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Journalism of Courage
Even after finishing my civil engineering, getting married and managing a job as a site engineer, my obsession didn’t die…My father was a sound engineer in Annapurna Studios in Hyderabad, and owing to that had reasonable access to the big guns there. One fine day, when my film mania reached its absolute peak, I went to him and declared that I wanted to be a film director. He looked at me as if I were stark raving mad and with good reason, because there was not a single constructive thing I had done in my life until then. I was a bad student and had the reputation of being a useless bum.
I gave up the idea of being a director, and began preparing to go to Nigeria. One of the documents necessary for the purpose was an international driving licence. A friend of mine called Naidu was taking me on his bike to an RTO office, where he knew someone who would do the needful.
En route he stopped at a video library called Priyadarshini Videos owned by his friend. Those were the days when video libraries were just coming up, and that was the first time I had been inside one. As Naidu was chatting with his friend, I was checking out the cassettes and suddenly had the brainwave of starting a video library. With my extensive knowledge about films, I was confident of making a go at it. By evening I had become so obsessed with the idea that I took my father’s scooter and went all over town to check out six or seven video libraries, and by night I had firmly made up my mind to drop the idea of going to Nigeria. I decided that I would make a film with the profits I earned. Everyone including my father, grandfather and Ratna thought I had lost it, and Ratna understandably was in tears.
…By the time I started my shop, I barely had 100 workable tapes. My shop, which I called Movie House, was located in Ameerpet and everyone told me that it was a very bad idea to start a shop there as it had a predominantly lower-middle/middle class population that could not afford video cassette recorders (VCRs). I was also told that my shop couldn’t compete with a library called Fantasy on Punjagutta Road as the rich Banjara Hills crowd patronised it. Once it started, my library became successful within a month and Fantasy soon went out of business. Now the same people said that these days everybody owned a VCR, and that Movie House had better parking space than Fantasy…
If something doesn’t work, people will say “we told you so”, and if it works, they will come up with a new theory… For my films, as for my video library, I get a lot of unsolicited advice. I was told Daud would be a blockbuster because it had Sanjay Dutt after Khalnayak, and Urmila and AR Rahman after Rangeela, and I was advised to shelve Satya because nobody wanted to see sweaty-looking faces in dirty locations.
Guns and Thighs : The Story of My Life
Author: Ram Gopal Varma
Publisher: Rupa
Pages: 219
Price: 500
