When Amitabh Bachchan Refused To Do ‘Mr. India’ & It Caused Salim-Javed’s Split(Pic Credit: Wikipedia, Poster)
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One of the most popular writer duos back in the 1970s, Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar had drifted from one another, and Amitabh Bachchan may have been partially responsible. How? Scroll to read the scoop!
Nowadays, we watch movies that are content-based but eons ago when commercial films with massive scripts used to release, the audience used to give the writers their due credits and used to celebrate them. However, when one of the popular writer duos Salim-Javed split over a movie, it came as a shocker to their fans and the Hindi film industry. It was over Mr. India. Yes, that’s right.
As per a report in The Indian Express, the book written by Diptakriti Chakraborty, “Written by Salim-Javed: The Story of Hindi Cinema’s Greatest Screenwriters” talks about this incident. Reportedly, Salim Khan had bared his heart out in an interview about this incident to Anita Padhye who wore the Marathi book, “Yahi Rang, Yahi Roop”.
Years back, when Salim-Javed had approached Amitabh Bachchan with a movie which turned into Mr India later, Big B had declined the offer. As the megastar didn’t want to be a part of a movie with an individual-man concept as his fans come to the theatre to watch him. They even wanted Amitabh Bachchan to lend his voice for the movie but the actor wasn’t very convinced with the concept.
Javed Akhtar felt Amitabh Bachchan’s refusal was insulting and thought they would not be working together, however, Salim had a different opinion. A few days later, Javed had gone to Bachchan’s Holi party, and Salim believed Javed had badmouthed him to Bachchan. This miscommunication led to Salim and Javed’s split, leaving their massive fanbase hurt.
In the middle of this, Javed Akhtar had already started working for Silsila and his plan was to sell the Salim-Javed package, but as Salim had no contribution, he didn’t want to be a part of this. Earlier, in an interview, had said, “I don’t consider it right to take credit for something I didn’t do. Javed would write lyrics, have meetings with music directors and I would sit there contributing nothing. This was not acceptable to me.”
Well, it’s quite a misunderstanding. What do you think?
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