Sholay: The Making of a Classic
Sholay is a 1975 Indian action-adventure film, written by Salim-Javed, directed by Ramesh Sippy.
After writing a book about a movie (A Lot Can Happen in the Middle of Nowhere: The Untold Story of the Making of Fargo), I’ve begun diving into books about movies written by others. At the moment, I’m reading Sholay: The Making of a Classic, a 2001 book by Anupama Chopra about the most majestic, entertaining Bollywood movie of all time.
For the uninitiated, Sholay (Ramesh Sippy, 1975) stars Amitabh Bachchan, Amjad Khan, Sanjeev Kumar, and Dharmendra. It’s a sprawling, 2 hour, 42 minute extravaganza about a gang of thugs terrorizing a rural village. The village elder (Thakur) hires a pair of convicted felons to battle the bad guys, who are led by one of the most evil men in the history of cinema: Gabbar Singh.
When the movie opened, critics panned it, but audiences loved it. Many returned again and again to see it. According to Chopra, Sholay played for five straight years in theaters. While visiting Kolkata, India in 2015, I bought a dozen or so Bollywood LPs from a street vendor. When I showed my Sholay record to a young hotel worker, she excitedly began performing lines from the movie.
The promotional copy on the other side of the LP reads: “This is an extra-long play record, each side of which runs for approximately 28 minutes. The selections featured in it have been derived from the original soundtrack of the film, and reproduce the dialouges as well as the sound effects and the background music in the full splendour of stereophony. To best recreate the auditorium listening effect and to import longer life to the record, the sound reproduction level has been kept purposely lower than usual. However, if so desired, louder sound can be easily achieved by turning up the volume control of your amplifier or record reproducer.”
The three videos in this post show a clip from the movie (above) of Gabbar terrorizing the village, author Anupama Chopra discussing her book (below), and Anupama Chopra chatting with Ramesh and Rohan Sippy (below) in their Mumbai home. Near the end of the Chopra-Sippy visit, we get to see various rooms in the Sippy house that are relevant to the film’s history.