MUMBAI, India — “Bollywood” conjures images of ubiquitous stars, but every movie produced in Mumbai is made possible by an army of men and women toiling in the shadows: the extras, the carpenters and caterers, the tailors bent over sewing machines creating glittering costumes, the men putting up movie billboards, the men sitting in the ticket window at the local theater.
India has been under a strict lockdown since March 25 to fight the coronavirus outbreak. The complex machinery of Bollywood has come to a halt, affecting about a million people — according to the Producers Guild of India — who are directly or indirectly employed by the movie industry. Many are without work and wages. The worst hit are about 35,000 daily wage workers.
A March report by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry and Ernst & Young estimates that 1,833 movies were released in India in 2019. India makes movies in as many as 28 languages. More than 200 of them are produced by the Hindi film industry in Mumbai, which is popularly known as Bollywood.
Movie studios, production offices, editing and sound suites, and stars’ homes are mostly in north Mumbai. The more palatial homes are traffic landmarks. Ask someone for directions and you could easily hear the reply, “Take a U-turn at Shah Rukh Khan’s house.” Every Sunday for years, crowds have gathered in front of the actor Amitabh Bachchan’s house for a sighting. The 77-year-old actor, surrounded by security guards, dutifully steps out and waves to his admirers. The coronavirus outbreak has put an end to the ritual.
The film industry effectively shut down in mid-March when the producers’ guild decided to stop filming and most of the movie theaters across India were closed. Bollywood has a calendar tightly packed with release dates for new movies. As the pandemic closed down the theaters, some of the year’s biggest films, scheduled to open in March and April, have been indefinitely postponed. It is impossible to predict when theaters will open, and even when they do, when audiences will feel safe enough to venture in again.
Bollywood has long been accused of peddling escapist, overblown fantasies and having little connection to reality, but when the pandemic hit Mumbai, the movie industry came together to protect its most vulnerable. Several movie trade associations have been raising funds and providing financial assistance.
Some of the wealthiest actors donated to coronavirus relief funds run by the Indian government. The actor Salman Khan made direct transfers to bank accounts of the workers in the film industry. On May 3, Bollywood’s leading actors, musicians and singers recorded performances and messages from their homes for a digital concert and raised over $6.8 million to fight the virus.
The pandemic also brought into focus the curiously cordial relationship between the movie industry and the Bollywood paparazzi. The Mumbai paparazzi are less feral than their London and Los Angeles counterparts. Yet they doggedly cover every entertainment event, from movie trailer releases to parties to premieres.
They feed the insatiable demand for the stars by taking photos of them outside gyms, bars, restaurants and especially the Mumbai airport. Stylists responded by designing “airport looks” for their celebrity clients. The paparazzi play a vital role in creating the chimera of relevancy and buzz around actors and films.
After the coronavirus outbreak, the Bollywood paparazzi, who make about $15 to $20 after a long day, had little work. The filmmaker and producer Rohit Shetty and the actor Hrithik Roshan donated money to support them.
Bollywood’s complex publicity machinery is dormant. The actors, models, filmmakers and fashion designers who relentlessly fill India’s media and mind space are stuck at home and trying to stay alive in public memory through Instagram livestreams, Zoom interviews and curated glimpses of their quarantined lives on social media. Every third celebrity has turned into a chef and a poet.
All of this provides momentary distraction from the mounting dread and anxiety about the extent of damage the coronavirus outbreak will inflict on Bollywood. India has a mere 9,527 movie screens, and a majority — 6,327 screens — are in single-screen theaters. Some of them will close permanently in the post-pandemic world. Given the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic, no one is willing to predict the exact amount of loss, but experts estimate that Bollywood will lose between $1 billion and $1.3 billion.
I called Karan Johar, arguably Bollywood’s most successful filmmaker and producer, who currently has three films in postproduction. Mr. Johar’s “Takht,” an ambitious, historical movie set in the Mughal era, was scheduled to start filming in Italy in April. “All creators are optimists,” Mr. Johar said. “You have to believe that it will all work out. But right now, we also have to be realists. I have told everyone in my company: Please don’t think of growth, think of survival.”
The movie industry that emerges after the pandemic will be necessarily altered. Perhaps the movies will as well. Until there is a vaccine, how can anyone film a spectacular song sequence with 200 dancers in the background? Our stories and the way we tell them will change.
In India, movies define Mumbai and politics define Delhi, the capital. In a horrifically overcrowded city, where over 41 percent of the population lives in slums, Bollywood provides a unique, fairy tale sparkle.
I have never understood how they arrived at this number, but industry old-timers will tell you that every day, 200 aspirants come to Mumbai hoping to break into show business. That is why the city is also called Mayanagri, or the City of illusions. I have long maintained that Hindi cinema is a necessary comfort and a collective expression of hope. Even as Bollywood scrambles to survive, we have to believe that a happy ending is a possibility.
Anupama Chopra is the editor of Film Companion, an Indian cinema portal, and the author of “Sholay: The Making of a Classic.”
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