A new understanding of the culturally rich and historic relationship
between Hollywood and Bollywood.
With American cinema facing intense technological and financial
challenges both at home and abroad, and with Indian media looking to
globalize, there have been numerous high-profile institutional
connections between Hollywood and Bombay cinema in the past few years.
Many accounts have proclaimed India's transformation in a relatively
short period from a Hollywood outpost to a frontier of opportunity.
Orienting Hollywood moves beyond the conventional popular wisdom that
Hollywood and Bombay cinema have only recently become intertwined
because of economic priorities, instead uncovering a longer history of
exchange. Through archival research, interviews, industry sources,
policy documents, and cultural criticism, Nitin Govil not only documents
encounters between Hollywood and India but also shows how connections
were imagined over a century of screen exchange. Employing a comparative
framework, Govil details the history of influence, traces the nature of
interoperability, and textures the contact between Hollywood and Bombay
cinema by exploring both the reality and imagination of encounter.