A salute to James Ivory — the oldest Oscar winner

James Ivory has a formidable body of work - most of it done in collaboration with the late Ismail Merchant. His Mumbai connection didn't quite pay off as he thought it would, but has left in its wake a robust global legacy

It seems just like yesterday, even though it was circa 1983. On the boulder-strewn outskirts of Hyderabad, the shoot of Heat and Dust was on. Gregarious producer Ismail Merchant was unusually tense. Reason: director James Ivory was customarily upset. He was miffed with the bit players assembled for a crowd scene. They didn't look right. "Excuse me for a while," Merchant pleaded. "I have to get Jim back in a pleasant mood or he won't budge from his hotel room."
As it happened, the producer ensured that right down from the costumes and the camera lighting to fresh fruit juices for refreshment and, of course, all the faces in the crowd were organised to the last detail.
The day's shoot was completed by the time the sun set; no glitches. Merchant saw his director off to the car, and then looked after the transport: luxury cars to drive the star-studded cast led by Shashi Kapoor, Julie Christie, tabla maestro Zakir Hussain (making his debut as an actor), Greta Scacchi, and Madhur Jaffrey. "For me Jim is the superstar," Merchant exclaimed. "He can be touchy, he's such a perfectionist."
Next, the producer zoomed off to shift Julie Christie to a more homely hotel than the five-star one the actors had checked into. Christie hadn't approved of her spacious but impersonal chintzy suite; she wished to stay in a downscale hotel which exuded the old-world Hyderabadi ambience. "Jim thinks she's being unnecessarily fussy, but to each his or her own," Merchant had laughed out loud uproariously.
Despite their chalk-and-cheese personalities, Merchant-Ivory formed a team which earned them a place in the Guinness Book of World Records, for their collaboration in over 40 years - on more than 40 films. When Merchant passed away at the age of 68 in 2005 following surgery for abdominal ulcers, Ivory lost both his personal and professional partner. 
Hence on March 4, when the 89-year-old writer-director finally snagged an  Academy Award - for Best Adapted Screenplay for Call Me By Your Name - a palpable emotional note was struck. The oldest-ever Oscar winner - after being nominated thrice over for the Best Director trophy for A Room with A View, Howards End and The Remains of the Day - thanked Merchant, as well as the late novelist-screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, for his moment of Oscar glory.
Bollywood mainstream cinema never recognised the duo though. A pity that. Their initial resolve was to make films in the English language on Indian themes for the domestic as well as the international audience. The duo had first met in New York after an evening screening of Ivory's documentary The Sword And The Flute on South Asian artefacts. 
Merchant, born to a middle class family in Mumbai, was a cinephile of world cinema. Simultaneously, he was entranced by Bollywood movies and was a fanatical fan of actress Nimmi. 
Ivory, born to a blue-collar Californian family, was persuaded to debut as a director with The Householder (1963), which looked at the tradition of arranged marriages; the newly-wedded couple was memorably enacted by Shashi Kapoor and Leela Naidu. Decades later, Asha Parekh, the top heroine of the '60s, regretted her decision to reject the heroine's role, since she was far too tied up with the song-and-dance entertainers of the era.
Again, it was thanks to the persuasive skills of Merchant that without taking so much as a credit, Satyajit Ray re-edited the final cut of The Householder. Ray went on to officially compose the music score for the duo's Shakespeare Wallah (1965), an elegiac tribute to a wandering troupe performing the bard's plays across India. 
Working out of a tastefully-appointed office in Colaba, Ivory-Merchant soldiered on to impact the pan-Indian market, albeit in vain. Their films - including The Guru (1969), Bombay Talkie (1970), Autobiography of a Princess (1975), and Heat and Dust - were considered too "pseudo-eastern" and were screened to limited audiences. Quite relentlessly, their endeavours to carry India abroad attracted hostile reviews. As The Guardian put it, their India-based oeuvre smacked of "ersatz classiness. (a) touristic approach to fine and fancy manners, and their seeming indifference to the hidden cruelties of class division." 
Never the sort to get stymied, Merchant's forte was in raising finance, striking a rapport with gifted actors, and assuring that every project reached fruition. Starting from the late 1970s, they received global attention and financial success with adaptations of Henry James' The Europeans (1979), The Bostonians (1982) and The Golden Bowl (2000), EM Forster's A Room With A View (1985), Maurice (1989) and Howards End (1992). Their take on Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains Of The Day (1993), with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, has achieved a cult status.
Over time, Ivory seemed to have forsaken India as his muse. Merchant, however, persisted in directing a clutch of India-related films, the most memorable one being In Custody (1993), showcasing Shashi Kapoor as an ageing Urdu poet, besides authoring two books on Indian cuisine.
From all appearances, there was no fallout between Ismail Merchant and James Ivory. Their base was Manhattan, New York. It was when Merchant passed away and was buried next to his ancestors at a cemetery in Mumbai, that Ivory returned, after an extensive hiatus, to visit his friend's grave. 
And then, he expressed his last goodbye, with love, for the world to remember from the stage of the Oscars.  
wknd@khaleejtimes.com