Searching for a Hollywood ending

BY ROBERT POLNER | NEWSDAY STAFF WRITER

March 18, 2006

Marzban Cooper, a street vendor, standing inside his news stand on Queens Blvd. who lost everything in Bollywood, holds posters of some of the movies he made in India. (Newsday Photo/ J. Conrad Williams Jr. / March 17, 2006)

From an out-of-the-way newsstand on Queens Boulevard where he toiled as a vendor this summer, Marzban Cooper would ritually make slash marks with his pen on scraps of paper. Each line, he said, represented another day that had passed until his planned date of return to India, after a six-year self-imposed exile.

Cooper, 64, was once a Bollywood film producer and director in Mumbai, but his career in India ended badly. He lost more than a million dollars on a musical melodrama that went bust.

Devastated and shamed, Cooper abandoned his film company, Marco Enterprises, and his wife and their two children, and left India to avoid creditors, do penitence and plot a comeback.

When he arrived in the United States, he went first to Boston and found a job at a 7-Eleven store. "I thought to myself, I'll go to Hollywood and find a way to make kind of an Indian version of 'Fiddler on the Roof,'" he said.

It didn't pan out, and Cooper moved to New York City for a better job. He found one -- waiting tables at an Indian restaurant on Union Turnpike owned by a Sikh man.

After the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, though, the turban-wearing restaurant owner feared becoming the target of harassment or attack, and left the country. The restaurant was closed, and Cooper was out of his $8-an-hour, seven-days-a-week job.

He found a one-bedroom apartment in Elmhurst just off Queens Boulevard, a place he shared to help save money. He soon started working at the newsstand, and turned it into something of a Bollywood lending library.

He abandoned his dream of making another movie, however.

His family, with whom he maintained steady contact by cell phone over the years, wanted him back, and his daughter was soon to be married in Mumbai.

Cooper boarded a jet at Kennedy Airport and returned home Oct. 16, just in time for the younger of his two offspring to be wed.