Screenwriters are miserable. In Hollywood, certainly, in Bollywood, too. And they're making it known.
Hollywood screenwriters are on strike seeking better wages. Back home, a recent Delhi HC order on intellectual property rights points to a longstanding issue
Few in Hindi cinema have challenged the producer-director’s sway over the agency and rights of the writer as doggedly as Jyoti Kapoor has. Screenwriters getting the short shrift, directors hijacking ideas and making them their own, producers denying credit, writers fighting over their dues for years—these should’ve been outdated bones to pick in the age of streaming TV cornucopia. Television is a writer’s medium after all, as platforms such as HBO and Apple TV have proved brilliantly over and over again. Writers now enjoy monikers such as “creator” or “show-runner” in credit rolls. The “Writer’s Room”, an anointed stop for developing a series, has found widespread resonance in this OTT age. Writer’s Rooms in Mumbai’s filmy suburbs of Versova, Juhu and Andheri, are aspirational for young screenwriters.
Jyoti Kapoor (Daawat-e-Ishq, Good Newwz) is still an inspiring outlier. I met Kapoor at a small, vibe-rich cafe in Versova called Leaping Windows. It had been a few days since the Delhi high court (HC) ruled that the copyright to the screenplay written by director Satyajit Ray for his 1966 film Nayak belongs to him, and after his death, to his son Sandip Ray and the Society for Preservation of Satyajit Ray Archives, stressing that an author, commissioned by the producer of a film to write its screenplay, must be first owner of the copyright. The family of the film’s producer, RD Bansal had sought to restrain HarperCollins from publishing and distributing a 2018 novel by Bhaskar Chattopadhyay that was a novelisation on Ray’s screenplay for Nayak on the grounds that this was an infringement of its copyright.
Kapoor as well as Anjum Rajabali, screenwriter (Drohkaal, Ghulam, Rajneeti, among numerous others) and passionate advocate of screenwriters’ rights through his capacity as the chairperson of the Contracts Committee of the Screen Writers Association (SWA) believes this is a welcome judgment because it at least shows the sensitivity of the legal system towards the intellectual property rights of writers.
A homegrown OTT channel has just green-lit a “comedy-drama with a woman protagonist” that Kapoor, now 44, has written—and will be show-running. Over elderflower-spiked coolers, I take her back to turbulent times. Her uphill legal journey of 2015 ending in a verdict in her favour was an IPR milestone in India: The Supreme Court ruled that there were similarities between the storyline of Phir Se, a film that was being produced and directed by Kunal Kohli and Kapoor’s script titled RSVP, which she had earlier pitched to Kohli to produce. On his part, Kohli maintained that Kapoor’s accusations were false, he had not discussed any story with her. The top court ordered that Kohli pay Kapoor a compensation of ₹25 lakh and give her a “story idea” credit. It was an eight months-long battle, which SC advocate Shyam Divan took up pro-bono. The verdict brought to end an eight-month battle which took Kapoor from multiple industry dispute resolution mechanisms to the Bombay high court and then to the top court.
A couple of years later, she had to fight for another “story writer” credit with Junglee Pictures, the film production wing of the Bennet & Coleman group in the commercially successful and award-winning film Badhaai Do (2018). She went on to head the Disputes Settlement committee of the Screen Writers Association (SWA) and is now a key member of this organisation, which is the only body representing rights of screenwriters in Hindi films.
Compared to its stolid early years since it was set up in the 1950s, SWA has become a force for good over the past two decades. In 2019, the SWA announced a Legal Aid Policy to help its member screenwriters fight their legal battles related to copyright infringement, breach of confidentiality, payments and credits. So Kapoor is champion as well as trouble-maker, and this bodes well for the writing community. “I received huge support from several people, especially the writing community. Of course, some people will always perceive you as a troublemaker, but as long as you have stories to tell, you’re here to stay.”
Kapoor’s advice to screenwriters starting out in the Writer’s Rooms of Versova and Juhu, is simply to be connected to other writers, form rings of trust and support with other writers.
Kapoor is optimistic that the ongoing Hollywood Writers’ Strike, which is almost two months old now, will have repercussions around the world. The last strike was 15 years ago, lasted for 100 days and caused a roughly US$2 billion dent in Hollywood. “I once represented the SWA at the International Screenwriters Association (ISA). And it was obvious that our issues here are still so basic. The Hollywood strike will have repercussions for sure, and that is a good thing.” The ISA is a parent body of screenwriters associations from around the world, and the SWA is an active member.
On May 2, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) — an alliance of two labour unions representing over 11,000 film, television, news, radio and online writers — went on strike, demanding minimum fees for all writers, royalties, staff positions instead of the umbrella category “freelancer”, and regulation of the use of artificial intelligence in script production. For screenwriters, these can be seismic changes. The Hollywood writers have claimed that while their wages have been falling in the last few years, profits have been skyrocketing for streamers they write for. One demand related to the rising use of “mini rooms” — scaled-down writers’ rooms that hire fewer writers for shorter periods of time. A small group of writers typically work with the showrunner in mini rooms to break down the season’s overarching features of a script, which later written without them. “Existential crisis” is how the WGA describes the plight of writers.
In India, “existential crisis” certainly applies. But first, the obvious silver lining: Streaming has generated more jobs for writers. “Things are better, there is better money, we are taking family holidays now,” says Charudutt Acharya, a TV writer for 20-plus years, and is behind the screenplays of the sharp, successful Netflix crime thriller Aranyak (2021). “But,” Acharya says, “the joy of writing has somewhat gone. There are two sets of hierarchy one has to work with, the producer’s and the platform’s. Many executives and creative heads come back with inputs on a screenplay several times over, sometimes with contrasting feedback, and if you give in to each, the final product has little of the writer’s signature.”
Sometimes, writers claim, the story itself changes. In most cases, there are no royalties/residuals and writers settle for a one-time payment. Kapoor says, “Interestingly, the same streaming platforms that follow strict mandates in the West and are known to empower writers, don’t extend the same advantages to Indian writers.”
Platforms such as HBO, Netflix and Amazon Prime are known for writer-centric projects. They are pioneers in that sense. “We are still thinking in a feudal way in our film industry,” Kapoor says. And perhaps the India contracts only mirror a need to be “culture-specific”.
I reached out to Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and producer Siddharth Roy Kapoor, managing director of Roy Kapoor Films for interviews about the state of screenwriters’ rights in India. All of them declined to comment.
Having talked to several screenwriters in Mumbai between the age group of 25 to 60, it was clear that the biggest source of their insecurities and misery was the draconian clause in most contracts that states, “The writer will be credited at the discretion of the producer.” Many screenwriters also said that this clause is antithetical to the objective of the 2012 amendment to the Copyright Amendment Act (1957) which establishes “an equitable and just framework for administration of copyright and sharing of revenue to protect the rights of owners and authors incorporated in cinematography and audio recordings.”
“In most OTT platforms or production houses, the chief creative officers or gatekeepers are made to ensure writers are kept in their place,” a writer, whose web series last year premiered on Amazon Prime, says, requesting anonymity. Social media has amplified voices of writers in the past few years, but still, unlike in Hollywood, there is no singular opinion or voice representing writers. It all boils down to the individual writer.
Recently, when IMDb included Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story (2020), Inside Edge (2017) and Rana Naidu (2023) in its list of top 50 most popular Indian web series of all times, prolific scenarist Vaibhav Vishal, who has written all three screenplays, tweeted thanking the directors and actors who alchemised his words and scenes on screen. “I never used to do this but now I’m making a conscious effort. I think it’s important that if you have worked on stuff, people should know about it. Typically, it is the stars and the people in front of the camera who get all the credit,” he recently told The Hindustan Times in an interview.
Vishal’s tweet coincided with the release of a survey by media research firm Ormax and content and talent management agency Tulsea, which found that 63% Indian screenwriters are dissatisfied with their pay and 53% with the credit they are given for their work. Titled ‘The Right Draft: 2023’, the study is the first published report on the writers’ community in the country.
Writers have always endured indignities in Bollywood. The few outliers who make noise make a difference. In the 1970s, in an entirely different cinema culture, writer-poet Javed Akhtar and writer Salim Khan—who wrote as the electric duo Salim-Javed—did the unthinkable when their request to have their names on the poster of the Amitabh Bachchan hit Zanjeer (1973) was declined. They hired people to get their names painted on posters across Bombay overnight. They could get away with it, because they were Salim-Javed. Writers with less creative command in films had far more basic struggles then—and now.
A lot of time, disputes arise due to cliques of Bollywood producers, who support specific writers. An overwhelming majority of streaming giants prefer to work with writers and directors that established names in the film industry back. The same people who were best friends once cannot tolerate each other any longer. Such is the nature of creative collaborative work, and so, says Rajabali, uppermost in the agenda of the SWA is the need for standardised contracts for writers.
Less than a decade ago, when the streaming platforms commissioned the first slew of India Originals including Sacred Games, screenwriting seemed like one of the coolest, best-paying jobs a writer could have. Playwrights and journalists moved over to Bollywood to partake in the heyday of prestige TV. Unlike big-budget movies, television was seen as a writers’ medium, and it was undergoing a creative explosion. The old perception that TV writing in India broke brains and souls began to change. In the intervening years, the profession has changed a lot. Streamers are ordering shorter seasons.
The “mini room” phenomenon — a Hollywood term which refers to the room populated by writers who are paid a small sum to work on the basics of a screenplay that is still in the early stages of development — is common in India too. Screenwriting is without a doubt the most lucrative form of writing for a professional writer. But its risks are far more volatile. Mental health is a concern for many writers. In 2020, screenwriter Abhishek Makwana, who wrote Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah, the longest-running Indian TV soap running into thousands of episodes, died by suicide due to, according to the suicide note he had left, “financial troubles”. Earlier in 2018, Ravi Shankar Alok, a 32-year-old screenwriter of the film Ab Tak Chhappan, also died by suicide in his flat in Versova. He was suffering from depression and was in deep financial trouble; he was unemployed for more than a year. Alok had come to Mumbai from Patna at the age of 17, to make it in Bollywood.
One writer called the “mini room” phenomenon a “glorified purgatory”. Not the best way a story should brew.
Sanjukta Sharma is a Mumbai-based film critic and writer.
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