Poster of a Hollywood B-grade movie being shown at a hall on Wednesday. Picture by Biju Boro

Oct. 22: Two young boys, barely out of school, enter the cinema hall premises surreptitiously, their eyes glued to the scantily-clad lady on the poster of the Hollywood skin-flick.

The capital “A” printed in red and bold on the poster is their “invitation” to the movie. The man at the ticket counter does not even give them a glance as he thrusts two front stall tickets to the two.

No eyebrows are raised at the entrance as the young men walk in — the gatekeeper knows that the two boys are not old enough to qualify as adults. Neither do the majority of the people who occupy the seats in the dark theatre care.

In the city, it has almost become an unwritten rule: if it is an adult movie, the viewers must be youngsters, mostly schoolboys. However, entry may not be easy any more. City police is planning to deploy plainclothes personnel in and around halls which are known to screen such movies regularly.

“We are aware of the trend. But we will soon deploy our men in plainclothes to bring this to an end,” a city police official said.

As of now, however, there is no one to stop the young ones from having a ball. While police look the other way, the hall-owners welcome the young viewers with open arms. “After all, they are our main customers. It sounds bad, but we make the most profit from adult films,” admits the owner of a city hall.

The manager of Rupashree cinema said “Earlier we tried to prevent these youngsters but this only leads to heated exchange of words, as the boys threaten our staff. Anyway, the films we screen are cleared by censors.”

In a city where an Assamese film hardly gets past the one-week mark, B-grade and C-grade Hollywood and Bollywood movies run for weeks. Most of the movies are censored. “But for the young boys, even one or two titillating scenes make their day”, a gatekeeper at a shady hall said. However, there are also allegations that sometimes footage cut during censorship are added in the cinema halls and then screened. “The news goes out through word-of-mouth about the extra scenes in a particular movie,” the gatekeeper added.

According to cinema hall authorities, the films marked “A” come from authorised film distributors. The government earns the maximum revenue from these films.

An office-bearer of the Eastern India Motion Picture Association, the apex body of distributors in the region, said that it is the job of the police to check underage viewers gaining entry into halls screening adult movie. He, however, denied knowledge about censor-cut footage being screened in the city.

The association has decided to don the mantle of a “super censor” to ensure that only quality films are screened in the city. The move comes after several militant organisations of the region, including the United Liberation Front of Asom (Ulfa) and National Democratic Front Of Boroland (NDFB), issued a diktat recently, “banning” Hindi movies in the Northeast from November 15.

The outfits said the Bollywood movies were showcasing vulgarity and polluting the minds of the people, specially the younger generation. The manager of a cinema hall said, “What is the use of blaming only the B-grade and C-grade movies? Nowadays, almost all the Mumbai movies with top stars are as explicit. There appears to be no problem when children come with their parents to watch these Bollywood hits.”