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Salman Khan was the new kid on the block after his debut film Maine Pyar Kiya became a blockbuster in 1989, but soon afterwards, he appeared in a string of flops, until the 1991 film Saajan. The film also starred Sanjay Dutt and Madhuri Dixit, and turned out to be a massive box office hit. The film brought director Lawrence D’Souza into the limelight but its success also made him an easy target for underworld gangsters.
In the 1990s, Lawrence continued to make mid-budget money spinners that turned modest profits. But, when he made the film Indian Babu, it prompted gangsters to make extortion calls to his house, and even shoot him in plain sight at his office. In a recent interview with Amar Ujala, Lawrence shared that back in those days, buying a new car or a flat could paint a target on your back. He recalled that after he bought a Mitsubishi Lancer for Rs 14 lakh, he started getting extortion calls in the middle of the night. And so, he sold it for just Rs 5 lakh at the earliest.
Lawrence said that after this phone call, Ejaz’s henchmen started following him around. After a couple of weeks, when Lawrence was sitting in a lawn just outside his office, he saw a biker taking two shots at him. “I was sitting outside my office but there was a gate there where I had put up an acrylic sheet. He shot twice but the bullets didn’t hit me, they hit the sheet. One of the bullets hit the Mother Mary statue that was behind me,” he recalled.
Afterwards, the gangster continued to call at his house and demanded Rs 1.5 crore. “He then started saying that you ask Nadeem (of Nadeem-Shravan) for this money. And we were like ‘Why would Nadeem pay?’ I don’t know what happened but eventually he stopped calling,” he shared.
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