Top Bollwood actresses unaffordable?

Do you know that many  heroines in Bollywood ask their producer’s to pay for their Man Fridays? Not only that, today every top heroine comes with an entourage  — a coterie of hair-dressers, personal assistants, make-up artists, a team of spot boys  etc — all of which are billed to the producer. To top it all, sometimes expensive costumes of the film are never returned.

“The top heroines in Bollywood are a nightmare to work with these days. Apart from the fact that most are over-priced and are almost unaffordable, one has to deal with the coterie that accompanies them as a package. It’s exactly the reason you find new faces being launched with every movie,” says filmmaker Ekta Kapoor.

According to Kapoor, she couldn’t afford the package that a leading heroine commands these days when she was casting for her latest film. “It is sometimes impossible to pander to all their demands like ‘to get me, you will have to get this make-up man, this hairstylist, this choreographer’. To add to it, even these people on demand start charging more than the usual market rates as they know that they are riding on the star,” she added.

According to sources, the fees of actors have touched Rs 3-5 crore per film, but a producer ends up paying double that on a  heroine because of her demands. “The actresses have become ridiculously expensive. It sometimes worse because you are made to pay for people like the heroine’s driver and that too at rates like Rs 5,000 a day. It becomes unbearable sometimes. The more painful part is the group that comes with the heroine. Even if you don’t like their work, you will have to take him or her because he comes with heroine’s recommendation,” said filmmaker Vipul Shah.

Subhash Ghai also seconds Vipul, “The prices will always go through a correction and currently there has to be a correction. We talk about Hollywood so much but when it comes to these things we never bother to say that we are operating quite like their opposite,” he said.