OTT-THEATRICAL MODEL UNDERGOES A MASSIVE CHANGE IN THE WEST; WILL INDIA FOLLOW SUIT?

Ever since the OTT platforms have come in India, the multiplex chains have devised a rule. If a filmmaker wants to screen his/her film in cinemas, he/she has to sign a contract with the multiplex chains stating that the said film won’t be given to a streaming platform until 8 weeks of its release. Most filmmakers accepted this rule. However, the sooner you give your film on OTT, the more you get paid. Hence, some filmmakers tried their luck and asked the multiplexes to let go of this rule for their films. The multiplexes, however, didn’t relent. In a few cases, it led to tensions. The Rajkummar Rao-Kriti Kharbanda starrer Shaadi Mein Zaroor Aana didn’t get a release in multiplexes for the first few hours on the day it came out. It’s only when the producer realized that he’ll lose out on revenue from multiplexes that he signed the eight-window contract. Only then did Shaadi Mein Zaroor Aana release, post 1:30-2 PM. The same happened a few weeks later with Vikram Bhatt’s horror film 1921. This film too arrived in multiplexes only post noon.

One of the first releases of this year was the long-delayed Shimla Mirchi, directed by Ramesh Sippy. He had got a lucrative deal from Netflix for which he had to release the film on their platform within 4 or 5 weeks. Multiplexes, naturally, didn’t agree and hence this flick had a release only in single screens! It was clear that the multiplex chains are quite adamant when it comes the 8-week-window rule.

In the West, it’s even more extreme. There, the films are supposed to be released on non-theatrical avenues only after 90 days of release. Netflix, meanwhile, made it clear that it’ll allow only four weeks in cinemas for it’s films like The Irishman, Marriage Story etc. The major chains there like AMC, Regal etc didn’t accept. Hence, these critically acclaimed flicks released in single-screens and smaller centres of North America and in other countries.

Earlier this year, Universal Pictures took a revolutionary step – it released it’s animated flick Trolls World Tour in cinemas on April 10. But footfalls got affected due to Coronavirus-induced lockdown. As a result, the same day, it was also released online but under the PVOD (Premium Video-On-Demand) model. Viewers had to pay $20 to catch the film. This step worked big time and reportedly, it set several streaming records. A surprised and motivated Universal then announced that they’ll do more of simultaneous theatrical and streaming releases from now on. An announcement of such nature angered the theatre chains. Adam Aron, CEO and president of AMC that their chain would no longer release a film that also drops online at the same time. Another chain, Regal cinemas, too put a statement to this effect.

However, around 10 days back, a sudden development left the global movie industry shocked as well as amused. AMC signed a deal with Universal wherein the theatrical window was shortened from 90 days to just 17 days! Also, once the film is released online, AMC would still get a cut out of these PVOD platforms. This makes it a win-win situation for all. It was also made clear that the bigger event films which would benefit from longer theatrical runs like Fast & Furious or Jurassic World sequels would not immediately go for a PVOD release.

Still, the development is a bit too unexpected. And if this is not enough, Disney’s much awaited flick Mulan too will release on it's Disney+ platform under the PVOD model. Viewers will have to pay a high $29.99 to view the movie, once it releases on September 4. This is mostly done as Coronavirus cases in USA are still high and theatres won’t be opening till the Mulan makes it to cinemas. Disney’s CEO Bob Chapek however insisted that this is a one-off decision taken by them and that it won’t be the norm for their future titles. Also, he assured that Mulan can be experienced on the big screen where countries where cinemas are open.

Mulan was going to be one of the two films besides Christopher Nolan’s Tenet which were to release in cinemas as soon as normalcy kicks in. With this decision to go digital, it means one film less and a further encouragement to those who feel ‘theatres are dead’!

Will these developments have any effect in India? Will producers here also demand a 17-day window instead of a 8-week window for digital release? Will they experiment with PVOD model with desi audiences? Only time will tell although trade experts believe that cinema halls are still safe in India. The footfalls in places like USA have been going down and hence, such steps were necessary. India, meanwhile is still a film-crazy country and hopefully, the pre-Covid model will be continued to be followed by producers and exhibitors alike.

Mayank Shekhar (MID-DAY; February 8, 2020)

Whether on social media or offline, one of the things I find sorely missing in all conversations on Bong Joon-ho's Parasite is how playfully the picture is plotted. People come out ruminating far more on the intensity of class-divide that the movie strikingly shines a light on. Don't let that bog you down about Bong's film. Which is already in Korean, with English subtitles, picking up an unprecedented six Oscar nominations, including for the Best Foreign Language Film, that it'll certainly take home.

I know how such a résumé intimidates mainstream audiences. Can't reiterate more: Parasite is an out-and-out fun film — to start and end with. Now go catch it, whether or not it wins Best Picture at the Academy Awards on February 9, Sunday night (Monday morning, for Indians).

For, the Oscars is not merely an award. It's a statement that the Academy makes, through the choice of its films, reflecting on the changing world. And the rich-poor divide expressed through Parasite is hardly a statement unique to 2020. What is?

Honestly, Taika Waititi's splendid farce, Jojo Rabbit. It's about a little boy in Hitler's Germany. Unless you've been living under a rock, or in complete denial (same thing), you know what the world is currently grappling with — authoritarian leaderships, pushed to the top by a brainwashed band of cult-worshipping adults, spreading hate against an imagined 'other' that they've been lulled into assuming the worst about. That's Jojo Rabbit, as a film. Will it win? No.

Because it's hard to match the film-making flourish of Sam Mendes in 1917, that remains the most anti-war film, in the history of war films. And God knows we could do with that statement too — now, more than at any time in the recent past. That said, just look at the competition — what a year it's been for Hollywood; or the Oscars, as it were.

In any other year, Todd Phillips's dark, deep Joker would've hoped to gobble up all the top trophies on its own. Probably won't. Even James Mangold's Ford v Ferrari could've been a front-runner, for all you know. Says a lot that the only Best Picture nominee that bored the crap outta me was Greta Gerwig's period piece Little Women (and that too because it just seemed too irrelevant in my buzzing head, that's all).

For a simple example, you only have to compare Guy Ritchie's pure gangster thriller The Gentlemen this year, which is in the sort of domain Quentin Tarantino could lord over in the '90s. Look at where Tarantino is, at present, as an auteur, at the top of his game, with the semi-fictional Once Upon A Time In Hollywood!

Speaking of which, those few who vaguely dismissed Martin Scorsese's The Irishman, because they found it long, or slow or whatever, I'm pretty sure, years down the line, will wonder what the hell they were thinking when the Master delivered his masterpiece. No, it's not Goodfellas or Casino. Mull over the final 30 minutes of The Irishman, and you'll see in it a genre being lifted to meditation on life itself.

No Hollywood studio was willing to touch The Irishman. Netflix pumped money into it. As producer, Netflix has the most nominations at the Oscars this year — Noah Baumbach's gut-wrenching Marriage Story, and Fernando Meirelle's unusually cinematic The Two Popes, being the other toasts for web as the new cinema! Academy ought to reflect this change on its prize-winners' roster.

Will they? Well, the only Oscar that Scorsese ever received was for the Hong Kong adaptation, The Departed (2006). Come on! And I don't even want to go into history and pluck out Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), almost indisputably considered the greatest film in Hollywood history. It didn't win an Oscar. Which film did? How Green Was My Valley. What's that? Never mind. Just feeling better about listing films that should pick up the top awards this year. Won't feel terrible if they don't.

Oscar Predictions

Best Film: 1917
If not, then? Parasite

Best Director: Sam Mendes (1917)
If not, then? Bong Joon-ho (Parasite)

Best Actor: Joaquin Phoenix (Joker)
If not, then? Adam Driver (Marriage Story)*

Best Supporting Actor: Joe Pesci (The Irishman)
If not, then? Anthony Hopkins (The Two Popes)

Best Actress: Scarlett Johansson (Marriage Story)
If not, then? Charlize Theron (Bombshell)*

Best Supporting Actress: Margot Robbie (Bombshell)
If not, then? Laura Dern (Marriage Story)

Best Original Screenplay: Bong Joon-ho (Parasite)
If not, then? Quentin Tarantino (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood)

Best Adapted Screenplay: Todd Phillips (Joker)
If not, then? Anthony McCarten (The Two Popes)

Al Pacino, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro at the The Irishman's international premiere and closing gala during the 63rd BFI London Film Festival at the Odeon Luxe Leicester Square in October in London. Pics/ Getty Image

Ahead of Martin Scorsese's American crime thriller The Irishman dropping on Netflix, Sunday mid-day recreates cinema history, in conversation with Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, in the same room/frame
Mayank Shekhar (MID-DAY; November 24, 2019)

"Oh yeah, at Anupam's place, I remember," says Robert De Niro, sitting alongside Al Pacino, end-September at New York's Mandarin Oriental Hotel, as I remind De Niro about the one time he came to Mumbai, and had a full posse of Bollywood's A-list (from Anil Kapoor to Ranbir Kapoor), swarming on the floor by his feet—a picture that went viral online. Unsure if he was embarrassed by that public display of deep bhakti. He certainly didn't let on. This isn't surprising.

Between the two, De Niro, 76, comes across as the severely reserved, quiet type. Perhaps he saves public pronouncements and choicest words for his President! Pacino, on the other hand, despite age, 79, appears to have retained that slightly frazzled but youthful gregariousness we've come to admire him on screen for, over generations—one-on-one, he's far more forthcoming with opinions, and anecdotes.

The point I was trying to make with both De Niro and Pacino was if they're even vaguely aware of the sort of unparalleled weight and excitement their names—individually; forget, for a moment, together—carry across the globe, let alone in Mumbai, which is half a world away from Manhattan, where they've honed and practiced their craft since the late 1960s.

"It's a good question," Pacino mulls in his husky baritone. For him this sort of undying global admiration quite simply boils down to doors that it can open up when he's travelling. "My daughter wanted to go to Japan, you know. And I said, yeah, yeah, alright—was thinking about what we could work out. Because you really get access to things. And it's wonderful. What's better than that, right?"

Right. For De Niro, this excitement equals expectations alone. He recalls how in 2008, Al Pacino and him were in Europe together—he can't remember if it was Paris or London—and he thought in his head, "You know, it feels so nice, there're so many people; this big premiere on the street and everything. We should be able to give something to deserve this kind of adulation, or whatever you want to call it. Let's hope we can do something really special the next time that we're in this situation."

That 2008 'situation' was Righteous Kill—only the second time De Niro and Pacino shared screen (after Michael Mann's Heat). Not too many people have seen Righteous Kill. I just had, on US Netflix, before I met them. It's a buddy-cop thriller, with twists and turns that Abbas-Mustan could've pulled off on a decent day. Even as I bring it up later in the conversation, De Niro tones down while referring to it, mindful of not overtly dissing his own film.

Pacino is more elaborately realistic: "What was that thing that Paul Newman once said? He said, 'He works!' Because if he only did what he really felt good about—he'd work once in every five years. And he can't do that. As an actor, stuff comes to you. It's not like you generate your own work, although Bob [De Niro] does a lot of that. I have a little bit [of that going] in theatre. That's where my thing is. I'm pretty much half and half—I do more theatre than I do films, [especially] when I'm thinking about what to do next."

"You know, I was just thinking about this play called The Visit. Don't know if you know that one. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontane did it on Broadway. Ingrid Bergman and Anthony Quinn did it as a movie. But it really is a play—has some surreal stuff. But then, I found out [playwright] Tony Kushner is now adapting it. So I had one idea. And it's taken! In some ways though, I'm lucky to have a go-to thing in live theatre. Maybe I'll come to your place with something once."

Okay, maybe I skipped a beat. While he can't say for sure if the thought occurred to him during the London/Paris Righteous Kill premiere—as producer, De Niro did in fact plot the making of The Irishman, having read the book I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt. And seeing in it potential to star alongside Pacino, Joe Pesci and others, in a film directed by Martin Scorsese, with whom he's collaborated nine times—pretty much all of which, starting with Mean Streets (1973), rank among the greatest films of all time! The Irishman drops on Netflix on November 27.

Pacino, rather surprisingly (or not), had never worked with Scorsese before. How'd that go? "What can you say? It's just easy. Working with Marty [Scorsese] is like working [jumping] without a net and feeling safe. That's a good way to describe it. I'm sure that's how Bob feels too. It's why they do what they do together. And I feel that. There've been directors I've had that feeling with, but not many."

The Irishman centres on the true-life, stellar story of Teamster (truckers') Union boss Jimmy Hoffa—whose mysterious disappearance in 1975 still remains strong in American consciousness—and a truck driver, Frank Sheeran (De Niro), who became a hit-man, and Hoffa's key consigliore.

Pacino plays Hoffa, a role immortalised by Jack Nicholson in the 1992 biopic. Did he look at that closely? "No. I loved Jack. But that has nothing to do with the way I was interpreting [the part]. It only inspired me, when I saw it [and it helps]. Like it makes you say, yeah, I'm not the only one doing this. That person exists. I saw Bob Duvall do American Buffalo, I remember, on stage. I thought his characterisation is brilliant. And I'm thinking, yes, so I can do [the play] now. I won't do it like him."

Longish pause, and Pacino, ever so generous in this chat, reveals, "But I'll tell you one thing: When I saw [Paul] Muni's Scarface (1932), all I wanted to do was copy him in that performance. Of course it turns out—it always turns out—that I didn't. Don't know why I didn't. Maybe it was in the back of my head. But he gave me something with the anarchy in that performance, which was incredible. After I saw him, I said, let's do this film, you know. With Jimmy Hoffa, there was so much stuff on him. And so you watch, and you wait, and you hope to absorb."

Pacino has of course, banged it with biographical roles in the past. I recall Sidney Lumet's Serpico (1973): "I knew him—NYPD officer Frank Serpico, on whom the film's based—very well. And I studied him, and worked with him." How about Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon (on an actual, failed robbery in a Brooklyn bank)? "For some reason, I didn't meet him [the person Sonny Wortzik character was inspired from]. Because I had some sort of idea [about him]. And again, he was in prison. And I didn't meet [Dr Jack] Kervorkain either. I don't know if you ever got to see that [HBO's 2010 TV film, You Don't Know Jack, on a controversial euthanasia practitioner]."

Brian De Palma's Scarface (1983). Serpico, which also somewhat got channeled into Om Puri's sub inspector Anant Velankar in Ardh Satya (1983). Dog Day Afternoon (1975). The fact that these are monuments in cinema history, having aged not a day since their release, should be lost on no one—least of all, late-millennials. In fact it's impossible to touch upon Pacino and De Niro's vast body of work, without extending it into a full-blown thesis. Suffice it for most recent relevance—arguably the best film of 2019, Jaoquim Phoenix starrer Joker is, at its core, De Niro in Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) and The King Of Comedy (1982), rolled into one.

From even before Francis Ford Coppolla's The Godfather (1972)—that Pacino broke out into the global scene with—and Godfather 2 (1974), where De Niro and Pacino were in the same film (but never in the same frame), and which fetched De Niro his first Oscar (second was for Raging Bull), the careers of these two masters have wholly mirrored each other's.

Both method actors, having debuted in the same year (1969)— graduated from the same New York acting institutes, Actors' Studio, Stella Adler, HB Studio—were effectively the right conduits at the right time, brutally heralding the golden age of American (realist) cinema. Over years, film-buffs have been split between admiring one more than the other, but inevitably both.

At this stage in their life, I ask them how they look back at this rivalry/relationship, and how it's evolved. "Well, I think we're both happy to be still working," De Niro says. "And alive," Pacino cuts in, to add: "You know, we've been through a lot of the same things—unusual stuff happened to us in this profession. We knew each other when we were very young too—not well, but we had met. Throughout the many years of knowing each other, we had a certain comfort, when we'd meet, share certain things. It was helpful."

4 AM friends, on occasion? "Well, if I need to ask him about something, we talk about it. Or he does with me," De Niro says, defying at least at this moment that there is extreme envy among equals. There's extreme empathy too. It's also the roles that's brought them together for the third time in The Irishman—mob-boss, and his aide. You can feel a certain camaraderie/chemistry spilling over from the screen, which is heartwarming for fans.

For, The Irishman—a perfectly conclusive show-reel of Scorsese's (under)world—quite literally travels back in time, with a novel 'de-ageing' camera technology, seamlessly transforming De Niro, Pacino, Pesci and others into their younger selves. De Niro says, "Even before the de-ageing was as complete as in the final film, a few people that Marty had screened it for didn't find age getting in the way of the story. But it looks pretty good [now]. I hope audiences will go with it. And it's interesting."

Hell, yeah! How many film-buffs of my vintage (growing up in the '90s) have incessantly relived that coffee-shop scene in Michael Mann's Heat (1995)—"A guy told me one time: Don't let yourself get attached to anything you're not willing to walk out of in 30 seconds flat, if you feel the heat around the corner" (De Niro's line).

Just watched it again on YouTube—two stationary cameras flipping between over-the-shoulder shots of De Niro and Pacino. There were rumours that they hadn't actually shot the scene together. Fact is they hadn't rehearsed it together. It's the first time the two superstars were in the same movie-frame, after killing it not-so-softly, and separately, for 26 years in Hollywood. Goose-bumps cut across generations/globe.

During this interview, I similarly see De Niro and Pacino sitting a few inches away, talking not to each other, but to me. Is it out of some unconscious nervousness towards breaking ice that I ask De Niro as he walks in, dressed in thin jacket and T-shirt, and places his phone on the table, "Oh hey, you got the new iPhone 11 already (it'd just been launched)." Eh?

After the interview, Pacino, in his adorably clumsy state—in black blazer, loose black shirt buttoned down, and dark glasses—plucks the airpod that'd been stuck to his ears throughout: "I can't believe I'd been wearing this all along; man, what'd you think of me?" De Niro wraps up asking about why it's called Mumbai, and not Bombay: "What's the difference? And yeah, hope to see you soon." Yeah, sure. Just another day (or 20 minutes) at work, no? Huh!

Mohar Basu (MID-DAY; October 17, 2019)

As Ali Fazal turned a year older on October 15, he marked the occasion with an intimate dinner with Death On The Nile co-stars Gal Gadot and Annette Bening in London. Interestingly, the actor jokes that he received his birthday gift a day earlier — Fazal, who was attending the London Film Festival, met his screen idol Al Pacino at the screening of The Irishman.

"It has been a lifelong journey to finally arrive at this moment when I got to meet the man himself," enthuses Fazal. The actor says that he grew up on a steady diet of Pacino’s classics, including The Godfather series and Scarface (1983). He further reveals that he harboured the dream of meeting the legend since his college days.

"My friends Vijay and Aalaap, and I used to fill up the walls of our hostel room with posters of the movies that we would like to watch. Over the years, I watched each and every film on that list. And that day, I could not believe that I was meeting those very actors whom I had seen while growing up."

During his interaction with the Hollywood superstar, Fazal told Pacino how his mother — an avid fan of the legend — had narrated the story of The Godfather to him as a fairytale.