Still Playing : The Eighties

A street urchin grew up to become a disco sensation,played electric guitars not connected to any power source,and nearly got electrocuted by one Disco Dancer. A king tattooed the word mard onto his newborn son8217;s chest; the baby smiled throughout,and grew up to be the fearless mard tangewala Mard.

It was,actually,a pretty awful time.

The Eighties. The plots were tripe,the bad guys laughable,the dance sequences weirder than Dolly Bindra,and OTT-ness a way of life. It was,without debate,the worst decade of Bollywood. The question is: why are we still laughing along?

Mumbai-based Kapil Samant and his friends have gathered at his apartment to watch a Mithun Chakraborty film forgotten by all but the connoisseur of schlock. The title has promise: Kasam Paida Karne Wale Ki. Samant fast-forwards to the scene de resistance. The music is by Bappi Lahiri,the song clearly inspired by Michael Jackson8217;s Beat It. Mithun and Salma Agha,both in tight red leather pants,dance with ghouls in a graveyard of course,it8217;s a love song. And that zombie is wearing a face pack, quips one of the watchers.

It8217;s not just odd groups of Mithun and Jeetendra fans yes,they exist who hold on to Eighties8217; love. The decade of terrible movies and tackier clothes are now inspiring filmmakers like Milan Luthria. Aamir Khan paid a spoofy tribute to the era in the Delhi Belly item song I Hate You Like I Love You. Anuvab Pal8217;s recent book Disco Dancer was a tongue-in-cheek take on the film and the Mithun phenomenon. And,above all,Bappi Lahiri is back with Ooh la la,the song from The Dirty Picture that could have made the coyest 80s leading lady heave her bosom and twitch her lips.

When Luthria decided to make The Dirty Picture,a film inspired by Silk Smithas life,he knew that the kitschy props,blingy sets and outrageous costumes,highlights of Indian cinema in the 1980s,would strike a chord. While that phase,right up to the late 1990s,is often dubbed as Bollywoods worst,many of those films have acquired a cult following. So we chose to create visuals that could get the audience to laugh, he says.

So,he has rolled out pink bikini cholis lined with pearls,Amrapali pants with gold tassels,heavily-printed shirts and white shoes made famous by Jeetendra. Large flowers and florid drums decorate his sets,while the background is filled with rows and rows of colourful matkas. In the backdrop of animal-shaped trees,and faux waterfalls,actors roll down hills,accompanied by hundreds of oranges. It wasn8217;t easy though. The first look test for all the characters made us realise that the art was looking too tacky. We wanted the audience to laugh with us,not at us. We struck a balance,so that the visuals looked appealing enough to draw in the audience without taking away from the story that we wished to narrate.

That fans have become indulgent about the cinema of the Eighties and Nineties is thanks to the internet and YouTube. They are so bad that they are good, says Mumbai-based game developer Shailesh Prabhu. The 28-year-old grew up watching Amitabh Bachchans films. While Don is among his all-time favourites,he has a different kind of affection for Shahenshah,where Bachchan plays both a corrupt cop and a righteous vigilante. It is Indias very own and original superhero film, he says. As a child,Prabhu may have loved the film in all honesty but today,he watches it for the over-the-top drama and countless absurdities,including the shiny armour that the baddies so dread. Like all fans,he delights in the obvious plot-holes that Eighties8217; Bollywood merrily rode over. Take the blockbuster Tridev where Sunny Deols character Inspector Karan,considered dead,returns with a flimsy moustache and not only the villains but even his best friend fails to recognise him. What is unbelievable is that the films were made in all sincerity,unlike,say,Andaz Apna Apna also a cult which was meant to be funny.

The decline of the Eighties,though,was in contrast to the 1970s,which came to be known for slick,sharp writing and the growth of parallel cinema. One of the reasons was drying funds,especially the legitimate kind. That was when financiers from the South stepped in. NT Rama Rao backed many films like Justice Chowdhary,Judaai and Ilaaka which saw actors like Jeetendra and Mithun Chakraborty in the lead. The production values,therefore,also brought in regional sensibilities which remained embedded in the cinema, says writer Anuvab Pal. Jahnu Barua,National Award-winning filmmaker who was a part of the parallel cinema movement in the 1980s and 1990s,believes that the decade was bad for cinema,the world over. With money and technology joining hands,cinema stopped being viewed as an art form. Instead,people would focus on replicating a success formula and compromise on quality as well. Films were mass produced by businessmen with little passion for the medium and a bent for money,8221; he says.

It8217;s perhaps only the Eighties8217; child,who can see the humour in those films today. Many younger kids could not relate to the phenomenon I was talking about in my book and the older ones lacked the sense of irony that our generation had acquired through education,knowledge and exposure to international cinema, says Pal.

This was cinema born at a time when the dream of socialism had soured,and liberalisation had not arrived. If movies then served out sequinned Afro costumes and imitation MJ dances as their idea of cool,it was because a money-starved,shortage-stung,pre-internet country really knew no better. As Pal wrote in a column,in post-Manmohan Singh India,no one wants to be a disco dancer because we now know what success and fortune look like. And they don8217;t include disco dancing.

Perhaps,indulgent fans of the Eighties cinema,while LOLing at its absurdities,are only expressing a nostalgia for a more innocent time.

Unlike films of today,where stories and even poster concepts are heavily borrowed from the West,the films in those days were original. They had what makes Bollywood unique, says blogger Arnab Ray,whose book,May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss,explains his association with the cinema of the 80s and 90s and how he came to idolise Mithun Chakraborty.

However,as Ray points out,there is a sincere following for the cinema too. In Russia,for example,Mithun was once voted as the sexiest man alive by a lifestyle magazine. In Kochi,TV journalist T George,a die-hard Rajinikanth fan,heads a local Mithun fan club that screens movies of the star,from the 1980s and 1990s. Every alternate Sunday,following his visit to church,he gets together with his childhood friends from the neighbourhood and introduces them to the actors works,irrespective of the fact that the language proves to be a deterrent. He says it offers him a refuge from the grim reality he deals with every day in his profession.

Located at the junction that branches off to Mumbai8217;s red-light area,Kamathipura,is Alexander Theatre. A tiny opening in the wall serves as the box office and a small wooden plank is the door. Yet,it is clearly a step above the video theatres that operate out of one room with a television and CD player. Posters of Mithun8217;s 1989 movie Ilaaka still can be seen here,and Jeetendra is still a hit in these hole-in-the-wall theatres.

One of the theatres employees,Salim Sheikh,sits on a small stool outside the theatre waiting for it to open for the day. He does not fear competition from similar halls nearby but hopes that the area will not be sold to a builder or revamped into a multiplex. That we cannot afford the recent Bollywood releases is one thing,but old films are in demand even today, he says. A new Bhojpuri film has replaced Chakrabortys Yamraaj,a 1997 release,but the old film will be back soon after a few weeks,he says. The regulars at my theatre must have seen each of these films at least a dozen times,but they keep coming back to watch their heroes bash up the goons and avenge the rape of their sisters.

Rajesh Vora,known as Raju Bhai across Mumbais cinema halls,understands all too well Sheikhs rationale. The owner of a shop that prints and sells film posters,he says that the money is in the films from that era. The 80s movies will always be popular in north India. Only Bhojpuri cinema and South remakes compete. Who cares about Ranbir Kapoor and his love story in Rockstar? The person who can shell out no more than Rs 20 for a film every week has not been to college and neither does he stand a chance to woo a rich,pretty girl, he says.

Much of this boils down to the debate over escapist versus meaningful cinema and it8217;s clear what wins in Bollywood. An age-old television channel strategy to up GRPs includes airing Chiranjeevis Indra The Tiger. In terms of fashion too,points out stylist Niharika Khan,who has worked on both Delhi Belly and The Dirty Picture,there are elements from the era that refuse to fade away. Sequins and block heels or platforms are the two items that have remained a part of the Indian wardrobe. Both can be tacky as well as cool. It depends on how you use them, she says.

Scriptwriter Kiran Kotrial points out that Eighties are making a huge comeback. All the recent big films,like Singham and Dabangg,are either remakes of South films or centred on a Herculean hero one likes to watch them for the same reason why one enjoys Mithuns Goonda or Amitabh Bachchans Ganga Jamunaa Saraswathi, says Kotrial,whose recent release,Bodyguard,crossed the Rs 100 crore mark. It is no more looked down upon if the hero attempts to carry a massive alligator on his shoulder; in fact,it invites whistles and hooting even in a multiplex.