`Slumdog Millionaire' kid stars face uphill battle

Now that Slumdog Millionaire won 8 oscars and grossed $100 million, will Danny Boyle give his child stars more than a few thousand bucks so that their parents don't have to sell scrap metal for a living?

By ERIKA KINETZ

MUMBAI, India (AP) — They are not your typical movie stars.

Ten-year-old Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail lives in a lean-to made of tarpaulins and blankets. Nine-year-old Rubina Ali's home is a tiny bubble-gum pink shack. A murky open sewer runs down her narrow lane.

Plucked from one of Mumbai's teeming slums to star in the Oscar-nominated hit "Slumdog Millionaire," they are India's real slumdog millionaires.

Like the film's hero, an impoverished tea seller who wins money and love on India's version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," they now have a chance to escape the grinding poverty they were born into. But as their still-unfolding story shows, things never go as smoothly in real life.

The filmmakers are helping the children, but fast discovering that good intentions and deep pockets don't guarantee success. Meanwhile, sudden fame and relative fortune are sowing resentment within the families and with neighbors, who wonder why their big-eyed boys weren't cast instead.

The Fox Searchlight release has grossed more than $100 million, but the children's lives seem nearly as fragile as before.

"He's supposed to be the hero in the movie, but look how he's living," said Azharuddin's mother, Shameem Ismail, sitting on a rotting board outside their lean-to. "It's a zero."

About 65 million Indians, roughly a quarter of the urban population, live in slums, according to government surveys.

"Most of them are doomed to remain as they are," said Amitabh Kundu, dean of Jawaharlal Nehru University's School of Social Sciences in New Delhi.

It's too early to tell whether Rubina and Azharuddin — Azhar to his friends — will buck the trend.

The filmmakers debated whether to use slum kids at all.

"Part of your brain thinks, would it distort their lives too much?" said Danny Boyle, the British director, by phone from London. "Then someone said, 'These people have so much prejudice against them in their lives. Why should we be prejudiced against them as well?'"

Boyle and producer Christian Colson figured education was the best way to help Rubina and Azhar. They got them places in Aseema, a nonprofit, English-language school for underprivileged kids in Mumbai.

Some arrive at Aseema with matted hair, never having seen a mirror before. Many need counseling. On one blackboard, the lesson of the day read: "I must close my mouth when I eat."

School chairwoman Dilbur Parakh said half make it through high school, and she tries to find vocational training for the rest.

The filmmakers also paid the children for 30 days of acting work, gave the families a small monthly stipend and set up trust funds that Rubina and Azhar can tap once they graduate.

Colson describes the amount in the trust as substantial, but won't tell anyone how much — not even the parents — for fear of making the kids vulnerable to exploitation.

The filmmakers have also faced criticism that they didn't fairly compensate the children, but have declined to reveal how much they paid, again citing fear of exploitation.

"It's becoming a full-time job dealing with the daily hassle," Boyle said. Still, he added, "I'm glad we did it, even with all the headache."

He hopes to give Rubina and Azhar an education rather than a jackpot — what he called a "slow nurturing" instead of "a sudden dash for glory."

"Moviemaking is distorting," Boyle said. "The last thing you want to do is turn them into a star."

But directing movies is easier than directing lives. Stardom is already distorting Rubina's world.

The latest additions to her family's meager belongings — some stainless-steel pots and old blankets — are two small photo albums.

Inside are photographs of Rubina wearing a glittering "salwar kameez" outfit and sitting in a helicopter, ready to fly off to a strange new world of red carpets and Bollywood heroes.

"My friends when they see me on TV say, 'Look, you're going to be a big actress when you grow up. You're going to forget us,'" Rubina said. "I say, 'You are my best friends. How can I forget you?'"

She dashed outside and scurried along the sewer. "See this?" she said, pointing at a tract of weeds. She seemed proud to pronounce a new English word to a foreign visitor: "jungle."

But on the narrow, dirty lanes Rubina knows best, most kids speak Hindi and Urdu and forgo school to work.

"If I wear something nice then people say how I'm trying to show off, and I normally don't talk to them in English," she said.

Azhar's mom, wrapped in the sparkly pink sari she wore to the movie opening, wonders where all the money the filmmakers promised is.

"I don't know if I should go ask them if money is coming in," she said.

Her husband usually brings in 1,500 to 3,000 rupees ($30 to $60) a month selling scrap wood, but now is hospitalized with tuberculosis, Ismail said.

Azhar sat at her elbow, distracted. His friends had been staring at him as he talked with one journalist after another.

"My friends have seen me get new clothes and go in cars and get books," he said. "Even they want that sort of life."

He celebrated his birthday recently by buying a cake and balloons for his neighbors.

Now he wanted to buy his friends chocolate, but his mother controlled the purse strings.

Azhar began to cry. Tears ran down his small face.

"It's my money and you are using it!" he shouted.

"We have 200 rupees," his mother said. "I'll give you some later."

He kept crying, twisting his body in small unhappy thrusts. "You're not giving me money," he yelled. "You're spending it on other things."

His mother grabbed a piece of brick and raised it over her head.

"Is it your money?" he shouted, daring her: "Hit me. You hit me!"

Then he fled.

Suddenly, school, Bollywood and the upcoming Oscars all seemed terribly irrelevant. There was only the plain dirt Azhar and his mother live on, and the immediate, unruly desire for cash.

Ismail tossed the brick to the ground, rolling her one good eye in exasperation. She can't see out the other one and says she needs 6,000 rupees ($120) for an operation.

"He's a star," she sighed.

Note: According to the UK newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, Azharuddin Ismail (who played Salim as a child) was paid £1,700 and Rubina Ali (who played Latika as a child) £500 for a month’s work on the film. The child actors continue to live in makeshift shacks in the slums of Bandra, a suburb of Mumbai, according to the Telegraph and ABC News. The Telegraph also reports that Ismail's home has been demolished by the local authorities and he now sleeps under a sheet of plastic tarpaulin with his father Mohammed Ismail, who suffers from tuberculosis. A Fox Searchlight spokesman has responded that for their one-month work on the film, the child actors were paid three times the amount of an average annual salary for an adult living in their neighborhood.

Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle states that, "Slumdog Millionaire has a problem in its storytelling. The movie unfolds in a start-and-stop way that kills suspense, leans heavily on flashbacks and robs the movie of most of its velocity. The filmmakers' motives are sincere. The story is interesting enough. Yet the whole construction is tied to a gimmicky narrative strategy that keeps Slumdog Millionaire from really hitting its stride until the last 30 minutes. By then, it's just a little too late."

Eric Hynes of IndieWIRE panned the film and wrote it is "bombastic" and "a noisy, sub-Dickens update on the romantic tramp's tale" and faulted the film's glossy and sentimental portrayal of societal poverty, and described it as "a goofy picaresque to rival Forrest Gump" in its morality and romanticism.

Armond White of the New York Press called the film "decadently over-hyped" and "Gitmo for guilty liberals", also stating that "over-stimulation crushes feeling [and] only evokes sentimentality" and that "Boyle trades exploitation for schmaltz".

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As much as I am not a fan of Indian culture, I also am not a fan of exploitation, no matter who is the victim. This film should have stayed in the can, or at least those who worked in it should have been compensated fairly. That's what I would expect.