'GORILLA' CHOICES, writes Niranjan Iyengar

In the good old days if you wanted to be a part of the film business you had to work in the actual making of a film. But things have improved now and a host of new areas have cropped up, which despite having no direct relation to filming, wield great power. Listed below are three such choices and the skill set you need:

TALENT MANAGERS:
You are the super breed that has the mammoth task of `managing' talent and hence automatically gets you the right to judge the talents of films & filmmakers who approach your clients. Your duty demands that you have `pointers' on the `second half' (or any half) of the film that your client is approached for. You must always give unasked for but `polite' suggestions regarding potential casting but in a tone that says it's cast in stone. You must `watch' a lot of movies and make sure your client believes you are `bang on' with your opinions. Once that is reiterated a few times no one will question the process of osmosis through which you learnt all about filmmaking!

PRESS-FOR-A-QUOTE EXPERTS:
Your entrance test is befriending a couple of rookie reporters. You must study trade journals for a few weeks and then find your way into desk pieces as a `trade analyst' where your opinion is one of the eighteen in an article. Then slowly you must manage to become one of the eight voices and within a couple of years you have to be one of the two `experts'. You must also make an appearance or two on the panel of any news channel to accelerate your rise. You will then ascend to review films for their creative merit and tell the screenplay writer and the director how to make better movies. The tricky part is to come up with quotes, which can neither be verified nor contradicted. Once you cross a hundred of those no one will care where you came from and you will transcend from being an `analyst' to an `expert'!

`FRIENDS' & `WELL WISHERS':
You must sound very honest when you say you don't care about film stars despite being obsessed with them. You have to be intelligent, sensitive and must master the art of opportunistic objectivity. You must befriend the star, star wife or the girlfriend. Your selfies clicked at various private film parties with various stars must be seen on Instagram without causing threat to your perceived loyalty to `the one'! You must, at all times, know why a film worked (or didn't), who needs to do what to resurrect a failing career and whose marriage is strong (or not). You must be seated in the front row with stars at award functions even as nominated filmmakers and technicians sit on the 18th row.

Of course none of the above is easy and takes years of hard work to achieve. If you want an easy entry there is writing, editing, cinematography or various such crafts.