On how Bollywood continues to heat up - Sumita Sheth

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'India is really hot, so is Bollywood' Saturday November 19 2005
Associated Press

NEW DELHI: Here's what led to the making of the first Hollywood film set in Bollywood: a technology czar's heart attack, his son's craze for movies, the producer's online romance and a ‘Sex and the City’ star's fascination with India.

My Bollywood Bride, a romantic comedy that features Jason Lewis from the popular HBO series about four New York women, is an East-meets-West rendezvous, complete with song and dance. The $2.5 million movie is the story of an ordinary American man who falls in love with an Indian woman on a California beach, loses her, and then makes a life-transforming journey to India to win back his love, only to find she is Bollywood's biggest movie star.

He then has to try and woo her all over again, and before she goes through with an arranged marriage to a top producer. If that sounds like a typical Bollywood masala, the events that led to the making of the film were equally worthy of a movie plot. Shaken by a near-fatal heart attack while on a Caribbean cruise in 2002, information technology millionaire Vivek Wadhwa, an Indian-born American, wanted to make up for the time he didn't spend with his son, a movie-addict. So he decided to make a movie for him.

Expected to be released worldwide before year-end, My Bollywood Bride also taps into India's growing international presence, with its software engineers becoming a worldwide brand, its curries becoming a part of the global platter, and its Bollywood films becoming the most watched cinema in the world.

My Bollywood Bride features Jason Lewis and Kashmera Shah

"India is really 'hot' right now, there's lots of interest. Bollywood is following the same path," said Wadhwa, who grew up in the United States and is based in Raleigh, North Carolina. "There is a cultural shift from West to East now. In my generation, it was the other way around."

Wadhwa said the main reason he wanted to make the movie was so that his son, a technology student who wanted to be an actor, would see the often murky world of film making from within, and not sacrifice a successful academic career.

"This was for my son. He developed such a fascination (for movies) that he wanted to be a model and movie star," Wadhwa said. "You have no idea how worried my wife was when he dropped out of his IT classes and took theatre," he said in an interview.

An internet chat conversation had set off another chain of events some months ago that would help shape the film. Investment banker and technology entrepreneur Brad Listermann met the future lead actress of My Bollywood Bride, Kashmera Shah, in an web-based chat room. Online love blossomed over months and they married.

Shah, a Miss India finalist, moved to the United States after meeting her fiance. But Listermann wanted to make up for her lost Bollywood career by casting her in a film loosely based on their own story.

"I was frustrated with the way Indian actresses were being left out in Hollywood. Rather, Indians in general," Listermann said via e-mail. "Being that my wife was an accomplished film star in Bollywood ... we decided if Hollywood wasn't coming to us, then we will bring Bollywood to Hollywood!"

Listermann and Wadhwa, old acquaintances, worked together to produce the movie, at a 10th of the cost of a regular flick, and soon a film was on the storyboard.

"People in America have had a special fascination with India and Bollywood. However, when it comes to films, I felt no one has made a film yet for the Western sensibility that features Bollywood," Listermann said.

Next, they hired Lewis, who was one of the most highly-paid American models and even hotter property after Sex and the City. Lewis, who played the toyboy lover of Sex and the City's Samantha, said he was intrigued.

"I had always wanted to travel to India, a place that when mentioned would conjure images of an exotic foreign land, woven with a history much older than my own country's and mysteries to be discovered," Lewis told the media in e-mailed comments.

"I was intrigued both from my desire to travel to India and that (the) story explored a relationship where I was the foreigner and had to contend in a land that was not my own," he said. Back in the United States, leading Hollywood executives loved the film, Wadhwa said, but surprisingly wanted more Bollywood song and dance. That was done, and the 92-minute film is now ready for release.

"I think that Hollywood audiences yearn for the songs and melodrama, and that is why they fall in love with Bollywood films. This is the way films here used to be, and they are often fed up of the realism, violence, and nature of Hollywood films," said Wadhwa. Wadhwa says something else good came out of the project. His son doesn't want to be an actor any more and has gone back to an academic life.

"He has lost all interest in this (movie) world. I made him spend a month on the sets."