Everyone knows bollywood movies are very different from hollywood movies. They are pigeoned holed by the westerners as muscials with over dramatic story telling and acting.
Actually there is another major difference. Bollywood and other Indian movies have an interval. You may think that this is not such a big deal but it is. Every movie script has a beat structure. Beats are the critical points at which the story takes a turn. Most hollywood movies follow a particular beat structure. If you go to UCLA to study script writing they make you an expert at this type of hollywood beat structure. They follow a three act structure where in the first act establishes the main characters and the goal of the protoganist and the antagonist who makes it difficult for the protaganist to achieve the goal. The second act has the protaognist failing miserably to achieve the goal and looks down and out. The third act will have climax where the protaganist will beat the odds and the protagoanist to achieve the goal in a dramatic fashion. A typical hollywood script is 100 to 120 pages long. Each page yields one minute of movie so a typical hollywood film is 100 to 120 min in duration.
Now let’s look at bollywood. They have an interval at the middle of the movie. So they follow a totally different beat structrure. It is almost like two smaller movies with two climaxes one before the interval and one before the end of the movie. You add 5 or 6 songs to that and you get 3 hour long movies. So bollywood has developed its own beat structure to tell stories which is very differnt from hollywood and why it is very diffcult for the westerners to identify with them. It is not just the song and dance numbers.