
My own quest continues. I am still working on bring the screenplay (now
completed by scriptwriter Shuchi Kothari) of R. Raj Rao's short stories to the
screen. It's tentatively and subliminally titled Second Chances.