When Vikas Swarup got a call in 2004 from a film producer who was interested in turning his book, Q&A. into a movie, the Indian author was taken by surprise.

That’s because his book has yet to be published. Within two months after he finished writing the book in 2003, it acquired a publisher, Random House, which felt it was a “heavy book” for it deals with modern India which has not been exposed to the world at that time.

The publishing company promised to release the book in two years, so the offer to turn Q&A into a film was totally unexpected.

Swarup, who was in Manila last week for a literary gathering, surmised that when the publishers got hold of the manuscript, Random House felt that it had cinematic potential and so passed it on to film scouts hoping to land a film deal. That’s because publishers want to maximize the potential of the book.

And that movie turned out to be the Oscarwinning worldwide phenomenon, Slumdog Millionaire.

According to Swarup, his novel, Q&A, was the first of its kind that touched on contemporary India, a departure from the conventional allusion to the exotic India of Maharaja, palaces and elephants.

When he met the screenwriter, he was advised that the title of his novel would be not used, arguing that they wanted something more provocative.

Moreover, due to the lack of budget, not all the stories in his novel would be used. But the screenwriter promised that he would remain faithful to the “soul” of the book.

Nonetheless Swarup felt at that time that the body of his novel would be mangled, aware that what he has written is a book—and what they are doing is a film.

“When the medium becomes different, the vocabulary and texture of the medium have to be different,” he explained.

But when he first read the draft of thescreenplay, he already had the feeling that the screenplay just might win an Oscar—in the Best Adapted Screenplay category. Slumdog Millionaire would garner more than 70 awards, including four Golden Globes, 7 BAFTAs and eight Oscars.

Swarup credited its awards success to the brilliant acting of the child actors, the musical score and cinematography.

Aside from being a good product, the other factor that propelled the film to become a worldwide hit was because it was about India and “this was the time of India.”

The movie came at a time where there was global economic meltdown and people needed something that could give them hope. “And Slumdog was a flicker of hope during those

times,” he said.

The Slumdog effect

According to Swarup, Bollywood films are traditionally seen as escapist entertainment in a country where the vast majority of the people are poor. Films were considered the main source of entertainment until the introduction of colored TV in 1984.

The script was the least important aspect of filmmaking in India in the late 1980s, he said, and only in the 1990s that this mindset was changed as films began failing in the box office with the rise of TV.

“TV has saved Bollywood to the extent that it brought the script back into the limelight,” he said.

For him, the whole economics of Bollywood has changed after Slumdog Millionaire. After the success of the movie, more novels from India were being pitched for movie adaptation.

Also he noted that some 30 soap operas in the US now have Indian characters. “Hollywood is increasingly looking at India for stories and location,” he said.

Indians also have a penchant for searching where particular scenes of films were shot. And when you consider that Indian tourists spent $5 billion last year outside the country, “film tourism” is now seen as lucrative. As a result, many countries call on Indian filmmakers to shoot attheir respective locales.

Just as Slumdog Millionaire inspired optimism among many moviegoers, organizers of the Philippine literary festival are probably hoping that Swarup’s success can also inspire the country’s writers.

But for scriptwriter and journalist Eric Ramos, writing for the Philippine movie industry is not a profession—at least in its current state—but a vocation. The award-winning writer added that writing screenplays in the Philippines is a thankless endeavor for the most part.

“You really have to love the medium for you to derive any amount of satisfaction from it,” he said at the forum that delved on “Screenwriters and filmmakers on the challenges of writing for film” last Friday, along with Swarup.

According to Ramos, filmmaking is a highly collaborative process where the director is in charge and gets the “lion’s share of credit.” And unlike writers of poetry, fiction and drama, a screenwriter needs his work to be made into a film for it to be called a “finished product.”

Ramos argued that beyond the question of vision and authorship, there are tougher challenges facing the Filipino screenwriters.

First, the local movie industry today is very small. Economically and artistically, it is now a shadow of the vibrant business it was years ago when the industry churned out over 300 films a year, with masterpieces by Lino Brocka, Mike de Leon and Ishmael Bernal, and blockbusters starring Fernando Poe Jr., Vilma Santos and Nora Aunor. On average, mainstream Filipino producers nowadays will make only around two or three movies a month. Independent producers may make several more, but they get a very small fraction of the theatrical distribution. In many instances, independent films do not even get commercial releases.

Ramos noted that Philippine cinema is losing the battle to two “formidable monsters”—Hollywood and local television.

“Most cinemas of the world have been marginalized by the billion-dollar Hollywood juggernaut, whereas the country’s film industry is not a unique substory,” he said.

For Ramos, the bigger problem is the effect of local television in the movie industry.

The television network giants have become the biggest employer of people who used to work in the movies—from the actors and directors down to the technical staff.

It is but natural for many of the scriptwriters who write for movies to similarly migrate to television.  Some have become directors or creative consultants for soap operas and other kinds of programs.

Television may be called the “small screen,” but today it is not that small anymore, as it commands the attention of millions of Filipinos, Ramos said.

But unlike cinema, television thrives on close-ups, rather than on wide-angle shots.

“Sadly, the medium [of TV] has little tolerance for nuisances and subtexts. It revels in clichés and storytelling formula. In this universe, the plot of the prince and the pauper never gets old. It just gets a new leading lady every time,” Ramos said.

The same scenario is observed in mainstream cinema. This is primarily because the leading producers are the major TV networks themselves, which treat the movie of today as no more than a showcase for their own stable of stars.

For Ramos, the only option for anyone who wants to write for the movies is to write for independent cinema.

“Indie films allow you to explore things and subjects that TV dramas and mainstream cinemas will never touch. They allow you to experiment and challenge yourself. They let you think as an artist instead of an artist chasing for the next paycheck,” he said.

But Ramos lamented that the audience share for independent films remains very small. “You’re lucky if you get a one-week run in digital cinemas in SM or Robinsons,” he said.

Poet-screenwriter Jerry Gracio, who considers writing as his lifelong career, offered his piece on the subject by revisiting his first venture into writing.

His introduction to scriptwriting started when he was asked by an editor to do a series of articles on movie producers. That was how he met Seiko Films’ owner, Roby Tan. Notorious for its adult films or ST (sex trip) and TF (titillating films) of the late ’80s and early ’90s, Gracio’s first stint in scriptwriting was for a film called Talong.

At first, he was not allowed to write fulllength screenplays. He was asked to read, review and revise a number of scripts. “I became a script doctor,” he said.

At that moment, what he learned from the academe with all the theories repeatedly reinforced by his mentors was entirely different from what he was doing. “For Seiko was the real life, the real thing,” he said.

“In poetry, I feel bad with the replacement of a colon to a semicolon, but in film, you have to be prepared because sometimes the director would delete five or 10 sequences, the actors would replace your dialogue, the director or producer would declare your work trash on the basis of five-page reading of your script,” Gracio said.

The script may be the basis for a film but, Gracio said, the scriptwriter will never be its star. A good script can turn bad depending on the abilities of its director, while a brilliant director may still pull it off even with a terrible screenplay.

“I realized that the real challenge when you’re writing for film, is that you’re writing for your director. But in the case of Seiko Films you’re writing for Roby Tan,” he said. C onsidering that cinema is an art form, Gracio believes that it has the capacity to challenge and change viewing of things, whether they are good or bad, ugly or beautiful. It could stir deep feelings and provoke memories.

According to Gracio, screenwriters should keep in mind that film is a visual medium in writing film scripts.

Still there are many idealistic screenwriters out there who dream of hitting the cinematic equivalent of the lotto jackpot.

“The great Philippine screenplay that will become the great Filipino film which will receive universal acclaim,” Ramos said.