10 Unbelievable Facts About Sholay Movie One Of The Greatest Indian Movie Of Alltime
Sholay is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential Indian films of all time. It changed the landscape of Indian cinema. The film came, conquered, and changed Indian cinema forever. If you haven’t seen it Sholay, what are you doing man? Watch Sholay ASAP. And to the people who watched Sholay and loved it, here are the things you didn’t know about Sholay.
1. The screenwriter pair Salim–Javed, narrated the idea for Sholay as a four-line snippet to G. P. Sippy and his son Ramesh Sippy. Ramesh Sippy liked the concept of Sholay and hired them to develop it.
2. The film’s script and dialogues are in Hindustani. Salim-Javed wrote the dialogues in Urdu script, which was then transcribed by an assistant into Devanagari script so that Hindi readers could read the Urdu dialogues.
3. The character Gabbar Singh was modeled on a real-life dacoit of the same name who had menaced the villages around Gwalior in the 1950s. Any policeman captured by the real Gabbar Singh had his ears and nose cut off, and was released as a warning to other policemen.
4. Sippy wanted Shatrughan Sinha to play the part of Jai. Amitabh Bachchan, who was not very popular yet, lobbied hard to get the part for himself. He was cast after Salim-Javed recommended him for Sholay in 1973; Bachchan’s performance in their first collaboration, Zanjeer, convinced Salim-Javed he was the right actor for the part. Amitabh also requested Dharmendra to put in a word for him to get the role of Jai. Finally, Amitabh got the role and Sholay made Amitabh the Superstar.
5. Sholay was the first Indian film to have a stereophonic soundtrack and to use the 70 mm widescreen format
6. The film took two and a half years to make and went over budget. One reason for its high cost was that Sippy re-filmed scenes many times to get his desired effect.
7. “Yeh Dosti”, a 5-minute song sequence, took 21 days to shoot, two short scenes in which Radha lights lamps took 20 days to film because of lighting problems, and the shooting of the scene in which Gabbar kills the imam’s son lasted 19 days. The train robbery sequence, shot on the Bombay–Poona railway route near Panvel, took more than 7 weeks to complete.
8. The industry people after watching Sholay made comments on Sholay saying it would become a flop, the producers got scared and went into damage control mode. But writers Salim-Javed were damn confident, that they put out an ad in a paper saying Sholay will make Rs. 1 crore in every territory, everyone thought of Salim-Javed as a fool for making this statement. When the film was released, it went on to make 2-3 crore in every territory.
9. Sholay was ranked first in the British Film Institute’s 2002 poll of “Top 10 Indian Films” of all time.
10. Sholay was the highest-grossing Indian film ever at the time, and was the highest-grossing film in India up until Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (1994). It ran for more than five years at Mumbai’s Minerva theatre.
