Ronnie Screwvala of UTV

If Hollywood has the glitz and glamour, Bollywood has the volume: it produces 1,000 movies a year to Hollywood’s 100, and counts on a domestic audience of more than 1 billion, not to mention the far-flung, well-heeled Indian Diaspora in California, London, and beyond. What Bollywood has always lacked, of course, is pan cultural resonance and global hit-making prowess. That’s a market cornered by the Los Angeles moguls. If anyone can change that, it’s Ronnie Screwvala. Dubbed by industry insiders as “Bollywood’s Jack Werner” in 2007, Screwvala has already caused waves at home. He took stale, derivative plotlines and gave them a Hollywood makeover. He took an industry full of mom-and-pop shops and professionalized it, courting foreign investors (Disney owns a third of his business, UTV Software Communications) and undertaking in-your-face marketing campaigns. He leapt feet first into the age of new media, grabbing market share in videogames and digital content. And he was the first Indian media mogul to believe in the export-worthiness of his product. His bankrolling of Mira Nair’s The Namesake showed that Indian entertainment could make money overseas. His big gamble on M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening wasn’t exactly a royal flush, but it didn’t force him to leave the table, either. He has since partnered with Bloomberg News and raised money in London, looking for his next international opportunity. His story, in many ways, is the story of globalization itself.