The three-episode, biopic, was fascinating to me, both for the nostalgia and for some new learnings
Illustration/Uday Mohite
I watched Salim-Javed’s Angry Young Men last evening - a three-part documentary drama series about the magical screenwriting duo, who from 1971 to 1987, yielded 24 jubilee hits—very early on in their careers, incensed that they’d not been included on the film posters, the two men hired a stencil guy to walk through the streets of Bombay stamping on their names, boldly—written by Salim-Javed. The three-episode, biopic, was fascinating to me, both for the nostalgia and for some new learnings.
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Here are some random thoughts:
>> Screenwriters are the angriest men and women—also the most unappreciated—as Salim Khan said. “No script no film”— still film writers go unnoticed, lowest in the pecking order, usually underpaid. The fact that these two men, had the chutzpah, the gumption to pull off this stencil stunt, and demand the same price as the stars was unprecedented. That it hasn’t been replicated ever since, were those different, easier times, or were Salim-Javed just arrogant Napoleans, conquering that 70 mm of real estate lodged in the viewers mind.
>> Their formulaeic “dishoom-dishoom” revenge sagas kept me inside the Imperial-Alankar-Apsara-Naaz- Minerva movie houses through my teens—an array of Deewar-Zanjeer-Sholay-Don-Kaala Pathar-Shakti, wolfing down dodgy chicken rolls, and oily chicken samosas… standing outside cinema halls negotiating with black market touts to watch Amitabh Bachchan, aka Vijay taking on eight to ten baddies singlehanded, either as a cop, a coolie or a Don.
>> I was 13, when Sholay opened in 1975, a school mate’s dad was manager at the Minerva Theatre—he snuck us in first day first show, front row, Jai-Veeru-Basanti-Gabbar-Thakur, and that mad dialogue, something we’d never heard before. Five years later, we turned 18, the blockbuster was still running to packed houses, we snuck in again—this time, we were unable to hear the actors, the audience loudly mouthing in unison, every single one of Salim Javed’s dialogues.
>> Salim Khan was quite candid talking about originality, “seeking inspiration from other sources is fine so long as you use it in a totally unique way”—in truth, Sholay had been loosely adapted from The Magnificent Seven and Seven Samurai before that, but the two men, spun the story and the multi cast characters gave the movie a whole new dimension.
>> My friend Bugs Bhargava Krishna and I have written a film together, and for me, one plus one equals three in the way that two minds make a film far richer than one.
A collaboration can go many ways, as both writers can dive in, bat ideas around, devoid of ego.
I missed deeply, the two men, being interviewed together, to understand how their collective creative energy worked, unfortunately, for their own reasons, the two have been interviewed separately—I missed a darker, edgier recounting of the darker days, the blacker moments. I realised we’re good with nostalgia, fabulous with cinematic confrontation, not so good with candid confession. I’d love to have known what did happen that morning, when Javed walked out on Salim, and why.
>> What we do know is their careers fell apart as single screenwriters, post the split. Screenwriting is the loneliest job in the world, but it’s also the most layered. If you’ve got used to a 16-year jugalbandi, you’ve been dispossessed of the tools to work solo— that blank white page seems emptier. One man coming up with the story, characters, scenes, dialogue, as Javed said, “is very hard”.
>> They wrote when there was no Final Draft. That they still gave their directors bound scripts was amazing.
>> How did Salim-Javed get so famous, in a cinema star crazy country? Were they an exception, an aberration, in a world where writers and by and large stay in the background, that they could maintain their prima donna-diva status, with producers lining up to hire them. That they could and were held responsible for the success and failure of a film.
As Gabbar Singh asked his henchman, Kaalia, “Kitne aadmi thhe?”
And Kaalia would famously answer, “Do, sarkar.”
There were indeed two men, Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar.
Rahul daCunha is an adman, theatre director/playwright, photographer and traveller. Reach him at rahul.dacunha@mid-day.com
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