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Porn in the USA

Suparn Verma meets Dr Jagmohan Mundhra, our man in Hollywood!

Jagmohan Mundhra

He sparked off a filmi genre, that walked the thin line between pop and pornography, between the hackneyed and the horrifying. Nineteen erotic thrillers, one art film, one commercial venture, no awards. Jagmohan Mundhra has come a long way.

Oddly, despite being based in Hollywood, he made his debut with a Hindi film Suraag, following it with an art flick, Kamla, and, years later, the awful Pooja Bedi starrer, Vishkanya.

A film by Jag Mundhra is a brand name in the video circuit the world over, synonymous with sensuality and titillation. It highlighted sex -- sex shot beneath multicolored lights, sex shot in the glow of candles, sex with wax, sex in the swimming pool... So much sexual steam did he generate that Mundhra might even have paved the way for films like Jan De Bont's Basic Instinct.

In 1968, Mundhra landed on American soil armed with a degree from IIT and went on to do his MBA and a Ph D in marketing motion pictures from the University of Michigan. His conservative Marwari family wasn't very supportive when he announced his plan to join films.

It was in the US that he realised his creative potential.

"I realised there was so much I could do. Before I came to the US I had no access to such knowledge. While I was studying advertising I picked up a couple of awards in my class and my professors encouraged me. But I knew my heart belonged to film-making. After I passed out, I knew the only way to get a foot in the industry was to be placed in Hollywood."

Click for bigger pic!

Mundhra began teaching marketing at the University of Southern California, and later at California State University. In the evenings he would study film-making at the American Film Institute and the University of California. His status as a professor got him on the board of the Los Angeles film exposition, where he was asked to select Indian films to be screened at the festival.

"As a teacher at USC I had to only work 12 hours a week. The rest of the time I was free to research or write my book." But he was getting restless to enter the tinsel world.

With his earnings and some borrowings, he rented a 800-seat theatre (Meralta) in Los Angeles in 1975. Since he couldn't compete with big theatre chains that got their hands on the latest English films, he began screening Hindi films. Since they had limited audiences, Mundhra had to ask his Hindi film distributors for 35 mm prints. "I remember the first film screened was Julie. Our average collection with English films was four to five hundred dollars a week. With Julie we earned 5,000 dollars in one weekend."

With business taking off, the Meralta marquee was redone, a snack bar with a speciality in samosas cropped up, a magazine counter was added and the lobby got some much-needed paint.

It then became the in thing in Bollywood to have a premiere in LA. Dev Anand went there for Des Pardes, Sanjeev Kumar for Pati, Patni aur Woh and Yash Chopra for Kabhi Kabhi. "It was so strange. I was in Hollywood trying to make it, and I was making more contacts with Bollywood," guffaws Mundhra, scratching his trimmed salt and pepper beard.

When Sanjeev Kumar came a-calling