A Malegaon film costs about 100,000 rupees. The producers are usually small-time businessmen who often go broke or stop the funding when they feel a director is spending too much too soon. The films are made with camcorders. To achieve some ambitious shots, a cameraman is sometimes placed at one end of an ox cart and onlookers are asked to push the other end down so that the camera is slowly hoisted in the air. As the Malegaon moviemakers clearly cannot afford dollies, bicycles are used for tracking shots.

I discovered the film industry of Malegaon in 2003 when I was a reporter with the magazine Outlook. By then, Malegaon’s artists had already spoofed some of the greatest Hindi film classics, but not many people outside the city knew of them. At the time of my visit, they were shooting a film called “Malegaon ki Lagaan,” a spoof of the blockbuster Hindi film “Lagaan,” which was nominated in 2002 for an Academy Award as best foreign language film.

Farogh Jafri, the director of “Malegaon ki Lagaan,” was wearing a torn T-shirt. He ran a small tile-polishing business, but evidently he did not earn enough from it. He was a distraught man when I met him. He had secured 30,000 rupees as funding for the film from an employee of the local electricity board on the condition that the man’s son would be cast in the film and that shooting would be completed in 15 days. But for a number of reasons, the shoot had stretched to over a year.

The cinematographer, who also owned one of the very few camcorders in Malegaon at the time, was in fact a wedding videographer who would vanish from the set or not turn up when he found a client. Also, sometimes the main actors would disappear. “But everybody would be here on the day the girls come,” the producer said with bitterness.

Because Malegaon is a conservative place, actresses are usually outsourced from the bottom rungs of Mumbai’s desperate starlets. A crew member on “Malegaon ki Lagaan” told me that these girls were “treated respectfully,” even offered expensive mineral water to drink, and “sent back with honor.”

The story in Outlook about Malegaon’s film industry got its artists some attention from the news media and documentary filmmakers. Even though none of them has managed to escape from Malegaon yet, they have endeared themselves to Mumbai’s top film directors, some of whom even met the Superman of Malegaon before he died.

Mr. Jafri is now preparing to direct “James Bond 007.5 of Malegaon.” He has cast himself as Agent 007.5. His director’s fee will be about 20,000 rupees, one-fifth of the total budget of the film. It will not make him rich, but life could have been worse. About five years ago, Malegaon’s film industry received a shock when the municipality shut down all 14 small theaters because they were caught screening pornography. But the film fraternity of Malegaon successfully lobbied the administration to reopen them.