MUMBAI: Bollywood — the world’s largest movie-making centre — has long been burdened by associations with Mumbai’s underworld, deriving much of its funding from gangsters’ so-called “black money”. Just five years ago the Hindi cinema industry’s credibility was at an all-time low as the “mob” brought kidnapping, murder and extortion along with its much-needed funding.

But in 2001 a sudden influx of “clean” cash from India’s major industrial groups hoping to make quick bucks by dabbling in the glitzy and glamorous world of film heralded a new dawn for the industry.

Top conglomerates run by India’s wealthiest families — such as the Tatas, the Birlas, the Singhanias and liquor baron Vijay Mallya — plunged into film financing when the Indian government declared Bollywood a bona fide industry.

A series of flops and millions of lost dollars later, however, and the more respectable investors are running scared, leaving Bollywood’s hopes of putting its murky past behind in tatters.

Many of the new financiers have been left with burnt fingers after backing flicks with weak scripts, and are rethinking their strategies. Tata, meanwhile, has pulled out of the business altogether.

“They are licking their wounds and reviewing what went wrong,” says film analyst Indu Mirani.

“These companies were worse than some of those truck transporters who put their surplus money into films,” she says, referring to a trend in the late 1990s when anyone with spare cash would put it into a Bollywood movie in the hope of quick returns and that the industry’s glamour would rub off on them.

The main problem says Mirani, is that the big companies had no experience of film and chose weak scripts, which even big stars such as Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan and leading actors Sanjay Dutt, Hrithik Roshan, Bipasha Basu and Rani Mukherjee could not rescue.

“It appears that even these sophisticated businessmen got enamoured by the glamour and forgot that finally it is the script that has to be good and not just the stars for a film to be a hit,” Mirani said.

None of the top 10 Bollywood films of 2004, according to a list by global research house PricewaterhouseCoopers, was produced by companies. They were made by long-time filmmakers putting their own money in scripts that clicked with the audience.

“The movie business is a quick-sand business and is driven by passion,” says Anshuman Swami, chief executive of Birla-owned Applause Entertainment.

“We have made money from ‘Black’ and intend to fund films in the future. We will continue to make movies, but know that the game is slow and steady.” —AFP