73. Sholay – More interesting facts, but the concluding blog!!

Sholay was released on 15^th August 1975.  From 30^th May to 15^th August, the Film trade magazine had an ad depicting one character from Sholay each week!!  And the final ad depicted the entire cast of the movie!!

Sholay was the first movie to be released in 70mm in India.  During the premier, the 70mm print had still not reached the theatre as some bureaucrat sat on the print because has had not been given due importance!! The print was developed in London and was sent from there.  Sippys had to speak to the then Information & Broadcasting minister to get the prints out.  The initial premier was seen on 35mm print and the 70mm print was seen by very few people late at night.  Prakash Mehra was one of the viewers.  After watching the movie, he cursed himself as to why he had let go of this film!!

Initially reports came in that unprecedented crowd was witnessed all across Bombay for the movie and they had not seen such a rush since Mughal-e-Azam some two decades ago.  But next week, news was that Sholay will be a sad experience for distributors.  There were no long queues for Advance Bookings!!  Salim-Javed were criticized for the killing of Amitabh Bachchan in the movie.  By that time Zanjeer had released and Amitabh had become quite famous.  The critics felt that Amitabh was a big hero and did not need to be killed in the movie.  They also said it will do a maximum of Rs 40 lakhs in each major territory and nothing more.  Incidentally, in the same magazine Salim-Javed had taken out an ad saying Sholay will do Rs 1 crore in each major territory!! 

Dilip Kumar loved the film but thought since the initial train scene itself had so much hype, whether the rest of the movie will match that or not!!  Raj Kapoor said that even though the movie was good, but if there were some more romantic scenes, it would have become great!!  Rajender Kumar felt that the film will not do well as there was no “mother’ figure in the movie.  And moreover, he was not happy with the friendship of Jai and Veeru.  He thought how they can be friends when Jai goes to Mausi and says all wrong things about Veeru!!

This is what Filmfare wrote – The major trouble with the film is the unsuccessful transplantation it attempts – grafting a western on the Indian milieu.  The film remains imitation western – neither here neither there!!  And it ended by giving it just 2 stars for the movie😊😊

During the release of the movie Amitabh was shooting with Sashi Kapoor for Kabhie Kabhie in Kashmir.  Sashi had seen the movie and told Amitabh that it would be a hit. Amitabh told him “Nahin yaar, gayi, picture flop ho gayi!”

After 1-2 weeks when the situation still looked grim, Salim-Javed met Ramesh Sippy and discussed about keeping Amitabh alive in the movie.  At that time, films were released in different territory on different dates.  Only the Maharashtra territory had seen Sholay with the South India and North India releases about 1-2 months away.  Salim-Javed wanted to keep the movie as it is.  Ramesh Sippy too was in agreement with them and did not want to touch the film but said let’s discuss this after one week.  During that time, a theatre owner called Sippy and told him that the film would be a hit.  When Sippy asked him how he can tell this, the theatre owner said his snacks business was coming down during the movie show.  The viewers were so stunned by the movie that they were not coming out of the hall to purchase snacks during the interval!!  This convinced Sippy to ensure that the movie will not be reshot and will be shown as it is across the country.  He felt that people were overawed by what they were seeing on the screen!!  The sound in the movie was also like a miracle.  When Veeru tosses the coin after Jai is dead, it is told that people seeing the movie in 70mm theaters with stereophonic sound, started looking under their seats to see where it had fallen!!

The music company, Polydor, paid Rs 5 lakhs for the film soundtrack. This meant that they had to sell 1 lakh records to break even!! During that time, the most superhit category movie did business of 25,000 units!!  Post-release, the music soundtrack did not do that well.  Polydor was looking as a major loss!!  After 2-3 weeks of the movie release, it was dawned that the people in the audience were repeating the dialogue with the actors in the theater!!  That meant that repeat audience was coming to watch the movie. And that is when Polydor realized the true strength of the "soundtrack"!!  They began selling dialogues from the movie on gramophone records!!  They sold almost 5 lakhs units of them, thereby pushing the superhit category to never-before seen figures!!

There were 2 versions running in the country.  Due to emergency, theaters had to be shut by 12am.  But the length of the film was more than 3 hours long.  So, in north India, Sholay was shown without the Jailer and the Soorma Bhopali scenes, while the rest of the country saw the whole film!!  Since these 2 portions were not related to the story, it was felt that this can be cut.  But this was only for 2 months.  The film became so popular that these scenes were incorporated again and then shown in north India!!

During that time Parle-G was the largest biscuit brand in India.  At that time Glucose-D was a very minor player.  Sunil Alagh, then the Group Product Manager of Britannia was sitting with his wife at home when she mentioned that Gabbar promoting Glucose-D would make the brand recall much better.  When Sunil proposed the same to his company, initial reactions were very negative.  Usually stars used to shoot for ads and never before a “character” was used to pitch products!!  Many people from the board had to see the movie in theaters to gauge the popularity of Gabbar before finally agreeing for him to endorse their biscuits!!  The shooting of the ad was done near Mumbai and was canned within 2-3 hours.  This ad made Britannia overtake the sales of Parle-G once it was released.  You can enjoy the ad here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBIuYbrkUuw

There are still a lot of things to write on the movie, but as promised, I will end here😊.  Most of the incidents mentioned here were sourced from Anupama Chopra’s “Sholay – The making of a Classic”. 

I hope you would have enjoyed these readings as much as I enjoyed writing about them!! To top it all, I have ordered the 3D-BluRay version DVD of the movie and it is expected to reach me next week!! So sometime next week, I will be watching the 3D version on my 3D TV😊😊

On to a different topic from next time!!

Cheers!!

Today’s Daffy Definition

Window – A device for looking through walls!!