While Priyanka Chopra and Deepika Padukone have been lately enjoying the ‘Hollywood Experience’, I can’t help but recall from a decade ago the ‘Indian Experience’ of actor Bentley Mitchum. Never heard of him? Okay, not your fault if you also haven’t heard of films like A Crack In The Floor, Delta Force One: The Lost Patrol or Shark Attack. Again, not your fault if you missed him in an episode of JAG or The Wonder Years. So let’s stick to the basic fact that Bentley is a Hollywood actor whose one big claim to fame is his grandfather – Robert Mitchum.
Now let me tell you his story. India was not on his mind before that call from a friend in the late 90s. “I was told that a movie is being cast which was to be shot in India for ten weeks,” Bentley recalled. “I had never been to India. But 8 months prior to that call, I had been drawn to the country.” He’d studied yoga, done some charity, sung bhajans and even found himself drawn to an Indian spiritual guru whom he referred to as Amachi. “So I think it was fate that made me do this movie.”
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The movie was Little John, released in 2001, a fantasy about how an American anthropologist who comes to India to do research on folklore and miracles and finds himself shrunk to 6 inches by a godman. The film was directed by Singeetam Srinivasa Rao, better known to most people as the maker of the silent film Pushpak and Kamal Haasan’s midget masterpiece Appu Raja. “I auditioned for the role,” said Bentley. “They wanted to know whether I could sing. And luckily, I happened to be part of a band. So I mailed them a CD of my music.” Then he did some homework. “I made some enquiries about the Indian film industry,” he said. “In fact, 2 weeks before I arrived in Chennai, I subscribed to a new cable system in Los Angeles and started getting over 300 odd channels.” And one of them happened to be an Indian channel. “I saw some 70 odd martial arts kind of films from your country where the hero would break into a song or kick 5 people. I also saw some soap operas where they didn’t break into a song, though I didn’t watch them long enough to see if they did.”
But nothing prepared Bentley Mitchum for what awaited him in Chennai soon after his flight landed in July 2000. “When I got there, I realized I was doing 3 different films – in English, Hindi and Tamil! And somehow my agent in LA had failed to convey this to me.” He also was not aware that each movie had 5 songs. “They wanted me to do Indian folk dance – something which I had not even seen!” It was tough going for an American actor. “The dance choreographer told me to smile, lip sync and dance at the same time… But I actually enjoyed this whole thing about being a singer and a dancer in the movie.”
More revelations came his way when he observed the Indian actors around him. “The style of acting was very different,” he observed. “But not the results!” He recalled how Anupam Kher in a godman get-up walked up to the director and asked, “Okay, what am I saying in this scene?” Now that was a lot different from Bentley’s own approach to acting, which included reading the script thoroughly and making notes about his character even before he boarded the flight to India. “But when I got here I realized that none of my notes were of any use. The director had different ideas.” Of course, Singeetam Srinivasa Rao justified it by saying, “Basically, Bentley is from Hollywood, where actors get a ready script and nothing much changes from that actual shooting. And Bentley had studied the script thoroughly. But over here, it’s not so much about studying the script or doing your homework. Because there are certain areas outside the script where the Indian idioms have to be used.”
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Bentley was also amazed at the work ethics in the Indian film industry. “People work all through day and night,” he noticed. “If I hadn’t put my foot down, I would have been working 16 hours a day. In Hollywood, a 12-hour rest is mandatory for every artiste.” But despite all the troubles he endured, Bentley found leaving the country heartbreaking at the end of the shoot. “I love the country and its culture,” he said. “The thought of leaving was kind of sad.”
It is not known if Bentley Mitchum’s very Bollywood display of a multi-tasking hero who sings, dances and fights, helped his career in Hollywood.
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