Recently, my American nephew asked if we could visit Gemini Studios, the next time we both find ourselves in the old hometown Madras, present-day Chennai. I tell the American teenager the studio had stopped making movies even by the time I was in my teens. Besides, I am not sure Gemini Studios was ever like the famous Universal Studios in California, which offers guided tours.
The boy’s curiosity, however, made me revisit the bilingual writer Ashokamitran’s slim book, Fourteen Years with Boss. The boss was the head of Gemini Studios, S. S. Vasan, India’s first movie mogul. Following the premature death of Ashokamitran’s father, on compassionate grounds, he gave the young man a job at the film studio.
Apart from the languages of Madras Presidency, Vasan produced films in Hindi, the language spoken by the greatest number of people in India. Chandralekha (1948), made in both Hindi and Tamil, is one of the studio’s most representative films. This plot involves a travelling circus, swordfights, the works. In the finale, an army of women, led by the buxom heroine, dance on outsize drums; soldiers spring forth from the drums and overthrow the swashbuckling villain. It was billed “as different from any picture, so far, produced.”
Going in, in 1952 Ashokamitran must’ve been familiar with the extravaganzas the studio made. A job as a public relations officer at Gemini Studios studio was not a good fit for an introspective young man. Still, at this workplace, Ashokamitran would acquire a wealth of material to draw on once he became a full-time writer. (His best novels would feature characters from the film industry.) Pritish Nandy, the editor of The Illustrated Weekly, encouraged the author to write specifically about his stint at the studio, ran those essays in the magazine, and the compilation turned into a memoir.
Despite his famous understated style, Ashokamitran makes no bones of the fact that the movies from Gemini Studios were too full of spectacle and light on logic. Consider the 1955 film Insaniyat. It had two top Hindi actors Dilip Kumar and Dev Anand in the lead, and yet the star who stole the show was a chimpanzee from the United States called Zippy. In fact, Vasan brought the Hollywood ape into the story, halfway through the shooting, Ashokamitran writes, with the specific intent of enlivening an otherwise dull film.
Earlier that year, Life magazine had run a photo feature of Zippy, the six-year-old chimpanzee, which lived in a suburb of New York. The ape reportedly ate at the family table and though it used silverware, it tended to hoot upon seeing the food. But Zippy didn’t bite his co-actors and they appreciated that. Apparently, good behavior is not something you can take for granted in showbiz chimps. For instance, during the making of the film Bedtime for Bonzo, the chimpanzee Bonzo (real name Peggy) had pulled hard on the protagonist’s necktie and nearly strangled him – the actor was Ronald Regan who would go on to become America’s 40th President.
Zippy, the chimpanzee, fortunately did not lose its cool even in the heat of a Madras summer. There is an archival picture of Zippy, flanked by newsmen at the head office of The Hindu. In a publicity picture, Zippy was “pretending to smoke a cigar big enough to send Samson reeling.” It is impossible to read such things without cringing now, but the writer Ashokamitran probably cringed even in the 1950s, even when others were fascinated by the celebrity chimpanzee and lined up to take pictures with him.
When Insaniyat hit the screens, again, it was Zippy’s appeal which drew the crowds. The plot was set in a mythical kingdom. By then, Bollywood had largely moved on from what Tamils locally call “raja-rani padams.” The highest-grossing film of the year would be Raj Kapoor’s hugely enjoyable social Shree 420. Vasan’s Insaniyat was not remade in Tamil. It was not a hit, not by a long shot.
Meanwhile, the Hindi film Insaniyat was contracted to play in a cinema in Calcutta from a certain date, but the theatre owner was in a bit of a dilemma. A debut film by an unknown young Bengali was proving to be unexpectedly popular. The theatre owner asked Vasan if he could extend the film’s run a little? Vasan would have none of it, but to his credit, he brought back a copy of that Bengali film made by that young filmmaker to Madras. A select audience had gathered to watch the film in a projection theatre at Gemini Studios on a company holiday. Ashokamitran, who happened to have wandered in on the scene, writes lyrically about the experience.
“Vasan and his close associates were watching a film. … The film was something I had known nothing about; I didn’t know the language, but I found myself throbbing with a surge of emotion, such as I had never experienced before. The film was over, but Vasan ordered it to be run again… I am sure I wasn’t the only one in the theatre to be so deeply, so completely moved. Vasan’s face revealed nothing but there he was, seeing the film all over again. When the film was finally over, I had to be alone and so I walked all the way back home.”
The film that crossed the path of Insaniyat in Calcutta? It was Pather Panchali, the first movie in Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy. The director, who shot the film on a shoestring budget, had worked with untrained actors and was mastering the craft as he went along. Ray would go on to win an Academy Honorary Award, but that was decades later.
In 1955, on Deepavali Day, Vasan sat in a darkened preview theatre in the city, watching this Bengali film, which the world would later call a masterpiece. The film was not the boss’s cup of tea, writes Ashokamitran, and quips — why the boss may not have considered it tea at all! Anyone, who knows old Indian films knows that Vasan viewed cinema as entertainment for the masses. Ray’s films appealed mostly to the intelligentsia. Chandralekha and Charulatha were polar opposite films.
And yet the owner of Gemini Studios watched Pather Panchali over and over again. Did it remind Vasan of his own impoverished childhood in rural Tamilnadu? Did he like the film? Or was the hit filmmaker looking for elements he could incorporate into his next blockbuster? We may never know. But the fact that movie mogul patiently watched an arthouse classic, which even the sophisticated Salman Rushdie admits having slept through the first time he viewed it in Bombay, is delightful.
The landmark studio in Madras, known for its extravaganzas, is long gone but Ashokamitran, a writer of nuance, has captured facets of his old workplace – the good, the bad, and the ridiculous – for posterity. It is a rare case of the “boss” getting a big, unforeseen bonus.