Shaival Thakkar
On the 21st of September, I read on a fan-site that the musical group REM has decided to call it a day. After 31 years of making some great songs and performing all around the world, they have decided with mutual consent to break up. On the day I read this news, there were some 20,000 comments on that story from fans across the world.
The next day, the number of comments went up to 40,000 and more.
However, most people here in …
Kartikey Sehgal
Part One
Part Two
Another theatre writer, Vikram Kapadia, whose play is undergoing adaptation for film, thinks that “there is no fixed formula as to what makes a film work”.
Vikram’s play ‘Black With Equal’ is a black comedy in English about the trials and tribulations of a housing society and has been staged more than a hundred times.
Like Aatish, he is comfortable with placing an item song in the film but his concern is avoiding the ‘dumbing down’ ‘of content. He …
Kartikey Sehgal
Role of songs in a film’s success and a filmmaker talking about his film losing out to an item song and marketing.
Part One here.
…continued
But Sanjay feels that though an item number does not define a film, “there is at least a chance that more people will go to theatres. Because of the item song and any marketing ploy, the film is not going to lose out on audience”.
This logic, however, does not justify why the film ‘Summer 2007’, directed …
Kartikey Sehgal
Written first for DNA
Director Shyam Benegal, who has captured myriad expressions of life in his various films, had to free himself from the clutches of the item-number when he was making ‘Welcome to Sajjanpur’.
“He did not want to include songs in the film. He did so on the behest of the producers”, says writer Atul Tiwari who has worked with the director.
In one of the songs, that was probably required to be the item song of the film, a village …