Advantage Amritraj

The rise of an Indian in white-only Hollywood.

When he was 10,Ashok Amritraj was short,dumpy and nearly myopic. His two older siblings Vijay and Anand were already stirring things up in the tennis world in the 1970s,not just in Chennai,where they lived and trained,but around the country. But because tennis was the Amritraj family business,so to speak Mr and Mrs Amritraj were athletes themselves,and the latter must have been a formidable version of what they now call a tennis mom,making sure the boys were on the court on time,having swallowed loathsome raw eggs in milk,no slacking,every single day,Ashok tracked his brothers large footsteps,shot up eight inches,and found his legs.

He could have basked in reflected glory and continued playing the sport. At the height of his ability,Ashok reached the finals of the junior Wimbledon championships Vijay reached the quarterfinals at the senior level,and Vijay and Anand made a great doubles pair for years. Like his brothers,Ashok too discovered the enormously lucrative world of club tennis in the US. There was money,glamour and girls,and it could all have been enough. But Ashoks trajectory veered off,from one kind of play to another. The boy who saw The Sound Of Music 34 times was mad about the movies,and when he went to visit the big Hollywood studios on his first visit to Los Angeles,he knew that was where his future lay.

In Advantage Hollywood,Ashok Amritraj tells the story of his quite remarkable journey. The prose is strictly serviceable,but it is never dull. And it seems like his own voice,where he uses a nice self-deprecatory style to offset the I-am-very-famous-now-and-everybody-in-Hollywood-knows-me tale. He starts off by recounting how he asked his mother to find a suitable girl for him. Of course,she had to be Catholic and south Indian and beautiful: clearly,the string of encounters with white American girls who loved his dark skin Amritraj describes it discreetly thus: post match,there was always more play at the hotel hadnt resulted in settled matrimony.

Armed with his demure bride Chitranjali,and invitations at high-profile Hollywood mavens Saturday morning tennis parties,Amritraj gets down to the serious business of breaking into what he calls the most exclusive club in the world. The famous faces that he played with from my friend Sydney Poitier to Charlton Heston,Michael Douglas,Dustin Hoffman and Arnold Schwarznegger didnt automatically translate into acceptance at their work tables,even if they were more than ready to discuss their serves with him.

He found a foothold in the low-budget B-grade movies-for-DVD circuit and learnt on the job. The book mentions this quickly and glosses over the keen disappointments in store for an ambitious Indian trying to get into a primarily for white-Americans-only business. Soon we are in that space where he starts getting the calls,and studio heads start taking his. His meeting with Jean Claude Van Damme at the Cannes film festival was a moment: Amritraj went on to make his breakthrough film Double Impact 1991 with him. Slowly,he began to lay the steps of what eventually became his company,Hyde Park Entertainment,and projects that would lead to premiere film festivals and red carpet openings and a celebratory 100-film party at Cannes.

His only Indian production has been the 1997 Jeans,directed by Shankar,fronted by Aishwarya Rai. Amritraj recounts how surprised he was when Rai,known before this only as a beauty queen,negotiated her own deal with him,as well as how the director persuaded him to fly the cast and crew to all seven wonders of the world for just one song: The producer who got talked into funding this around-the-world-song-and-dance,and who fed the delighted cast and crew idlis and dosai at the Grand Canyon having flown in the goodies from a Las Vegas restaurant ,calls it one of the Tamils industrys biggest hits.

Just shows how no one knows anything in showbiz,and the tricks you need to employ to get to the top. And to get the right people to come to your yatch.