Anshumaan Swami CEO, Applause Entertainment "Film business is like quicksand and even after you have done 20 films, you cannot predict what will happen to the next one"

When Anshumaan Swami got down to marketing Black, he didn't think of it as a movie. Instead, he looked upon the Amitabh Bachchan and Rani Mukherjee-starrer as a pricey Bentley or a snazzy Louis Vuitton. In an industry where 800 movies roll off production studios every year, why would anybody risk pussyfooting with marketing? Because the movie, about a deaf-dumb-blind girl and her ageing, eccentric teacher who is hell bent on making her self-reliant, wasn't meant to be a mass-market fare. In fact, it strayed so far from the typical Bollywood formula that it had all the chances of bombing on the box office. There were no action scenes, colourful and hip-gyrating songs, or even pretty faces. On the contrary, heroine Mukherjee was made to look plainer, Bachchan much older and eccentric than he actually is, and the director demanded a level of sensitivity not usually expected of viewers of Hindi movies. Says Swami, CEO of Applause Entertainment, an Aditya Birla Group company that produced the movie: "My core audience for the film is that which understands what Amitabh Bachchan says in the movie: Mujhe vishwas aur samay ke sivai aur kuch nahi chahiye (I don't need anything other than time and trust)."

Convinced that the usual marketing strategy won't work, Applause decided to go in for word-of-mouth marketing and restrict the initial release to multiplexes, which meant that only audiences in metro cities, and that too from sec A and B categories, would be watching it. For a movie that had cost Rs 21 crore to make, it was a risky marketing plan to adopt, but, fortunately for Swami, it seems to have paid off. Six weeks into the release, Black has fetched around Rs 15 crore in theatre ticket sales and another Rs 4.5 crore from satellite TV rights (film producers sell television rights to channels). Says Komal Nahta, a Bollywood tracker: "In multiplexes and in big cities like Mumbai and Delhi, the film has done exceptionally well and is a fair grosser."

Movie Management

Two years ago, when the Aditya Birla Group's young Chairman, Kumar Mangalam Birla, roped in Swami to launch Applause, he was wading into treacherous waters. Unorganised and chaotic, Bollywood had steadily resisted all attempts at "corporatisation" of movie making. Among the famous failures is ABCL (of Amitabh Bachchan that's now making a comeback). Indeed, Applause's first movie, Dev (again a Bachchan starrer) sank without a trace. Recalls Swami: "The fear set in when local newspapers said that yet another corporate bites the dust." Therefore, when he was first approached to bankroll Black, he took six long months to make up his mind, never mind that it boasted of a reputed director like Sanjay Leela Bhansali.