Sports, Celebrity, and the Sports Biopici
The biopic is integral to the sportsculture industry, and to celebrity cultures. It documents lives, and draws attention to the processes through which lives become spectacles and aspirational models for a country. This essay merges two domains of analysis: the sports celebrity and the biopic. It examines M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story (MSD 2016), Sachin: A Billion Dreams (S 2016) and the older Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (BMB 2013) Pramod K Nayar describes the fashioning of the celebrity through the cinematic medium, unpacks the factors that make a sports celebrity worthy of a biopic and thereby expanding his/her marketability. Sports celebrities and cultures may once have been local, but today the very articulation of national pride demands the cooperation of global media forces and personalities. The transnationalization of local/regional/national celebrities enhances their local values, and implies a two-way process between the national and the global.