final credits - ismail merchant
During cinema's 110 year history, there have been but a handful of creative partnerships that left behind them a lasting body of work. Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell produced some of Britain's more interesting and complex films of the 1940s and 1950s. Albert "Cubby" Broccoli and Harry Saltzman built the first modern film-franchise around an Ian Fleming protagonist by the name of Bond, James Bond.
Ismail Merchant, with partner/director James Ivory, defined the period-piece genre with intelligent, literate and seemingly sumptuous costume dramas. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, theirs is the longest partnership in cinema's history. Merchant died May 25, 2005 at the age of 68 of complications resulting from abdominal surgery.
The Merchant-Ivory team first collaborated on 1963's "The Householder." Their most recent effort was 2003's "Le Divorce." In between came such titles as "A Room With A View," "Howard's End," "The Remains of the Day," "Heat and Dust," "The Europeans," "Quartet," "Maurice," "Mr. & Mrs. Bridge," "Shakespeare Wallah," "Jefferson in Paris" and "The Bostonians." They have two films set for release: "The Goddess," a musical about the Hindu goddess Shakti, starring Tina Turner; and "The White Countess," a period drama set in China starring Ralph Fiennes, Vanessa Redgrave and Natasha Richardson. Together, Merchant and Ivory made 40 films which were nominated for thirty Oscars, winning ten. The team helped make Hugh Grant, Helena Bonham-Carter, and Emma Thompson household names.
Ismail Noormohamed Abdul Rehman was born in Bombay on Christmas Day, 1936. His father, a textile dealer, enrolled him in Muslim and Jesuit schools. While studying at St. Xavier's College in Bombay, he dreamed of becoming an impresario and changed his surname to Merchant "Because everyone called my dad 'Merchant' and the name just stuck."
Merchant first traveled to the United States in 1958 to study for a business degree at New York University. His studies got sidetracked when he discovered the movies. When he found out that one of his screen heroes, Paul Newman, was performing on Broadway, he marched up to the stage door and told the guard, "I am an esteemed filmmaker who has come all the way from India and I have an appointment with Mr. Newman." When they worked together decades later on "Mr. and Mrs. Bridge," Merchant brought up the story and asked whether Newman remembered. Newman replied, "Oh, you're that crazy Indian guy who came into my dressing room."
While studying, Merchant worked as a messenger for the United Nations. He used his job as an opportunity to persuade the Indian delegates to invest in his various film projects.
By the time he was 25, Merchant had moved to California as an aspiring (read struggling) film director. He worked nights in the Los Angeles Times' classified department to make ends meet. In 1960, he co-directed a live-action short film called "The Creation of Woman." He paid for the film to be shown in a cinema long enough for it to be eligible for Academy Award consideration. The film received a nomination as best short and was then entered in the Cannes Film Festival of 1961.
On his way to France, Merchant stopped for a day in New York and caught a screening of "The Sword and the Flute," a documentary film made by James Ivory, a native of Oregon. They later met in a New York City coffee shop. Merchant suggested they team up to make English-language films for Indian and other international markets. Merchant knew the Indian government had recently frozen the Rupee accounts of major American film distributors, and the monies could only be utilised to make films in India. Their deal was signed on a napkin.
Merchant and Ivory then approached Ruth Prawer Jhabvala in New Delhi about turning one of her books into a movie. "Ruth told us she had never written a screenplay," Merchant once said. "That was not a problem since I had never produced a feature film and Jim had never directed one." In what was soon to be typical of Merchant's style, "The Householder" had its 1963 premiere at the residence of John Kenneth Galbraith, then the U.S. Ambassador to India. The team was on its way.
Their movies were known equally for high quality and low budgets. Inside the business Merchant was known as the "frugal mogul." When Merchant was approached by Columbia to produce "The Remains of the Day," the company projected costs at $30 million. Merchant produced the film for $11.5 million, including Anthony Hopkins' salary. His training in business management probably helped him convince stars to work for less than their usual fees.
"A Room With a View" was made for $3 million and grossed $60 million. The success of the team's films was also reflected in the sales of books their movies were based on. E.M. Forster, who sold only 50,000 books in his lifetime, recorded sales of 6 million volumes after "View" was released.
Merchant was a master in the art of the bluff. During one of his rare directorial outings, he felt he just had to film inside the Trianon Palace Hotel in Versailles. However, there was an absolute ban on filming inside hotel. Nonetheless, Merchant posed as the Maharajah of Jodhpur, complete with robes, with a movie crew trailing as his entourage. Once inside, the crew set up the shoot. Merchant was a friend of the real maharajah and was confident that he would have found the ruse amusing.
Many thought that Merchant Ivory was one person, and they were not without their detractors. Some suggested a reversal of the team's name might have been more appropriate. Consensus suggests they only made one true bomb, 1989's "Slaves of New York." Others found the pace of their films a little too ponderous and precious, leaving ample time to admire the wallpaper of the sets.
Many critics detested their uncritical, touristic approach to fine buildings, fancy manners and the cruelties of class division. Their films have been relegated in some quarters as reactionary, pseudo-literary artifacts of the Reagan-Thatcher years. It was reported that Quentin Tarantino, before the premiere of his "Pulp Fiction," had bounded on to a stage, asking those in his audience who liked "The Remains Of The Day" to raise their hands. Quentin then pointed to an exit, yelling "Get the f#ck out of here!"
In addition to his role as film producer, Merchant authored many books. An accomplished chef himself, he once owned a French-Indian restaurant in Manhattan called "Pondicherry," and wrote such cookbooks as "Passionate Meals: The New Indian Cuisine for Fearless Cooks and Adventurous Eaters," "Ismail Merchant's Indian Cuisine," "Ismail Merchant's Florence," and "Ismail Merchant's Paris: Filming and Feasting in France With 40 Recipes."
Along more autobiographical themes, he also wrote "Hullabaloo in Old Jeypur," a book about the making of the film "The Deceivers," "Once Upon a Time . . . The Proprietor," about the making of the film "The Proprietor," and "My Passage from India: A Filmmaker's Journey from Bombay to Hollywood and Beyond."
In recent years, Merchant was involved in the restoration of works by Indian filmmaking legend Satyajit Ray, one of his cinematic idols.