A picture-perfect replica of the Hollywood sign shines in the clear, cool sunlight, a helicopter beside it and, down below, a city of fake fronts with signs advertising “Greg’s Pistol Ship,” “Bala’s Inn Bed and Breakfast,” and “Yogi Bear Bounty Hunters.” Not far away, in a square that’s closed to the public, a mob of children dressed in school uniforms is dancing and lip-synching furiously behind a pair of pouting lovers as cameras roll.

I’m surrounded by 11 Indian men in matching white baseball caps, five young women in saris, and a screeching child. We’re seated in a minivan with whirring fans above every row, offering the “air-conditioning” that is part of the $25 V.I.P. “Ramoji Star Experience” tour. In the past few minutes we’ve seen a “Sun Fountain” that would fit in at Versailles, a Japanese “Sayonara Garden,” and an intricate hedge maze; at this moment we’re passing an “Arizona Cactus Garden” across from a town that could sit in the shadow of the Himalayas. Now, in the bright late-monsoon-season morning, I watch young women in shalwar kameezes—and black cowboy hats—sauntering toward the “Wild Western Days Shooting Gallery.” An Islamic woman clad from head to toe in a burka is approaching the Gunsmoke restaurant.

Across one huge wall, carved out of the hills and emptiness 16 miles from Hyderabad, in central South India, is painted a certification from Guinness World Records: Ramoji Film City, where we now stand, is “the largest film studio complex” on the planet, covering 1,666 acres and containing 47 soundstages. Hollywood’s Universal Studios could fit into this space four times over, with room to spare.

“Now 1.5 million visitors a year,” says Ramoji Rao, the chairman of this universe, in his palatial ninth-floor office at corporate headquarters, not far from the “Charisma Garden.” “Why not 10 million?”

In the 16 years since its opening, R.F.C., as it’s locally known, has become one of the largest tourist attractions in India after the Taj Mahal (a replica of which also sits, conveniently, on its premises); at this rate, it could quite soon eclipse Shah Jahan’s monument to love.

Warm-eyed, and as unprepossessing in his open white shirt as a retired civil servant, the 75-year-old chairman has nothing on his huge desk—no computer, no loose papers, nothing—save for a small diary in which he has handwritten notes in five rainbow colors.

“I’ve always been interested in media,” he says with an air of quiet amusement, motioning to the 18 TVs, each tuned to a different channel, at the far wall of his near-empty office. “Most of those are mine.” Twelve satellite channels blast Rao’s ETV programming, in eight languages, from a building down the road. Next to the head offices are a film-and-TV school and a school of journalism. (Rao also owns the largest newspaper in the state of Andhra Pradesh.) As the years went on, it seems, Rao simply decided to move from paper to screen, finally using the money he’s made—through everything from pickles to hotels—to erect what he now calls “the biggest component of the world’s dream factory.”

India has long been in love with the epic; its beloved collection of mythic stories, the Mahabharata, is 15 times longer than the Bible. For years Bollywood—the film industry centered in Bombay, now Mumbai—has been mass-producing many more films every year than Hollywood (more than 800, as against Hollywood’s roughly 400). But many of India’s other regions also have thriving film industries, and all of them seem to converge on R.F.C., the spiritual center of “Tollywood” (named after the local language of Telugu), and home this year to 275 planned productions. A quarter of a century ago, Rao, a film producer himself, whose Ushakiron Movies has made more than 80 pictures over the past 15 years, hit on the idea of an “all under one roof” complex in which a project could move from script to canned film without leaving the premises. By 1998 even Roger Corman was talking of shooting a feature film, Nightfall—about a planet where there’s no night—in a place where, as Rao says, “you have well-trained manpower ready to create any kind of virtual world that a human mind can imagine.”