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The history of Hindi cinema is littered with stories of directors and producers who put their lives on the line, and ended up losing everything when one of their films flopped. There are stories of stars such as Bharat Bhushan and filmmakers such as Kamran Khan, music directors such as OP Nayyar and starlets and child artistes such as Baby Naaz, who witnessed major success in the film business, but suffered tragic ends. In a new interview, Mahesh Bhatt recalled a story from his childhood, when he watched a yesteryear director sit silently as every last one of his possessions was taken away to be auctioned.
Bhatt appeared as a guest on his daughter Pooja Bhatt’s new podcast, where they dismissively spoke about risk-averse studio executives in charge of green-lighting films these days. “There is too much money involved, and they want to be sure. You cross every T and dot every I and tick all the boxes, and you’re guaranteed to make a flop. You have to have that reckless gene,” Bhatt said, recalling ‘the real gamblers’ of the Hindi film industry.
He said, “We were staying at Union Park, which was Emraan (Hashmi) and his grandmother’s house. And bang opposite was M Sadiq’s house, a two-storey bungalow. One morning, there was a lot of activity for this quiet area, which is the Beverly Hills of Mumbai, Pali Hill. The who’s who lived there. M Sadiq was sitting on a chair, very sombre, and all the furniture of his house was being taken out into the garden. It was being taken away to be auctioned, and his house was being sold because he’d made a film where he’d lost a lot of money. He owed the market money and his property was attached.”
Bhatt said that his mother saw him staring, and told him to stop. “She gave me a whack on my head. She said, ‘Kya tamasha dekh raha hai’. His son, Mehmood, had come out to play. My mother told me to go play with him, because it’s not good to see your father being humiliated in this way. I remember going with Mehmood and Emraan’s father to go play. They thought that children don’t know, but he knew…” Bhatt said that M Sadiq reclaimed lost pride when he directed the classic Chaudhvin Ka Chand. “They say it was ghost-directed by Guru Dutt himself,” Bhatt said, adding that filmmakers of that era put everything on the table.
The ‘Muslim-social’ Chaudhvin Ka Chand was produced by Guru Dutt after the failure of his film Kaagaz Ke Phool. The film’s success saved his studio from financial ruin.
Bhatt continued, “Naushad saab told me about Mehboob saab. He wanted to make Aan in Technicolor. He had seen colour films come to India, and he said, ‘Rangeen picture banani hai’. But the technology was only available in London, and it was costing Rs 3.5 lakh. Naushad told me that he mortgaged Mehboob Studio, and he went to tell him, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ And Mehboob just said, ‘If I don’t have faith in my film, who will?'” M Sadiq was born in 1911 in Lahore, and he began his filmmaking career in pre-Independence 1943. Bhatt himself has had a tumultuous career and life. Born as the illegitimate child of filmmaker Nanabhai Bhatt, he spent his youth in angst, and experienced many ups and downs when he became a director himself.
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