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The documentary series Angry Young Men which dropped on the Amazon Prime Video today is full of anecdotes about the founding years in the careers of Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar as the most celebrated screenplay writer duo in the history of Bollywood. The duo came into the limelight after their film Zanjeer, starring Amitabh Bachchan, became a hit. While the film changed the filmmaking syntax in the Hindi film industry, it has now come to be known as a film in which most actors declined to be a part.
It was revealed in the web show’s first episode that iconic Hindi film actors of the 1970s, including Dev Anand, rejected Zanjeer because the script had no songs in it. Talking about how different the script of Zanjeer was then the films that were being made at the time, Salim said in the documentary, “A new hero stormed into the (Hindi) film industry after Zanjeer. This is a new hero. A hero who doesn’t sing songs doesn’t romance, doesn’t break into comedy, bakwaas (nonsense) nahi karta hai. The other characters were doing all that. But not the hero.”
Adding to it, Javed Akhtar says, “You have to be honest to the character, without pushing the character according to the need of your plot. Then integrity grows into your character, and you can give it authenticity and a third dimension. Had we got Amitabh Bachchan to sing 2-3 songs in Zanjeer then today you wouldn’t remember the ‘Angry Young Man’.”
Versatile actor Sachin Pilgaonkar revealed how and why Dev Anand refused to be a part of the film. He said, “You’d remember how Vijay doesn’t have even one song. This is the reason why Dev (Anand) sahab refused to act in it. He refused after hearing the script because he thought, ‘the audience will not accept Dev without songs!’”
Javed Akhtar revealed that the producer of the film, who was predominantly a filmmaker, was venturing into film production with Zanjeer. Even when most actors and actresses rejected the film, he remained true to the script and didn’t want to change it.
“Every hero rejected the film. Director Prakash Mehra was producing the film, it was his debut production, but he didn’t change the script even though we were not big-shot writers then. We became famous only after Zanjeer. He remained loyal to the script. It is easier said than done but one needs guts to do it,” said Javed.
While Zanjeer was Amitabh Bachchan’s breakthrough film, he did it because no other actor was doing it and he needed a film desperately as he was having a string of flop films. According to senior film journalist Bhawna Somaiya, Bachchan didn’t have too many choices at that time. All his films were flopping and most heroines didn’t want to work with him and “he was at his lowest ebb”. This is when Salim-Javed approached him for Zanjeer.
Jaya Bachchan, who was the female lead of the film, revealed that Salim-Javed forced her to act in Zanjeer even when she didn’t want to be a part of the film as it was “male-centric”. She revealed, “I didn’t want to do Zanjeer. I basically never wanted to be a part of a male-centric cinema. It was a male-centric film.”
Another reason for Jaya to be a part of Zanjeer is that she’d get to “spend some more time” with Amitabh Bachchan, her fiance. She said, “Salim sahab and Javed sahab, they were very straight-forward. They had tried a lot of other women actors, but of course, they all had refused. And they said, ‘you can’t say no, we need you’. Of course, another temptation was my co-star. So I thought at least we’d get to spend some time together.”
After the film was released in May 1973, Jaya and Amitabh tied the knot in June of the same year.
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