Johnny Gaddaar – Song Sequence in B-Movie

I was thirsting for fame. On this two-day shoot of a catchy music clip for the movie Johnny Gaddaar, I was determined to muscle my way into every frame possible.

I started by chatting up the dancers. On the first day, most were pretty aloof, but that didn’t deter me.

It was in an air conditioned nightclub, but being on my feet for so many hours caused my lower back to belie my true age. Yet when required to dance, I put on my ear-to-ear smile and shook my ass like there was no tomorrow. They took notice. I was moved right to the stage. At the end of one particular take, one dancer shook my hand. Another asked me if I was a professional. I replied that I was as of now.

The following day, which also spanned some sixteen hours, I was right up front dancing away as the hero entered the nightclub. Full frontal. Finally my 15 minutes.

As the day wore on, once nice young dancer gave me the number of a dance instructor in Chennai, where he was from. I could only improve. At this point, I felt I had finally gained the respect of the permanent foreign actors as well. I have pretty good moves for a white Jew-boy, after all.

Most interestingly, I was able to exchange a few words with the script writer at the end of the second day, a lovely woman named Pooja. She thought it was at once cute and strangely intriguing that I had come all the way from Israel to be in Indian showbiz in order to translate the medium to Western audiences. “Most Bollywood movies today are trash,” she told me. I explained that in an industry of 900 plus movies a year, 250 of which are in Hindi, if 90% are garbage, that means 25 good movies annually, or at least two a month. Those were the ones I was interested in. She smiled and said that she had never thought of it that way. I guess that this kind of cultural exchange is indeed a two-way street.