When Rishi Kapoor accused Salim Khan of threatening to destroy his career: ‘We created Amitabh Bachchan, who destroyed Rajesh Khanna’

Late actor Rishi Kapoor had gone on record to say that writer Salim Khan was a ‘huge morale booster’ and thought of him as a ‘good actor’, but this wasn’t before he had a run-in with the him, during which the veteran writer threatened to destroy his career. In a chapter dedicated to ‘fights and flare-ups’ in his life and career, Rishi Kapoor wrote in his autobiography Khullam Khulla about the many ‘skirmishes’ that he had over the years with the legendary writer pair Salim-Javed, either separately or together.

Recalling one such incident, which transpired after he turned down a role in the film Trishul, Rishi Kapoor recalled running into Salim Khan at a popular club. “I must be the first and only actor in the history of Hindi cinema to have refused Salim–Javed at their peak,” he wrote, adding, “I turned down Trishul because I didn’t like the way the role had shaped up. Salim and Javed bristled at my rejection and the animosity bubbled to the surface…”

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Salim Khan walked up to him, and asked, “How did you have the guts to refuse Salim-Javed?” Rishi said that he didn’t like the role. Salim replied, “Do you know that to this day nobody has said no to us? We can destroy your career.” He continued, “Who will work with you? You know, we had offered Zanjeer to Rajesh Khanna and he turned us down. We didn’t do anything to him but we created an alternative to him, a hero called Amitabh Bachchan, who destroyed Rajesh Khanna. We will do the same to you.”

Rishi wrote that he shrugged off the threat, and got a chance to gloat when his film Amar Akbar Anthony did very well, while Salim-Javed’s Imaan Dharam flopped. While he’d later develop a mutually respectful relationship with Salim Khan, Rishi wrote that Javed Akhtar said something about his father that soured their equation irrevocably.