There are two original body builders among the superstars of Bollywood — Sanjay Dutt, who after a stint in jail in the early 90s suddenly became a ripple of bulky fine-cut muscles, and Salman Khan, who followed suit and then made it a point to take off his shirt in every movie.
In recent times, there was suddenly a revival of the six pack with Shah Rukh Khan using it as a marketing tool for his movie Om Shanti Om. Aamir Khan soon followed with one of his own for Ghajini. And even then when the six pack had suddenly become de rigueur, Salman couldn’t hide his disdain for the trend.
In one interview he even said all the newcomers to this club had to slog for months to get into that kind of shape but because he had been pumping iron for so long, it came easy to him. He could, it was inferred, pull them out at will.
A recent video that went viral showed that maybe he was a wee bit overconfident. The clip is actually to do with his two-year-old movie Ek Tha Tiger that has a scene in which he is flaunting the abdominal six-pack. The video uploaded recently shows the same scene but without the six-pack and a plain ordinary unsculpted stomach.
If true, it became obvious that computer graphics had been employed to insert the six-pack into him. This is something you would expect from many film actors but not Salman. In fact, this scene was apparently edited out initially but Salman got it back in the movie because he thought his fans expected him showing off his body.
The video, it is said, got leaked from the company that did the computer graphics. It is good publicity for them but for Salman this probably means a lot of workout in the gym for his next movie. Fake six packs in every movie are definitely not going to go down well with his fans.
Story rights
Every once in a while a movie is made in one of the south Indian states that becomes such a huge hit that it sets a flurry of remakes in other languages. Last year, a Malayalam movie called Drishyam became the biggest ever hit that language had ever produced.
A story about a clash of wits between a man who is trying to protect his family and the police, its success soon found takers elsewhere. Remakes in Telugu and Kannada became big blockbusters. It was inevitable that sooner or later Bollywood would also want a piece of the action. And so comes news that Viacom 18 Motion Pictures, one of the big corporate banners, had bought the rights and they were in negotiation with Akshay Kumar and Ajay Devgn to play the main lead.
But like the movie’s plot itself, there is a twist in the tale. Ekta Kapoor’s Balaji Productions had in October announced that they had bought the rights to a Japanese novel, The Devotion of Suspect X, to make a movie based on it.
Drishyam released two months after that and Balaji says that there are several similarities between Drishyam and the novel. After they saw the success of the remakes, they threatened to sue anyone making a Hindi remake. But Viacom went ahead anyway and now it looks like there will be a legal battle in the offing.
Family disasters
Why do production houses repeatedly fall into the trap of heroine oriented movies which don’t do well at the box office? The answer is simple—the pull of family. Rani Mukherji has been riding on husband Aditya Chopra’s production house for years.
The latest is Mardaani, which has done alright but if you compare it to movies with male heroes, it is not such a hot property. And there have been a long list of flop movies with Rani in the lead before for Yashraj Productions. The other man to be bitten by the same bug is Anil Kapoor, but in his case it is a daughter who is responsible.
In 2010, he produced Aisha, an adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic novel Emma. Naturally, his daughter Sonam Kapoor played the lead role in the movie whose plot revolved completely around her character. It was not a bad movie but fared disastrously at the box office, disappearing without a trace. Anil’s other daughter Rhea was also a co-producer then.
And now they also produced Khoobsurat which released recently and has fared poorly with the audience. A remake of the yesteryear hit, it would have taken sensational acting for Sonam to better what Rekha had done in the original.
Unfortunately, she came nowhere close to the kind of caliber that can take a movie on her shoulders all alone. But it is not just Sonam’s fault. Heroine-oriented movies are gambles. The Hindi movie audience just does not have a taste for them. Barring the odd hit like Dirty Picture, they almost inevitably fail.
Kangana pulled a hit in Queen but then her next movie Revolver Rani was a complete flop. Anil Kapoor, meanwhile, is not taking the flop very well. In a recent event, when he was asked by the media about Khoobsurat’s performance he reportedly refused to engage and then walked out in irritation.
Brain drain
True that when it comes to a movie’s publicity, stars pull all kinds of stops. So they have to search for anything interesting that happened during the movie’s production that would get space in newspapers. In Hrithik Roshan’s case it turns out to be an ailment. Bang Bang has just been released and Hrithik is giving interviews to the media. In one of them he spoke of the time that he had brain surgery last year. It was in the middle of the movie’s shooting schedule and he suddenly noticed problems with co-ordination. Tests revealed copious amounts of blood in his brain. He spoke about shortlisting doctors and then finally going with one who told Hrithik to shut up and let him do his job. He also spoke of the surgery itself. Brain surgeries often require the patient to be conscious and he could see the blood being drained off. It sounds quite a difficult experience but, having gone through it, it is now a fertile subject for anecdotes to him.
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