The Hindu Business Line : Commercial cinema!

No long shooting schedules. No hassles with stingy producers. No clashes with temperamental stars. And no tearing hair trying to make sense of senseless scripts The work is short, sweet and remunerative, and no wonder some of the chosen Bollywood directors are loving it. And asking for more!

So director Farah Khan shoots for Shah Rukh Khan. So do well-known directors like Raakesh Roshan, Satish Kaushik, Vishal Bharadwaj, Nagesh Kukkunoor and Asutosh Gowarikar, who oblige their favourite stars. For a change, everything is paid for on time, exotic locations are no problem.

No one is talking of a Laagan, which took more than three years to complete. This work can be completed in three days or, if lucky, even in three hours. We are talking of ad films.

And no, the stars are not selling themselves, they are selling Coke, Titan watches or even a car.

Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan started it all and now more and more stars are featured in expensive ads. Shah Rukh Khan makes it clear he would like to be directed by Farah Khan and he gets her. Aamir is inclined towards Asutosh Gowarikar and Raj Kumar Santoshi, while Hrithik Roshan is more comfortable with his father, Raakesh.

Where does all this leave the average ad film director and the professional models? Fuming and gnashing their teeth.

"We do not mind an occasional venture by these people," says a mid-level ad director. "But it is not fair they walk away with the real big-budget campaigns which brought us good money." The top guns among professional ad-makers normally make about Rs 40 lakh per campaign while the lesser known are paid about Rs 15-20 lakh. But the Bollywood biggies, on the other hand, demand and get crores for their time.

So, what attracts top film directors to the ad medium? It is mainly the lure of easy money, which can be made even during breaks in film shooting schedules. Another reason is the proximity it gives them to some of the big Bollywood stars. "A lot of mutual back-scratching goes on when these ad films are shot," says a small-time ad director, adding that the big stars and big directors need each other and both profit from the ad shoots.

However, top ad-makers such as Prahlad Kakkar and Prasoon Joshi are not unduly worried about the intrusion from Bollywood. They are confident of their own ability to deliver the goods in major campaigns. Kakkar says ad directors can survive this intrusion and adds that work on ad films could, in fact, sharpen the creative abilities of moviemakers. But this optimism is not shared by all ad directors who feel they might have to lower their rates in order to survive.

"This is an area where the big fish are swallowing the smaller fish, and with the arrival of the giant fish from Bollywood, the small fry could be wiped out," lamented one of the smaller directors. The heartburn is more among the professional models. "When Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan appear along with some Indian cricket stars in a Pepsi ad, we are nowhere in the picture or reduced to the level of extras," says one model.

In the past, it was not unusual for models, aspiring and top grade, to aim at becoming film stars. Remember Zeenat Aman, Juhi Chawla, Kabir Bedi, Aishwarya Rai, John Abraham, and Bipasha Basu, to name some? Bollywood was then seen as the ultimate destination for the bold and beautiful. Now we have the trend in reverse with top Bollywood stars usurping top ad campaigns. Of course, in the past too stars had featured in Lux soap campaigns.

With the national passion for the game, cricket heroes too joined the ad party. From Kapil Dev, Mohammad Azharuddin and Sachin Tendulkar to the relatively new crop of Virender Sehwag, Mohammad Kaif and Irfan Pathan... they have quickly made it to the ads. Amitabh Bachchan, plagued by financial worries after the collapse of his company ABCL, entered ads and has been going great guns. With Bollywood and sporting stars shining bright in the ad world, where does it leave the professional model?

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