Category: General Interest

Items of general interest – for mass consumption

Anurag Kashyap apologizes for Shakalaka Boom Boom

My respect for Anurag Kashyap has just gone up significantly.

Over at PassionForCinema, Anurag Kashyap, dialogue writer of Shakalaka Boom Boom has apologized for atrocities inflicted upon us.

Quote:

… worst is every time the promos come on air my daughter calls out to my maid and says, “shamsu..papa ki picture” and i try and tell her don’t say it out loud.. i hope she doesn’t tell her friends in school..or her teacher, or her school bus driver…

and then a little later

…but then did i take so much interest in the film when it was going on.. no.. was i there to tell them where everyone was going wrong.. no..did i fight for it.. no..did i care..no..well..when you don’t care then this is what you get baby..commercial or not..when you make a choice you gotta care and i didn’t..i didn’t bother..when they called me i went..what they asked me to write..i wrote..i did not add anything to it..so all i can say for it is I AM SORRY and that is not enough..all i can say is never again..

After Black Friday (which he wrote and directed) and Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd. (for which he wrote dialogues) I had a lot of respect for him. Amazing versatility! That came back crashing down after Shakalaka Boom Boom. But, now he has gone and redeemed himself.

It takes a clear-headed and courageous person to publicly admit that some of his/her work is bad. (Maybe I am partial to such people – I recently blogged about Leslie McFarlane the author of the early Hardy Boys books, and how he hated his work. Mildred Wirt Benson, who wrote some of the early Nancy Drew books, appears to like her work, and I have less respect for her.) But in the case of Anurag, I wonder how much easier this apology became because of the fact that the producers stopped paying him for his work. I wonder whether he would have done a similar apology if he was still on speaking terms with the producers.

Whatever the nitty-gritty details, I think this is a great step. I also loved the fact that Anurag blogged about why he made Black Friday and then diligently and thoughtfully answered most of the readers’ comments there. This is a celebrity who “gets” blogging. That is a rather rare phenomenon. I don’t know any other Indian celebrity in this category.

Read his entire article. And the comments – those are interesting too.

Post-production technology in Bollywood

The Indian Express has a great article on the use of technology in post-production of movies in Bollywood. Although all of this material is familiar, I was unaware of how extensively this is used in Bollywood, and also some of the details are very interesting.

For example:

Is not only the fact that producers and directors want their films to be processed in digital labs after the shooting is done. Film makers are even going to production houses with the rough sketch of the storyline and using the latest technologies extensively to visualise their movies before the first shot is called. Post-production houses have even started moving to the role of pre-production by providing facilities such as pre-visualisation, character designs, story boarding and layouts. This helps director do his homework before going for the actual shoot.

Before and after: an animated van is rendered by PrimeFocus for a commercial. The image on the left is a sketch. The one on the right is the rendering of the same.

Read the full article. It is quite interesting.

Who wrote “The Hardy Boys”?

Franklin W. Dixon of course.

The Hardy boys. Read by countless kids of my generation. I don’t know if they are still as popular – I assume they are. There were about 60 mysteries that I was aware of when I started reading. Then suddenly new ones started cropping up. I remember wondering whether another author had somehow acquired the copyrights to the series and started writing. But no, the author was still the same – Franklin W. Dixon.

Things aren’t always what they seem. This old article from the Washington post about the author of “The Hardy Boys” which is an eye-opener and a great read. I assume that this must be old news to many people – especially since Wikipedia’s entry for the Hardy boys has all of this information. But it was news to me.

The name “Franklin W. Dixon” was owned by a publishing company which created short plot outlines and outsourced the actual writing of the book to nameless authors who were never allowed to reveal that they wrote the book.

The first author, Leslie McFarlane, took this on as a way to earn some money until he established himself as a serious writer.

Unfortunately, the great depression, and the resulting poverty ensured that to make ends meet, he would continue to write 58 novels even though he hated doing it. To quote his diary:

“To write a chapter of a book without having to worry about character, action or plot would call for little more than the ability to hit the keys of a typewriter. . . . They were straightforward, cheap paperbacks for a public that would neither read nor relish anything better. . . . And besides, I would be under no obligation to read the stuff. I would merely have to write it.”

I loved the Hardy boys as a kid – and had read over 50 of them (pretty much everything that was available to me at that time). But even at the age of 11, me and my friends used to make fun of the writing. How Frank, Joe, Chet and the other characters were always introduced in the same style, how often a chapter ended with “Suddenly, they blacked out”, and other quirks that I no longer remember. It is interesting to note what McFarlane thought of this writing:

“It is dull stuff. . . . I will make a New Year’s resolution never to do another if I can help it.”

The Washington Post article is also very well written and worth reading even though it’s a bit long. I have pulled out some choice quotes from the article.

I envisioned the young Leslie McFarlane, a fine writer, hunched over his typewriter, babies at his feet, desperate for the money to buy the coal to stoke the furnace to survive another day, haunted by fear, humiliated by his failure, guilty over his gall at subjecting the people he loved to the reckless dream he chased, banging out another idiotic novel for a plutocrat who abused him.

If you are a bad writer, then writing poorly must be no big deal.

But if you are a good writer, writing poorly must be hell. You must die a little with every word.

And this on the fact that writing good fiction and making money are not directly correlated:

John Grisham’s sentences thud and crepitate all over the page, and he has become a literary tycoon. Edgar Allan Poe nearly starved.

See the full article