Bollywood Gets Ready to Take On Hollywood

Jan. 14, 2005 — -- The Golden Globes kick off the Hollywood award season this weekend. But for billions of movie fans around the world, it is not Hollywood, but Bollywood that produces the biggest stars and the biggest movies.

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Bollywood is the name given to the Hollywood of India, the huge film industry based in Bombay, India's movie capital. Some 1,200 films a year are produced in India, the vast majority of them in Bombay. They are a big draw not just in India, but across much of the globe -- though not in the United States.

"I would say what soccer is to sport, Bollywood is to entertainment," said Richard Corliss, a film critic for Time magazine and a self-confessed Bollywood fan. "That is to say, it's only a minority taste in the United States, but throughout the Indian subcontinent, in North Africa, the Middle East, Asia straight through to Indonesia, large parts of Eastern Europe, it's the most popular form of entertainment in the world."

Corliss added, "It's best to think of Bollywood films now and forever as Hollywood films of the '30s and '40s, where there was a huge industry disgorging 1,000 movies a year back then, as Bollywood does now."

So what, exactly, is a Bollywood movie? Well, they're usually long -- about three hours -- and chock full of plot lines, music, dance -- just about anything that can go in a movie. "It's designed as full-on, total entertainment for the Indian audience, for the masses," says director Mira Nair, who included a Bollywood dance number in her recent Hollywood film "Vanity Fair" with Reese Witherspoon.

"Satisfying everybody is the general goal of conduct with a Bollywood film," Nair said, adding that the genre's films must have "drama, car chases, huge amounts of romance, always great amounts of music, and preferably a little danger, a little villainy, to keep the balance going."

And, of course, no Bollywood film would be complete without several great dance numbers. It doesn't matter what the topic -- the political tensions over wartorn Kashmir (recent hits "Main Hoon Na" and "Lakshya"), melodramatic family sagas ("Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham"), or an E.T.-like alien befriending a mentally challenged boy ("Koi Mil Gaya") -- a Bollywood viewer is guaranteed great song and dance numbers.

The entertainment spans genres, too. "If you're a Bollywood dancer, not only do you have to know Indian classical dancing, Indian folk dancing, Indian contemporary dancing, but you also have to know Western styles, too," said Bollywood dance instructor Nakul Dev Mahajan. "You have to know hip-hop, you have to know jazz. You have to have some other worldly training, whether it's ballet or whether it's salsa."

The music is hugely popular in its own right. Bollywood's leading composer, A.R. Rahman, is reputed to be the biggest-selling artist of all time. "According to some standards, he has sold over 150 million copies of the albums of the movies that he writes the songs and the scores for, which would put him above the Beatles, any Britney Spears, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra," said Corliss.