Fantasies of a Bollywood Love Thief Inside the World of Indian Moviemaking [Paperback]

Bollywood movies are glorious, colorful spectacles of romance, action, drama, song, and dance. The biggest film industry in the world, Bollywood puts out some nine hundred movies a year, which are watched by passionate fans around the globe.

Stephen Altera writer who grew up in India and has inside access to Bollywoodacts as translator and tour guide in this firsthand look into the world of Bombay films. Following the making of a Bollywood version of Othello, he explores the enormous popularity of Hindi movies and reveals the actors, directors, musicians, and feats of artifice that make them so compelling and unique. From the blessing ceremony performed each time a movie starts shooting to the secrets behind the song- and-dance extravaganzas, Fantasies of a Bollywood Love-Thief is a beguiling introduction to the rituals and culture of a moviemaking industry so similar to and yet utterly different from our own.

PRAISE FOR ELEPHAS MAXIMUS

Magical and fascinating. THE BOSTON GLOBE

Deftly blend[s] Indian history and culture with current debates about animal conservation . . . Joyous. THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE

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shakespeare remixed
If this were Venice there might have been an arched bridge of sculpted marble over a romantic canal, ornate balconies, and drifting gondolas.
           Instead, we are somewhere in rural India, three hours drive southeast of Mumbai, near a small village called Takave. According to the script its supposed to be another place altogether, the badlands of Uttar Pradesh (U.P.), in a different part of the country, more than a thousand kilometers to the north of here. Despite a dislocation of geography, the arid countryside is close enough to matchhard, dry soil cracked by winter drought, yellow thistles and congress weed, sparse fields of maize withering under a fierce sun. Cattle egrets wade in the shallz