Komal Nahta

Film trade journals and the film industry share a love-hate relationship.

While trade magazines are eagerly awaited for the information they provide about show business from all over the country and overseas, they are hated because of this very reason.

Box office collections are printed in the trade journals, laying bare the truth about how a film has fared all over. The leading trade papers print the fate of films in as many as 80 to 100 places every week. Those who profit from misleading the trade are the ones most agitated when the trade papers publish the dreaded figures.

Producers and distributors generally inflate box office collections when supplying figures to trade papers. It then becomes the duty of the trade papers to countercheck the figures with the cinemas and publish the actual figures as against the fake/inflated ones provided by interested parties.

While a few trade papers do everything within their means to present the true picture, less scrupulous ones take the easy way out and print the incorrect figures supplied to them by the producers/distributors.

Take Chori Chori Chupke Chupke, for example. With a court receiver appointed to monitor its release as well as business, the distributors obviously would not be interested in fudging figures, least of all in giving inflated figures to trade papers. If they gave incorrect and increased collections and if the courts were to rely on those inflated figures, they would have to account for monies they never collected.

So, in place of the inflated figures, the distributors of CCCC would be more interested that the actual figures got published in trade papers. Unlike normal circumstances, when the distributor instructs the cinemas not to reveal the actual collections (of course, since trade papers have their sources in cinemas, the distributor's instructions often go unheeded), in the case of CCCC, the distributor would urge the cinema to reveal the genuine collections.

Very often, the trade paperwallahs impersonate the distributor's men while trying to extract the true collections from the cinemas. To circumvent this, some distributors have wisened up to giving code words to cinemas. Only if a person repeats the code word is he let into the secret figure aka the actual collections.

In the case of CCCC, the code word has given way to: "Hello, I'm speaking on behalf of the court receiver"! This one sentence should be enough to send shivers down the spines of cinemas who would otherwise insist on the code word before revealing the box office collections.

This happened recently when a suburban cinema in Bombay casually mentioned to a trade paper editor that the noon show of CCCC on Monday (March 12) was housefull.

Fake information this. But I guess, old habits die hard.

The editor telephoned the very cinema, posing as the court receiver's assistant. Lo and behold! the cinema manager was oh so ready to help with "whatever figures you want."

As it turned out, the noon show had registered Rs 11,000 against a capacity of Rs 20,000 odd. So much for the housefull collections.

The joke doing the rounds of the industry is that as against the congratulatory advertisements customarily issued by various territorial distributors at the end of the first week in the trade papers, in the case of CCCC, the scenario may just be the reverse.

A typical congratulatory advertisement reads, 'Congratulations XYZ (producer, presenter, artistes of the film, etc) on the grand success of ABC (name of film). We are confident of giving you overflow in the months to come. May our association remain lucky for the times to come.'

However, a typical advertisement for CCCC goes the joke, will be issued by the film's distributors and would read something like this: 'Congratulations, producer Nazim Rizvi and presenter Bharat Shah on the average business of CCCC. We are confident we will not pay you overflow.'