Koffee With Karan is not candid: Bollywood could surely do with email leaks like Sony

By Kalpana Nair

In November last year, Hollywood quaked. A group of hackers calling themselves Guardians of Peace hacked into Sony Pictures Entertainment (most famous for producing all Adam Sandler movies in recent memory and the Daniel Craig James Bond franchise). They allegedly did it because Sony was about to release The Interview, a film that was less than complimentary about North Korea’s “supreme leader”, Kim Jong-un.

As part of the hack, confidential email exchanges between the top management at Sony and other Hollywood bigwigs came to light. Few of us are on our best behaviour in private emails, but the Sony mail trail is one long series of “OOPS”.

In one, Sony’s co-chairman Amy Pascal, before a breakfast meeting with President Barack Obama, mused if she should ask Obama if he liked Django Unchained or 12 Years A Slave. Producer Scott Rudin described Angelina Jolie a “minimally talented spoilt brat”. We learnt that Charlize Theron got paid $10 million less than Chris Hemsworth for the movie The Huntsman and that Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence made less than their male co-actors for American Hustle.

In a nutshell: it was a PR nightmare for Sony. For the public, however, the Sony hack has been almost like a breath of fresh air even if it is a gross invasion of privacy. In an environment where every public appearance by every celebrity is stage managed by a hawk-eyed public relations team, this stuff was gold. Finally! A candid, politically-incorrect opinion about famous people from those in the movie business. It’s almost enough to make you wonder longingly if Guardians of Peace would ever turn their encrypted gaze towards Bollywood.

Let me clarify: I’m not defending the violent threats that GOP has served. They’ve been condemned and rightly so. It’s not pure malevolence that is driving this desire to peer beyond the facades Bollywood puts up, but rather the boredom that comes from reading too many yawn-inducing, whitewashed interviews by the leading lights of Bollywood. The film industry is an exciting business, filled with money and people with talent, volatile temperaments, dreams, fantasies, scandals and madness. But to hear our actors, directors and producers speak in public is like watching the Q & A session in a beauty pageant. The answer is always Mother Teresa.

If you love movies, it is natural to be curious about how they are made and the people who make them. This doesn’t mean celebrities’ privacy needs to be invaded to satisfy the public’s curiosity. The private lives of stars should remain their business. However, there is no excuse for being dull. Or for lying through one’s teeth. Don’t you wish for a BollyHack that would puncture the ego of the A-list actor who spouts platitudes about their simple heart, morals and charity and then proceeds to assault girlfriends or swindle friends and family? Or the one who says ‘The script is God’ when they mean ‘Show me the money’?

From blind items and incidents off-camera, there’s enough to confirm the belief that most denizens of Bollywood have dollops of charisma and story-worthy lives. Maybe it’s the lure of pan-India appeal or the anxiety of working in a country that is quick to take offense that makes people retreat into a shell. Or maybe Bollywood is just full of hypocrites.

Whatever the reason, the gap between what is said by Bollywood celebrities and what actually happens is now a chasm into which any news of interest goes to commit suicide. Very rarely do we get glimpses of the warts behind the flawless complexion. Last year, a leak (allegedly by a disgruntled employee at the VFX studio Tata Elxsi) showed how six-pack abs were digitally created and added to Salman Khan’s midriff for a shirtless shot in _Ek Tha Tige_r. An apt counterbalance to the male bravado the star is famous for.

If that leak is true, is this not relevant information for a viewer? Since being shirtless is such a signature move for Khan and millions probably pump iron in their desire to get his body, surely it warrants a mention that it’s not just gymming and protein shakes that led to that physique at least in that particular shot?

More recently, a letter by editor Prerna Saigal, who’s cutting the Indian edition of Anurag Kashyap’s big budget production Bombay Velvet, was also leaked after her house was burgled and the hard disk containing the film’s footage was almost stolen. The letter claimed the producers, Phantom, had cut corners with respect to security and accommodation. While no one at Phantom has confirmed the authenticity of the mail, if the email is genuine, then it begs answers to serious questions about the lopsided way Bollywood pays and looks after its technicians, particularly in comparison to how it bends over backwards for so many actors.

Unfortunately, Bollywood’s idea of being candid starts and ends with Koffee With Karan. A show in which A-listers sit around, crack comfortable jokes about each other with a host they’ve known for aeons and who is an industry insider himself. In the four seasons of glugging Karan’s caffeine , the most candid confession was from Anil Kapoor when he said Shilpa Shetty had a lip job done during a film shoot, which led to continuity problems in the shoot. Even for this statement, he later apologised. Such is the thinness of hide sported by our actors.

So in the interest of truth and (less admirably) some schadenfreude, can we hear the sound of some whistle blowing leaks from Bollywood? It would be a welcome relief. And who knows, they may even affect change. For instance, after the Sony Hack, the website Page Six broke the news that Charlize Theron had negotiated a $10 million bump in her paycheque and was now paid at par with Chris Hemsworth for The Huntsman. Three cheers for information symmetry.

(Kalpana Nair studied Communications Management at Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad. She is addicted to movies and can no longer tell if she is in one or watching one or writing about one. She is @kalpananair on Twitter and blogs at www.ladymiddlebrow.wordpress.com.)