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The Rediff Business Special/ Ashok Banker

Big B's dream of showbiz supermarket lies in tatters

"AB, See Hell". That's what the letters ABCL seem to spell now for Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Limited, in the face of the twin demons of financial bankruptcy and career ruin that threaten to confront the country's most legendary film star.

It's an apocryphal story in Bollywood, one of those gossipy anecdotes that become instant legends. The only thing that gives credence to this one is the fact that it's true.

A well-known scriptwriter was working on the script to a Bachchan film sometime in 1997. The story centred around a rich industrialist widower with a beautiful but spoilt daughter. The film was to be about the father's relationship with the daughter and the young penniless mechanic she falls in love with. The daughter gets kidnapped and the father and the mechanic are forced to put aside their differences as they try to save her from the clutches of the kidnappers. The film ends with the father heroically fighting the kidnappers, killing their leader, saving his daughter and receiving a fatal wound in the process. He dies in a traumatic climax reminiscent of the death scene in Sholay, after uniting his daughter and the mechanic and blessing their union.

As you have probably guessed, Bachchan was to play the father. In fact, the script was conceived and developed purely with him in mind.

On the Friday that Bachchan's long-awaited comeback film Mrityudaata was released, the writer was hard at work on the script. He was interrupted by a phone call from the producer, a veteran of the industry. The producer told the writer that Mrityudaata had had a bad opening and Bachchan's equity had dropped substantially. The producer told the writer to rewrite the script, reducing Bachchan's role. He would still be the father, but the film would focus more on the daughter (to be played by Karisma Kapoor) and the mechanic (to be played by a newcomer).

The next day, Saturday, the writer got another call from the producer. He sounded very harassed this time. He said that distributors were very alarmed at the response to Mrityudaata and felt a Bachchan film wouldn't be worth a premium anymore. The producer told the writer to make the film centre completely around the daughter and the mechanic (who would now be played by a saleable young star). Bachchan would still be the father, but the role would be a supporting one.

Finally, on Sunday, the writer received the third and last call. The producer said that Bachchan was a complete write off and that nobody would touch him with a barge pole again. Mrityudaata was a total flop. He told the writer to rewrite the film completely, cutting Bachchan out altogether. He even suggested that they cast veteran character actor Pran (in Hindi, pran means life) as the father instead of Bachchan. The writer chose to shelve the script rather than make this final change. The punchline was his quip to the producer: "Pran jaaye par Bachchan na jaaye!" (''Even life can cease but Bachchan can't''.)

Recently, Bachchan's newest release Sooryavansham brought back shocks of déjà vu to the same writer. Because, despite the debacle of Mrityudaata and the subsequent sinking of Bachchan's career graph, there was still a great deal of hope that the superstar would rise again phoenix-like from his own ashes.

Sooryavansham put the torch to the funeral pyre of that last hope. The writer, a blueblood Bachchan fan and well versed in the ways of the industry, destroyed the script, convinced that it could now never be produced.

This loss of faith wasn't just the result of Sooryavansham's box-office failure. After all, Sooryavansham was not an ABCL release, so the loss would hit the distributors much harder than the Big B himself. Also, two of his earlier releases, Bade Miya Chotte Miya and Lal Badshah, had performed reasonably well at the turnstiles. It was possible that there was some running still left in the old horse. And even in Sooryavansham, Bachchan's performance was superb, reminiscent of his heyday 15 years ago, which was high praise indeed.

But what brought the last tear to Bachchan sympathisers and fans was not his films at all, but the recent reports in the financial pages of the press. Reports that detailed the Bachchan family's financial crisis. News that the famed landmark in Bombay's suburb of Vile Parle, the original Bachchan residence Pratikshaa, had been attached by a court order and was to be sold to help recover debts owed by Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Limited.

And the further news that ABCL had applied to the Bureau for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction, proof that the Bachchans felt their financial morass was beyond resolution.

The Bachchan era, thought by some to have declined years ago, had finally, officially, come to an end.

The Best of Intentions

It was just five years ago. The original executive summary, provided by ABCL's executives to a select group of potential investors at the time of the company's private placement, read: "The money that the promoters wish to raise through a private placement is for working capital to pay for acquiring film and television software rights, production of software, bagging audio rights, and clinching contracts with celebrities for brand and event management."

So far so good. Now, take a look at this final sentence: "In time, as these acquisitions begin to generate revenue, ABCL will build for itself a glitzy corporate office or entertainment headquarters and expand production and post-production facilities to take the corporation into the big league of world entertainment."

A glitzy corporate office? Entertainment headquarters? The big league of world entertainment? To dream of such things is one thing. To actually plan concretely for them, even to the event of including them in the promoter's prospectus, is stretching it a bit, don't you think?

After all, some of the biggest producers, distributors, even financiers in the Hindi film world, function in relatively humble offices. The Barjatyas, mentioned several times in the same prospectus as a shining example of the kind of success ABCL aspired toward -- after their Hum Aapke Hai Kaun grossed an industry record of over Rs 1 billion -- are known for their spartan lifestyle and for counting every paisa twice.

Yet there it is in black and white. A "glitzy corporate office". And if you ever had the pleasure of visiting the ABCL offices at Hotel Ajanta on Bombay's Juhu Tara Road, you could see what they had in mind. The executives were very apologetic of their temporary office and frequently referred to the new office they would be shifting to shortly. After all, some of them were drawing salaries ranging from Rs 50,000 to 200,000 (with Chief Executive Officer Sanjiv Gupta said to be receiving an astronomical Rs 500,000 every month).

The arrogance of those early statements and intentions put into writing at the formation of ABCL contain the seed of the corporation and Bachchan's own eventual downfall. Today, the last few members of the ABCL staff function in a roughly partitioned section of a single floor of Sahara India's multi-storey Goregaon office complex. There are separate cabins provided for the Bachchans, Mr and Mrs. But of course, both of them are rarely present there.

Bachchan himself is busy shooting for half-a-dozen films for outside producers, trying desperately to raise sufficient funds to make payments towards the interest on the loans taken by ABCL. This is proving virtually impossible, with the interest itself amounting to over Rs 10 million a month. And with the courts quickly attaching any advances he receives from producers, Jaya Bachchan too is said to have returned to active acting to help meet the same deficit. She even toured the USA recently with a Hindi play Bai Retire Ho Gayee to help raise some much needed funds, besides working as programming director of the forthcoming Sahara satellite television channel.

And of course, daughter Shweta's in-laws, the Nandas of Escorts, are said to be chipping in too. That leaves the third director on the ABCL board, brother Ajitabh Bachchan. His contribution to the war chest was the sale of Ipca, the pharmaceutical firm that he and the Bachchans jointly owned.

But even all this firefighting does not seem to be doing much good. Two months ago, public sector Canara Bank sought the Bombay high court's permission to attach Prateeksha to recover its dues, charging the Bachchans for the non-payment of a loan provided in the form of an open cash credit facility totalling Rs 240 million, and overdraft against book debts of Rs 560 million, foreign letters of credit worth Rs 250 million and a guarantee facility of Rs 350 million. Two other flats owned by the Bachchans and given as collateral for loans located at Bhanu Apartments at Ruia Park Road, Juhu were also sought to be attached.

Another plot of land located in North Bombay was attached last month in a separate Bombay high court ruling following an order by a court in the United Kingdom to Amitabh and Ajitabh to repay a loan of $ 1.46 m (Rs 62.3 million) for which the brothers personally stood guarantee.

However, the Bombay high court in a ruling in the first week of May 1999, ruled that the properties could not be attached at present, since the Bachchans had applied to the BIFR to be classified as a sick company. This was seen as a last-ditch effort to keep their debtors at bay, since once the BIFR declares a company sick, no properties can be attached and a long process of reconstruction begins.

However, the court did succeed in attaching the amounts payable to Amitabh as his fee for acting in the film Kohraam. For those who have been following the whole story, Kohraam is the retitled film Bachchan had signed with Mehul Kumar at the time of Mrituydaata's launch. Earlier called Aye Watan Tere Liye, Mehul Kumar decided to retitle it in a desperate bid to disassociate it from that earlier debacle.

But why on earth did Bachchan agree to act in a second Mehul Kumar film? After all, this was the man who was solely responsible for that hash called Mrityudaata which almost single-handedly destroyed the Big B's second coming.

Well, as a source close to the man put it, "You think I wanted to act in another film directed by Mehul? Am I crazy? The only reason I did it was because he had paid me ten million (rupees) to sign the film, and would pay me another 20 million (rupees) to finish it." Well, that's as good a reason as any.

But even a dozen commercial films such as Kohraam can't drum up enough fees to pay off ABCL's debtors. The total equity of the corporation was Rs 605.2 million, while its accumulated losses during the last financial year alone were a whopping Rs 700 million. That figure, with interest mounting at the rate of close to Rs 10 million monthly, now stands at Rs 800 million.

Remember that glitzy corporate office mentioned in the private placement prospectus? Well, not only did the executives not get that far, but even at the Ajanta Hotel premises they were temporarily occupying, they left behind chaiwallah (tea-supplier) and lunchbox caterer's bills of Rs 700,000 and Rs 600,000 respectively!

Part II: What went wrong with ABCL?

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