Ashok Amritraj to receive Pride of India award at New York

Ashok Amritraj, known in the South as the producer of the Tamil film Jeans is to be presented with the Pride of India award at the Bollywood Awards show at Nassau Coliseum, New York on April 28. Currently on a visit to his home in Chennai, Amritraj took time off to talk about his production company in Los Angeles, his struggles and his victories abroad. He is also a member on the board for foreign films at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The nominees for the awards are based on the votes of NRI’s polled in through phone calls, emails and coupons sent in. This is a major event outside India where Hollywood stars also participate. Last year Michael Jackson, Richard Gere and many others took part. Steven Seagull, Jean Claude Van Damme, Chaka Jhan and Jose Feliciano have confirmed their participation this year.

Having played in all major tennis tournaments in the world including the Wimbledon and US Open, Ashok shifted base to LA twenty years back to enter the entertainment business. For the first six years, he only studied business. "I was busy knocking on doors and tennis helped me to get my foot inside the door but beyond that nothing else happened. It was between 1985 to 1990 that US was witnessing a TV boom and we could make small films that were aimed for TV. So I ventured into making small films. In 1991, I made Double Impact with Jean Claude Van Damme at a cost of 11 million $. It grossed around 100 million $. Around this time, the video boom and small films were going out of the circulation and I shifted to bigger movies and entered into a picture to picture deal with Columbia. For the last three years, I am the CEO of Hyde Park which has a deal with MGM and Disney as well as Eplison for Pan European rights" said Ashok elaborating on his present activities. His recent films are Anti Trust starring Tim Robbins, Ryan Phillipe, Original Sin starring Antonio Banderas and Angelina Jolie, Get Carter starring Slyvester Stallone, all have been box-office grossers. What The Worst That Could Happen? starring Martin Lawrence and Danny Devito is under production.
Now known as a prolific producer in Hollywood, Ashok finds that any outsider in Hollywood is at a disadvantage and it can be from any non American country. "If anybody were to ask me to explain Hollywood, I would only shake my head.

Hollywood is a state of mind. They talk about 100-200 million dollars in production and another 20-30 million in distribution. It’s a very closed society and many success that seemed overnite are atleast 20 years of preservance and soul searching. It took me ten years to break into the Hollywood society.

There everything depends so much on the relationship with people. For instance, I am hosting a charity dinner to raise funds for a hospital in LA and each table costs 50,000 $. All the tables are booked and every studio has bought it. If you are on the fringe of Hollywood and not in the inner circle, then it is a bad place to live in. There are many Indians who have thrived in many areas of business but no Indian except for me has made it to the movies" says Amritraj with a smile. His market is the US and Canada and followed by Germany, Japan, UK, Australia, Spain and France which brings in the moolah. India is hardly one percent of the revenue worldwide.

"UK has a sizable Asian population which is a good market for Hindi films while in USA, in a population of 280 million, you have only two million Indians. So it does make a difference for a Hindi film to enter the top ten in UK because of the Asian population but to me I could care less because my movie has to collect in US and Canada. I would put in a German actor in my film to make it run in Germany as well. For a Hindi movie, the returns from the NRI population is sizable in terms of his investment but to me who makes movies on 60 million dollars, India is not much and I can’t make a movie on this budget for the asians. We do have movies made for Channel 4 and the festivals. But the mainstream films are the, what we call the tent pole films made by the studios who put in a Sean Connery or a Bruce Willis. Today the studios have run many out of business. If we make films outside the studios then it becomes very risky because its difficult to get buyers. We do have some flashes like Crouching Tiger or Life is Beautiful shot on a small budget and grossed heavily. There are seven studios who run Hollywood and it’s like that time -Warner owns HBO and Disney owns ABC. I have a co-finance and co-ownership with Disney and MGM who distribute my films in US and Canada.

Rest of the world is mine and like for Antitrust I tied up with 20th Century Fox in many areas."

Being on the board of foreign Films in the Academy, Ashok said that it was a eleven member board with only three non-Americans in it. The board has to decide on whether the foreign films come with the right credentials and once it is let in it’s sent to the 300 member Academy. "It’s quite a difficult job because the Academy stipulates that you have sit through 2/3rd of the movie length to vote and they log in the time. With our lengthy movies and from other countries, it’s become a tedious task", he says.

Jeans was an Oscar entry from India and Ashok laughs it off and adds "My friends sat through it because it had some production values and locales but I think no film from india has had such values of production seen in Jeans". The production of Jeans taught Ashok the lesson that movies in India don’t get made on time and the industry thrives on disorganisation. "If discipline can come in then I think India will see the emergence of corporates entering movie business" feels Amritraj who is soon to fly out for his charity dinner in LA.

Ayyappa Prasad