“A script is the very bedrock of a film. It sets the tone and if the script is not cohesive, it shows through at the tills. There are very few films that can rise above their script,” says Siddharth Roy Kapur, executive vice-president of motion pictures at UTV Software Communication, the entertainment company behind films such as Jodhaa Akbar, Taare Zameen Par and Life in a Metro. “There are some great writers out there, but not enough of them and they are not trained enough.”
Previously, the industry had regarded the institution of scriptwriting as superfluous to making a film and writers were only hired, if at all, after shooting had begun. An appetite for the formulaic style of Bollywood film, as well as a strong and ancient tradition of story-telling and performing arts, meant the need for a specialist artist to pen a script was deemed unnecessary. The trend was to adapt tales from mythology for the medium of cinema, which resulted in a story with dialogue, as opposed to a script.
“A screenplay is a very precise craft, and a narrative format,” says Rajabali. “That was never followed. Instead, we got a short story with the dialogue inserted as the film was being made.”
In addition, the adoption of the “author theory” from Europe during the 1960s, which held that the director, not scriptwriter, was the real author of a film, destroyed the last vestiges of credibility held by writers in the eyes of the industry, and prompted the Film and Television Institute to abolish its scriptwriting module in 1972.
In contrast, scriptwriting in Hollywood was treated as a specialist craft from its inception, as the US lacked the tradition of performing arts found in India.
“They sat down and put together a narrative format called screenplay, and that was followed,” says Rajabali. “So, it was already treated as a specialist craft and it was also logically recognized that it goes from script to director. So, from the beginning, the scriptwriter occupied a position right next to the director.”
Leading scriptwriters in Hollywood can command a fee of at least $1 million (about Rs4 crore) per script, compared with the Rs15-25 lakh per script that writers in Bollywood are still paid—also a fraction of the Rs5-7 crore charged by the top actors of today. Additionally, heavily unionized Hollywood recognizes and celebrates its scriptwriters through prestigious awards, which are highly coveted and accords them credit on publicity stills and hoardings.
In regional Indian cinema, the scriptwriter has historically occupied a more privileged position, says Shaji N. Karun, the Malayalam director whose debut film Piravi won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 1988. As a result, the south produces “better crafted” films than mainstream Hindi cinema.
“The role of the writer is considered much more important in Malayalam cinema than in Bollywood because the craft of making cinema is more important in the regions,” he says.
Scriptwriters who seek fame and fortune in television face similar challenges, but are presented with greater opportunity in terms of a larger choice of productions to write for, as well as a more regular and assured source of income. On the downside, they find themselves a part of an industrialized process, with television programming ruled by tight budgets and time frames.