Anil Ambani, Shah Rukh Khan

Calcutta, July 3: Anil Ambani may have lost the Calcutta IPL team to Shah Rukh Khan, but the industrialist now has a chance to beat the superstar in owning another source of entertainment in the city.

Chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee today told the Assembly that Anil Ambani had once expressed interest in setting up a film studio in the state. “Since then I have not heard anything on the matter,” he later said.

Bhattacharjee added that when Shah Rukh had approached him with a proposal for setting up a cricket academy, he asked the actor to consider building a studio. Shah Rukh did not make any commitment but said he would look into the proposal, the chief minister said.

However, industry sources told The Telegraph that Anil Ambani, whose Emerald Telecom had bid unsuccessfully for the Calcutta T20 team that was eventually owned and named Kolkata Knight Riders by Shah Rukh, still wanted to set up a film studio in Salt Lake’s Sector V.

If the project — which unites two of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s passions: investment and cinema — comes through, it will bring much-needed private capital to the struggling Bengali film industry.

Adlabs, a part of Ambani’s fast-expanding entertainment business, will develop the studio which, Tollywood hopes, will save many film-makers the trouble of travelling to the south in search of good studios.

“It’s good they are interested in setting up a studio here,” Bhattacharjee said in answer to a question from Congress MLA Sudip Bandopadhyay.

Adlabs already has a presence in Calcutta with two post-production centres for film processing and sound, and a multiplex in Sector V, next to which the studio is expected to come up. The studio will be the company’s second in India, after the one in Mumbai.

Anil Ambani’s foray into Bengali film production, however, came sometime earlier. Industry sources said Anil Ambani’s Big Motion Pictures might produce as many as 10 Bengali movies, including films by acclaimed directors such as Rituparno Ghosh, Buddhadeb Dasgupta and Sandip Ray.

Actor Prasenjit is said to be involved as an adviser but is not expected to put his money into the project.

Film industry sources said the city’s half-a-dozen existing studios -- some of them owned by the government – badly need to be upgraded.

This of course requires investment, which neither the state nor private business has so far been willing to provide.

“It involves a huge amount of money,” Bhattacharjee told the House. “The government cannot spend so much on reviving the film industry since we cannot curtail our expenditures on health and education. So private investment is needed.”

Adlabs’ post-production centres have saved many Bengal film-makers the trouble of going to labs in southern or western India, and the industry hopes Ambani’s studio will reduce a similar trend for film shoots.

Bhattacharjee said many private investors had put their money in the film industries in Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai but shied away from Bengal. “I had approached two or three corporate houses but they did not show much interest.”

The Zee group had once expressed interest in taking over the state-owned Technicians Studio but the deal fell through.

Bhattacharjee said the government had advertised in newspapers inviting expressions of interest for reviving the Technicians Studio I and II in Tollygunge.

He said the old Radha studio had been converted into an archive. The government had set up the Rupkala Kendra and Rupayun laboratories to help train young directors in video filming and making animation films.

Anil Ambani’s proposal comes at a time elder brother Mukesh Ambani, who owns Reliance Industries, is finding it tough to open his farm products business in Bengal in the face of Forward Bloc opposition. Anil, too, has not progressed much with his proposal to set up an IT institute in Kalyani.

Last month, Anil’s Reliance Big Entertainment had announced it would provide $1 billion as development funds to “eight leading creative forces in Hollywood” and invest another $1 billion in 69 other movies.