While approaching the interiors of The Permit Room, much like our food and drinks, we wanted the setting to stay true to its roots.
That’s why you’ll find movie posters with a South Indian twist to them sprinkled all around, and paintings and catchphrases that celebrate the quirkiness of our culture. Or even the walls that pay homage to street art, with furniture that’s as much an indicator of a city in the south as our food flavouring.
Full action, full meals.
If you look around, everything tells a South Indian story.
Like the movie posters, with a truly TPR twist to them.
But first, a little history.
The art of film poster making is an old one. All the way back before digital printing and Instagram’s minimal posters were a thing, hand painted posters were the sole visual representation of what you could expect from the film, and therefore an integral publicity medium.
These grand hoardings also became the agreed upon, and much more dramatic alternatives to pamphlets.
Being a Bollywood poster artist was one of the most lucrative careers for an artist at the time, and the poster artists in turn became an integral part of the film’s promotions.
The first painted film poster dates all the way back to the 1920s, which really was the golden era for these posters and their painters, appreciated not just for the art but also as the primary source of advertising for the film.
And of course, as the film industry grew, so did the size of the posters.
So important were these posters in generating hype about the film, that artists were called in and shown a bit of the film so that they could then depict their own interpretation of a scene or moment on their larger-than-life canvasses.
If this isn’t a collector’s item, we don’t know what is.
This then graduated to them receiving photographs of the scenes or the actors which they would then convert into posters, perhaps with a little artistic license of their own.
As any art form goes, film poster making, due to sheer scale alone, was a laborious process and took about four artists close to two days to work on one such 200 feet poster, on an average. Sometimes, even longer.
The advent of digital printing effectively reduced that time to a negligible amount, and in doing so, completely replaced this art form overnight, resulting in a lot of artists suddenly finding themselves out of work.
Vinyl printing pretty much signified the end of Bollywood Poster painting. The artists have since graduated to painting posters of deities or making replicas for collectors.
We at The Permit Room are all about local culture and nostalgia, and if you take a moment to stop and notice, our own homage to these film posters are up on the walls along the stairs. (Take the steps for once!)
We’ve taken beloved classics and made them (if possible) made them even more classic with some choice South-Indian style edits.
“Luke, I am your Appa!”
Of course, our posters might not be that accurate when it comes to what the film is really about, but it’ll make the South Indian (doesn’t even matter if you aren’t) in you giggle. Promissss.