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character and conversation has been chosen and constructed to convey specific points about the structure and working style of the film industry. This detailed ethnographic sketch provides the context to understand chapters five through seven. Chapters five and six analyze in-depth key issues raised by the ethnographic material, demonstrating how disdain operates to forge difference. For example, chapter five details the decentralized and fragmented nature of filmmaking, along with the longstanding anxiety about the proliferation of producers in India, which leads Hindi filmmakers to indulge in a particular sort of boundary-work around the figure of the illegitimate producer, most commonly referred to as the “proposal-maker. ” Chapter five also focuses on the structure, organization, and social relations of the Hindi film industry, revealing the central roles played by distributors, social networks, kinship, and stars in the political economy and production practices of the industry.
    Chapter six discusses the work culture of the Hindi film industry, which for decades has been the object of much disparagement, derisivehumor, and disdain. It details the informality, orality, flexibility, and thrift that are dominant characteristics of the industry’s work culture. Most of the attributes of the Hindi film industry’s improvisational and resourceful working style are not valued within filmmakers’ discourses and representations, however. Instead, the dominant tone is one of criticism, reproach, and disdain. In addition to describing these sentiments, the chapter discusses filmmakers’ efforts to assert their difference from a generic norm—ranging from discourses about behavior to a fetishization of technology.
    Chapter seven examines the myriad ways that Hindi filmmakers try to manage the uncertainty endemic to the filmmaking process. Rituals such as mahurats , and a reliance on stars and songs, are specific practices that Hindi filmmakers undertake to reduce the risk of commercial failure.
    Despite their best efforts, commercial success evades filmmakers most of the time, and this chapter discusses how filmmakers make sense of box-office failure by developing “production fictions, ” explanations that attempt to impose meaning and structure upon the unpredictability of box-office outcomes. A dominant production fiction has been that the industry’s commercial fortunes are intimately connected to its structure and work culture, with the implication that if those changed, the industry’s overall rates of success would improve; therefore, the chapter describes the structural changes referred to as “ corporatization , ” which ensued in 2003, and the way they interact with the industry’s production fictions.

Audience-Making
    Chapter eight discusses how Hindi filmmakers imagine and classify their audiences: representations derived from culturalist interpretations of box-office outcome. The binary opposition of the “masses/classes ” has been the primary mode for filmmakers to make sense of the vastly diverse audiences for Hindi cinema. The underlying assumption behind this binary is that the masses and classes are fundamentally different, and their tastes and world-views are completely incommensurable. Despite this incommensurability, Hindi filmmakers, for much of the industry’s history, strove to make films that would appeal across these divides. Such films are referred to as “universal hits ” and this chapter relates the difficulties, articulated by filmmakers, of achieving that form of success.
    Chapter nine analyzes the changing status of the universal hit within the Hindi film industry, with the growing significance of overseas markets and the advent of the multiplex movie theater. It describes the transformation in attitudes about the necessity of universal hits and locates them in the changing structures of production, distribution, and exhibition characterizing Hindi filmmaking since 2000. The