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Bollywood gets Hitched….

By: Anantha :+: Under: Culture, Entertainment, It Happens Only in India
On: ⋅ August 9, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment
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… and may be slapped with a $30 million law suit!

Prem is a Love Guru who solves out love problems of everyone. He meets Bhaskar Diwakar Chaudhary who comes to Prem for help in his love life. Bhaskar loves his Boss Priya Jaisingh but unable to express his love to her as she is the daughter of a wealthy buisinessman.

If that excerpt from a IMDB synopsis for a recent Bollywood movie sounds familiar, you are not hallucinating. It could *almost* be substituted for the synopsis for this movie and no one would complain, if not for the desi names.

It all began when, a couple of weeks ago, erstwhile Bollywood dancing star and funny (or raunchy, if you ask my father) man Govinda continued his comeback as an actor. Govinda, a la Fred Thompson, moonlights as a member of India’s Parliament representing Mumbai North constituency. And since that has not exactly been a glorious run so far, it is natural that that he has sought to test the waters once again for a return to movies after a gap of a couple of years.

And emboldened by the decent run of his first come-back movie (which incidentally was a re-working of the Hugh Grant/Liam Neeson/Colin Firth love fest, Love Actually), next up, our man signed on to play a romantically challenged Bihari who approaches a local “Love Guru” named Prem for help and advice in wooing his love interest who is also his rich boss’s daughter.

Yes, you did guess right. Director (and Govinda groupie) David Dhawan has conveniently internalized (probably not for the first time) another movie, this time the Will Smith-Kevin James-Eva Mendes starrer, Hitch. Playing the desi Hitch in Partner, is part time stripper Salman Khan.
And news sources have claimed today that the Hollywood watchdogs might have caught up with master of raunch and the paunch.

Sony Pictures Entertainment along with Overbrook Entertainment may file a $30 million suit against Eros Entertainment and K Sera Sera, the producers of the Salman Khan-Govinda starrer Partner, which has been accused of being an out-and-out copy of the Will Smith film Hitch which Overbrook Entertainment produced for Sony Pictures.

This is potentially huge due to a number of reasons. First, Eros Entertainment, one of the accused is perhaps the biggest distributor of Indian movies outside the sub-continent. A law-suit like this could potentially lead to a heavy loss of business.

According to sources in the film trade, Hollywood studios are now paying close attention to the Indian film industry because they have recognised that significant revenues are being earned from the Bollywood overseas market, and they are keen to claim their piece of the pie.

Second, Bollywood’s nonchalance in lifting plot lines and complete scripts from foreign cinema is well documented.

While Sanjay Gupta’s Zinda was an unapologetic copy of the Korean film Old Boy, the small-budget success Bheja Fry is a frame-by-frame, shot-by-shot imitation of the French film The Dinner Game, and Mohit Suri’s Awarapan was blatantly plagiarised from the Korean film A Bittersweet Life.

In fact there are a number of websites that chronicle the rampant plagiarism in Indian music and movies . As Bollycat’s description says,

Bollywood, India’s movie industry, churns out over 800 flicks a year. But with all those numbers it’s hard for them to keep up with the creative work. So a lot of movies turn out to be ‘inspired by’ movies from all over, especially Hollywood. And at the rate they are going with good and hit movies, very soon we’ll be seeing a copy of “Plan 9 from Outer Space”.

But the people in charge mostly deny everything vehemently. A couple of years ago, when questioned about the fact that his movie Kaante was so similar to Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, Sanjay Gupta, the director replied,

First, I didn’t choose Reservoir Dogs. Kaante is not inspired by Reservoir Dogs. I haven’t been candid about that at all. (Laughs) ….. My film is in the genre of films like Reservoir Dogs, The Asphalt Jungle, The Killing, City On Fire. These are the kind of films where you have five or six guys getting together to pull off a heist and how things go wrong. …. It is a crime film, not a remake of any one film. Reservoir Dogs itself is a remake of a Hong Kong-based film called City On Fire.

It’s a diffferent matter that when people saw the two movies, they begged to differ with Gupta. And funnily, earlier this year, Quentin Tarantino himself said,

I LOVED (Kaante). I think (Kaante) was fabulous. Of the two rip offs I loved are Hong Kong’s “Too many ways to be number one” and this one – “KAANTE”.

….You have INDIAN guys, coming to US and looting a US Bank. How cool is that. I was truly honored. And these Indian guys are played by the legends of Bollywood. I was honored.

But it appears Sony does not share Tarantino’s opinion. If the talk of a lawsuit is true then Sony sure could fancy its chances, given that a number of news sources and reviewers have touched on the similarities between Partner and Hitch. However Sony has to tread carefully, lest its case go the Barbara Taylor Bradford way.

A few years ago, best selling author Bradford was outraged when one of her loyal fans informed her that one of her novels was being serialized on Sahara TV in India. Radford promptly filed a case in the Kolkata High Court alleging copyright infringement. But the court ruled against her and the judgement was upheld by the Supreme Court of India. The judges apparently watched the TV series and read Bradford’s novel before ruling on the case.

Whether the Bradford case was an indictment of the holes in the Indian court system or a landmark judgement to be celebrated is quite another matter, but the fact remains that attitudes in India vis a vis intellectual property rights remain poor, as evidenced by this snippet from (of all places) espn.com’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback column

Raghunath Mashelkar, head of India’s equivalent of the National Science Foundation, admitted he had published a book containing extensive plagiarism. Subject of the book? Protection of intellectual property rights.

And nothing is more damning than this parting shot the CNN-IBN,

If indeed the case is filed, it will be the first such instance in Bollywood. One can only hope it is also the last such instance.

*sigh*

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