The Indian Cult Movie, Sholay (1)

This is first in a series of articles about Sholay, to be published here.

If you have watched Indian movies for long enough, you must have noticed the amount of belief Indian producers do have in fate. They roll out movies without any ground work, yet hope for gala box-office returns at the same time. They believe in targeting the jackpot blindfolded. Their ideas can be described at best as ill-conceived, scripts poorly written and their movie-making shoddy in nature.

What they normally seem to follow is, formula movie-making, where they have the liberty (rather compulsion) of adding as many emotional and dramatic twists in stories as they might wish to (stories that are stale as hell, anyway) and stuff in violent reprisals and half nude song items. There is no reason why such movies should be appreciated at the box-office. An industry that has not been successful in producing anything close to the Sholay cult since 1975, should seriously examine its reasons and try improving its craft.

Sholay Was No Accident

Contrary to what most Indian movie makers might seem to believe, Sholay was no one-time accident. Each scene, each action, each character, each song, the background music score, camera work and the flow and continuity of the whole movie spoke of dedicated efforts. It spoke of the time, energy and planning gone into making that epic. It also brought out some of the best performances seen in Indian movies ever, that of movie production, script writing, movie direction, music composition and the actors, a whole lot of them at their prime and in their best elements.

So, what made RGV (Ram Gopal Verma) think he could produce anything akin to Sholay? He is among the top Bollywood directors today, no doubt, but he also recently admitted how much speedily he makes those movies. How can he then think of producing a masterpiece like Sholay in four months (symbolic expression, am not considering the actual time taken for RGV’s AAG)? How can a movie-wallahs that loves announcing his next two movies beforehand, while still working on his ongoing project could think of reproducing Sholay? I never saw “Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag”, but had known its fate from the day it was announced.

I should stop now, and be back with more on this subject in the near future. Will try making a series of posts about Sholay in the next round.

PS – Btw, examine the interest taken by non-Indians in Sholay here.