 |
| The set of the Bollywood movie tentatively titled "The Dirty Picture" is as busy and complicated as any Hollywood set. |
I admit when we signed up for a tour of a Bollywood movie studio, I expected to be with a large group, and when our morning ride failed to appear at the hotel, I worried that we had missed out on the whole thing.
As we looked around the entrance to the hotel furtively, a smiling young Adrian Grenier (The guy who plays Vincent Chase on HBO’s “Entourage’) lookalike walked up to us and asked us if we were the ones looking for the tour.
 |
| Sara E. McNeil and Preetam Mhatre, our Bollywood tour guide, check out a train car and some couches from a disco set on the back lot of Balaji studios. |
Preetam Mhatre, tour guide, sometimes model and aspiring actor, was in fact our guide for a private tour of some of the facilities. “Everybody is here to be in the movies and entertainment. This is the media center of India, and there are jobs,” he said. And he repeated what I had heard before: that Mumbai produces more movies than Hollywood.
Film crews frequent many parts of the city and the outskirts, and movie and media facilities are spread around many parts of town, at least the nicer parts.
He first took us to an audio production house, High Octane studios, where audio engineer Rahul Rao demonstrated some commercial production techniques. Rahul is a musician, but he said he got into audio production because it’s steady. He said there is a great deal of production work available for young people in town in commercials, radio, television and live and animated film. After he showed us how he put the soundtrack on a commercial, he had me do a voiceover for another 30-second TV spot. It takes a lot of concentration and I gained a new respect for voiceover actors.
 |
| Kate Zibluk explores the main room of a mythical wealthy family's mansion at Balaji studios in Bollywood, Mumbai. |
 |
| A studio guard and his dog provide security on the set of an opulent soap opera. |
 |
| Kate Zibluk checks out the spoiled daughter's room, complete with "family pictures" of the actors who play the spoiled brothers on the soap opera set. |
 |
| The set of the evil drug lord's lair for a popular Indian soap opera filmed at Balaji studios. |
We had the run of a big soap opera set about a wealthy family whose daughter marries into the family of a drug lord. It looked as much like a telenovella from Telemundo as anything from Bollywood.
We also visited the set of a theatrical movie, tentatively titled, “The Dirty Picture,” about the real-life struggles of a middle-class Indian family.
 |
| Actors rehears some lines on the set of "the Dirty Picture," a movie about a struggling middle-class Indian family. |
Later in the afternoon, we visited the School of Broadcasting and Communication, Mumbai’s official, government-sanctioned, baccalaureate-degree-granting communications school. The school’s primary focus in feeding the needs of the communications industry – and there are jobs waiting for just about ever graduate, according to Tushir Choudary, managing director of the school. The program offers broadcasting and communications degrees as well as advertising and public relations degrees, and it also offers also master’s degrees.
Choudary’s heart, however, is in communications development in rural areas. He has spent several years setting up radio stations among tribal populations in central India. “When there is an accident or a storm, these people need to hear the news in their own language,” he said. “We set up three stations and we make a difference, and maybe we save some lives.”
Choudary, and Preetam, too, offered their services for instruction and tours in both the media capitol and into India’s rural areas, if ASU students return with us next year.
It’s nice to have options.
