Posters that Vaidya painted for his clients. Telegraph picture

Mumbai, Feb. 12: The film poster has been reinvented.

Not before it was killed by technology. The hand-painted film poster and hoarding, which had offered a young M.F. Husain his livelihood when he first came to the city, has been declared dead, as the film industry here does not want those pink-fleshed heroes and heroines with slightly grotesque, sometimes not slightly, faces and figures against flaming backgrounds any more.

The industry has opted for complete digitisation in its publicity materials ? there are special shoots of the stars working in a film, the photo CD is fed into the computer, layout is made on the screen, and out comes the film poster in glistening vinyl.

But somewhere out there, there is a growing craze for the abandonedtradition.

In his old, small Balkrishn Studio in a Dadar lane, sits Balkrishn Vaidya, proprietor, a 73-year-old man who has been in the business for more than 50 years. Three years ago, for him and his fellow poster painters, life came to a standstill as the printed or computer-generated poster took over. But now Vaidya has got a new lease of life.

He sits surrounded by huge posters of Devdas, Black, Mangal Pandey, Veer-Zara, Sholay, Aan, all hand-painted, with Shahrukh, Rani Mukherjee, Preity Zinta as gloriously pink-toned as before as slightly unrecognisable. All of them are mounted on frames and are going abroad.

“There is a huge demand of Bollywood posters from abroad,” says Vaidya. He has not done the original publicity of any of these films, except Sholay. His job is to produce a hand-painted poster from the computer-generated one.

Ten Devdas posters have sold in the UK alone. Two Mangal Pandeys are ready, one of them done with “knife painting” which brings a rough, uneven surface to the poster.

“We are told by our clients that they want the posters in exact Bollywood style,” says Vaidya. “They want red, pink, and our kind of painting, which a computer cannot produce.”

More than NRIs, he says, it’s “foreigners” who want it. The demand for Bollywood kitsch is so big that his clients don’t stop with ordering mere reproductions. They sometimes send their own photographs and ask him to use them instead of the hero’s and the heroine’s. So there is a Guide poster, which instead of featuring Waheeda Rehman and Dev Anand, stars two unknown Italians. A Kashmir ki Kali poster has been redone as one of Eternal Love, featuring two little-known foreigners.

Vaidya does not disclose the amount he gets for each poster, but says it is “good”.

He has not restricted himself to reproducing film originals. People want themselves in portraits drawn by him against “natural” settings, but Bollywood style.

He shows the photograph of a Swiss gentleman standing against the background of what looks like a museum. Then he shows the giant portrait based on the photograph, where instead of the subdued shades of the original, the colours have an overwhelming vividity ? and the gentleman looks slightly different, too.

Vaidya has also done a poster of Kill Bill (starring Uma Thurman), retitled Killer Bee, featuring his phirang lady client.

There is only one difference between the posters that Vaidya did before and does now. Earlier, the posters used to be done on cloth, coated with a white paint and smoothed over with crushed bone powder of animals (“they used to smell of dead animals”). But now they are on canvas.

Vaidya, who had done the original posters and banners for Manoj Kumar’s Kranti, Shor, Rajendra Kumar’s Love Story, Gulshan Rai’s Vishwatma and numerous other films he cannot recall, will soon travel to Finland to attend a workshop and also paint posters.

There are several reasons why the hand-painted poster had to go. There were about 30 studios in the city. Almost all have closed shop. Many owners have sold the plots. Others tried to enter other professions related to the film industry, but not very successfully.

There is hardly anyone who tried the computerised poster art, as that would involve buying costly machinery.

“No one goes for the hand-painted poster now,” says Ranjitha Bhat of Rave, a publicity company that has handled over 50 major films, including Lagaan, The Hero, Bend It Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice. With photography and computers, there is verisimilitude, and if there is distortion, it is deliberate. The posters now also cost less.

“Before we used to be paid Rs 1 lakh to Rs 1.5 lakh per contract,” says Vaidya. “We would get the whole work for Bombay territory, which included Gujarat (film distribution area break-ups are still called by their previous names).”

About 5,000 posters and 10 to 12 banners would be commissioned for a big film for the territory. There would be continuous work, for which Vaidya used to employ 21 artists.

But now he employs only two.

Now, though the number of posters seems to have gone up per film ? “About 10,000 to 15,000 posters are commissioned for Bombay for a big film,” says an employee of a leading film exhibition company in the country ? distributors tend to stagger out the work to a number of outfits, so the amount of work is less.

The other media have dwarfed the poster in other ways, too.

Bhat says the poster remains very important, as smaller films cannot afford advertising on other media, but gives an average break-up of the publicity budget for a big film that shows the newer media triumphing.

“For a big film, Rs 1 crore is spent on television promotion, Rs 50 lakh on print and about Rs 10 lakh on posters, banners and hoardings, for the whole country,” says Bhat.

But the good thing is that in Vaidya’s studio, there is also a young main in jeans and a pony-tail called Girish Parmar. He trained as an architect, but has come to poster art as a possible profession. He is an apprentice now in Vaidya’s studio.