After years of writers toiling and not getting their due, here were two who refused to take credit because their work was tampered with. The line between pride and arrogance is very thin but Salim–Javed made it their own!
In the Hindi film industry of the 1970s, Salim–Javed were known to be excessively arrogant. They defend this by citing the position of writers then. ‘When we entered, writers had no authority. There was no tradition of a writer putting his foot down or talking like an equal. If a downtrodden speaks to you like an equal, it sounds arrogant. We were seeking that equality, which sounded like arrogance.’ In retrospect, they feel, ‘We were very young—in our twenties and thirties—then. Now we feel it is important to make one’s success palatable for others but we did not do that. Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was the need of the hour. If we had been gentle, they could have trampled us.’
Success also allowed them to charge astronomical prices unheard of for writers in the industry. They reached a sort of milestone with Dostana when their fees overtook even Amitabh Bachchan’s—who was also a huge star when he signed the film. But Salim–Javed’s fees went up even after that.
Salim Khan explains, ‘In today’s films, there are additional expenses of Rs 3-4 crore due to changes in scripts/dialogues that require reshooting. With writers contributing a strong, well-thought-out script right at the beginning, this can be saved. When we started asking for the price we did, we gave these as reasons.’
He recounts a negotiation with producer Ramesh Behl, who called them to write a film (which was eventually not made).43 Film rights are sold for six territories in India. They asked him how much he hoped to make per territory with the stars he had finalized and he quoted a price of Rs 18 lakh. They then told him, ‘Ask your distributors how much are they willing to pay for the film if the script was by Salim–Javed.’ Behl found out that the price would go up by 3–4 lakh per territory. Salim Khan recalls telling him, ‘Six territories sold at an additional Rs 4 lakh would give you Rs 24 lakhs. This is the money you are making from our name, which is what we are asking from you. We are not taking any money for the script.’
They were paid Rs 10,000 for their first film, and even after all this time Salim remembers the fees they were paid for their first four films. ‘Rs 10,000 for Haathi Mere Saathi, Rs 55,000 for Zanjeer, Rs 25,000 for Yaadon Ki Baaraat, Rs 50,000 for Haath Ki Safai . . . after the success of Zanjeer, we decided to increase our price to Rs 2 lakh and did not manage to sell a script for nine months,’ he sighs.
Javed recounts a story of them going to a producer to narrate a script. ‘We told him right at the beginning to hear our price before the script. We wanted to do so because we didn’t want him to feel we had increased our prices after he liked it. So we told him two lakh. He remained silent for a while and then rang the bell for his peon. He then told his peon to get his partner urgently. All this while, we were sitting there silently. When his partner came, he said, “Hey, tell him what you just told me!”’ This reaction is a good indicator of the general response to Salim–Javed’s attitude in the 1970s film industry. People found it unbelievable!
And they did manage to sell a script for Rs 2 lakh (Majboor) and another for an amount very close to that (Sholay for Rs 1.5 lakh), not to mention that their prices went up further after the success of Deewaar and Sholay. Yash Chopra’s assistant director Ramesh Talwar remembers them charging the producer a lot less than their market price for Kaala Patthar, and he estimates that amount to be around Rs 7.5 lakh. This kept on increasing till their asking price reached the astronomical Rs 21 lakh for their last couple of films. And of course, as described, they had a reason for that price.
This clarity in commercial matters helped them right from the beginning and they never changed. Javed Akhtar says, ‘Producers and distributors are not bothered about content and the script is always lowest on the list of their priorities. The only way we can change that is by convincing them that there is great money in our scripts. The buyer should be impressed. After all, we are not dealing with saints but businessmen.’
And with the equity they had in the trade—distributors, financiers—they built their price, their swagger and their difference from other writers. How much were the other writers getting when you were asking for Rs 21 lakh, I asked. ‘Ek lakh ke upar mil jaye toh celebration hota tha writers mein,’ Salim Khan grins.
They changed the fulcrum of the Hindi film rivalry. Their success and brash attitude brought them many rivals—many of whom were waiting for them to fail—and industry camps suddenly had two heavyweight writers weighing in. Their success meant they had several actors in their camps, who were keen to work on films based on their scripts, considered to be sure-fire hits. All of this contributed to their becoming a much bigger force than what is indicated by the number of films they worked on.
In the eleven-odd years they worked together, Salim–Javed wrote twenty-one films (of which nineteen released within this period and two released later). In the same period (1971–82), another top writer, Sachin Bhowmick, wrote twenty-eight films including some very successful ones (Caravan, Hum Kisise Kum Nahin, Gol Maal, Karz, Bemisal). Kader Khan started writing in 1974 and in his first decade, he wrote dialogues for nearly fifty films (including blockbuster successes like Amar Akbar Anthony, Parvarish, Muqaddar Ka Sikandar, Naseeb, Laawaris, Satte Pe Satta, Himmatwala, Coolie). Inder Raj Anand wrote twenty-plus films in the 1970s and early 1980s (which included hits like Safar, Julie, Jaani Dushman, Ek Duuje Ke Liye, Kaalia), many of which had hugely popular dialogues. Yet none of them managed the clout or the larger-than-life impression that Salim–Javed commanded (or command even now). The only writer who comes close to their aura is Gulzar, though his reputation is as much as a lyricist and director as a screenwriter.
No other screenwriter can claim to have influenced such a large number of films as Salim–Javed did in the 1970s and 1980s. Their Angry Young Man and the action-revenge-thriller format ruled for nearly two decades and spawned a multitude of imitators.
But apart from their influence, what completely distinguished Salim–Javed from other writers is the confidence with which they backed their craft. Their unwavering belief that a film is nothing but a blank page before a writer gets involved, that it is the writer who makes or breaks a film, is what drove them to become the most impactful screenwriters of Hindi cinema, if not the finest. Their passion and dedication to the screenplay are what has made them as big they are.
As Salim Khan says, ‘Films should be made for only one reason. I have a script on which I will bet my last shirt.’
Strengths and Weaknesses
Writer–director Sriram Raghavan—a self-confessed Salim–Javed fan—says, ‘Looking back at the movies I love and watch repeatedly, I think it’s not the stories but how they were told that finally grabs the viewer. As writers, Salim–Javed never forgot the viewer within themselves. And critically, Salim–Javed didn’t think their audience was dumb! In fact, any film-maker who considers the audience dumb is actually saying he’s dumb himself because in a sense, he’s the film’s first viewer. I don’t think Salim–Javed ever said to each other the audience won’t accept this, that they will not understand this.’
Both Salim and Javed were avid movie-watchers and continued to do so in theatres even after they became stars. They remember watching their own films along with the audience to gauge their reaction, to see what had worked and—more importantly—what hadn’t.
Salim gives an interesting perspective on how to keep the audience engaged. ‘The audience must be allowed to guess some of the things. It is like playing football with a child. If you don’t let him kick the ball at all, he will lose interest and walk away from the game. You need to keep him chasing after the ball and the audience chasing after the plot. Dekhna, ab aise hoga is something the audience keeps on saying . . . you need to build the screenplay to build in these guessing nodes.’
It is with this thought in mind that they constructed th
eir scripts as one living, breathing whole. Director Ramesh Talwar, who assisted Yash Chopra during the making of all three of his Salim–Javed films, says, ‘Salim–Javed’s scripts did not have “buffer scenes”. Their scenes had links or continuations from previous scenes, so that one scene flowed into another. Even props were thoughtfully used and were part of the story.’
Writer Kamlesh Pandey adds to this when he says, ‘When we saw Zanjeer or Deewaar, we—as young boys—used to discuss the script and not Amitabh Bachchan. They were the first team who wrote logical screenplays where something happened because of something else in an earlier scene. Before them, nobody had done so and we really enjoyed that.’
Sriram Raghavan echoes this thought, ‘I think they managed to get the dramaturgy exactly correct to make it exciting and taut, with the dramatic transitions perfect. The earlier films did not have this. As a director, I would find my transitions from one scene to another. But in Salim–Javed’s films, you can see the writer has written the transition there. Deewaar is full of these things.’
However, that completeness of vision was backed by a grand imagination coupled with an eye for detail. Film critic Sukanya Verma calls this a perfect balance. ‘Their biggest strength is balance. Salim Khan’s explosive, intense impulses perfectly complemented Javed Akhtar’s wit and idealism. One’s ideas, another’s depth, together they created stories and characters we cared about, rooted for, connected with or wanted to become.’
While Salim–Javed never officially divulged who did what in the partnership44, it can be inferred that Salim’s sense of plotting and screenplay was a perfect match for Javed’s sense of detail and dialogue.
Javed says of the partnership, ‘We were a really great team! We really complemented each other. He had everything that I didn’t have, and I had everything he didn’t have. As a writer, he had the courage and I had the intricacy. He would introduce in our work the broad and bold strokes of drama and I had the detail and the finesse. How do I define this? Well, the power in drama, boldness in developing the story, bringing something extraneous to the script, thinking of something new . . . something that would shock.’
Along with this grandness of story plotting, as film-maker and film critic Khalid Mohammad finds, their dialogue perfectly suited the situations. He says, ‘The dialogue penned by Salim–Javed has been brilliant, packing in punchlines even in straight colloquial lines. They introduced effective, quotable lines of dialogue, erasing the theatrical and ornate language used earlier by most dialogue writers.’
Kamlesh Pandey continues, ‘Salim–Javed introduced to us the modern Indian screenplay. Our films did not have that before them. The vocabulary and the attitude of the characters were very contemporary.’
While several of their inspirations were from other classic Hindi or Hollywood films, the situations and the manners in which they played out were completely attuned to the times. Mother India’s mother, who became the mother of Deewaar, was no longer fighting dacoits in villages. She had to contend with urban problems like unemployment and crimes like smuggling. The mercenaries of Sholay were not honourable samurais but small-time thieves who had no qualms in stealing from their employer. The lost brothers of Waqt returned in a rock-‘n’-roll avatar in Yaadon Ki Baaraat. All their set pieces, their lines, their milieu were deeply rooted in the times they lived in and that drew the audience to theatres like nothing else.
However, all these strengths would have come to nought if not for that one winning quality of theirs, borne out of their formidable intelligence and an anti-feudal mindset. Coming from the backgrounds they did, they challenged the ‘caste system’ of the Hindi film industry and managed to actually turn it around. In the film industry, actors were the brand names on which films were sold and the audience’s love for music meant the composer/lyricist/singers were the only other group who were celebrated. Not even directors—except for a few very accomplished ones—were stars in the truest sense. In this situation, Salim–Javed’s conviction in the scripts they wrote and the confidence that writers—not actors or composers—made or unmade films was their true strength. Salim Khan says, ‘A lyricist writes five songs, which means just five scenes, but he is mentioned on the film’s banners. How can a writer who writes sixty–seventy scenes of the same film not get mentioned on the posters?’
Holding on to their scripts and their vision, Salim–Javed were in a position to discuss which actors could play certain roles and how the films would be mounted. One of the reasons they never ventured into direction is that their complete vision was visible on-screen anyway. Of course, preserving this vision meant convincing legendary producers (like Gulshan Rai) to drop superstars (like Rajesh Khanna) even though the advance had been paid, because the actor did not suit the role (in Deewaar) and talking another superstar (Shashi Kapoor) into playing a supporting role (in Deewaar) that was a very strong one as well.
Ramesh Talwar remembers Salim–Javed’s script-reading sessions to be one of complete unity. ‘They used to fight amongst themselves while writing the script but sorted out their differences before narration and presented one common vision to the producer–director. Then, they used to insist that the scene and dialogues remain unchanged.’
In the film industry of those days, where scripts changed on a producer’s whim, songs were inserted on a distributor’s insistence and dialogues changed because the actor said so, their ability to say ‘no’ because they didn’t believe in something was their biggest strength. Salim Khan sums it up, ‘You should know the worth of your product and you should be sure of its success. Phir aap ko naa bolne ke bhi paise milte hai.’
When I asked popular screenwriter Rajat Aroraa what he thought Salim–Javed’s weaknesses were, he just laughed and couldn’t come up with anything. Anything you dislike, I prodded? He said, ‘What I don’t like about them is that they broke up . . . they probably had many more great films left to do.’ This is an apt summation of what Salim–Javed’s strengths were and their impact on later writers.
However, what has often been counted as a weakness of Salim–Javed is their lack of originality. Kamlesh Pandey says, ‘There is no doubt about the fact that Salim and Javed were both incredibly wonderful writers. But most of their works were derivative. If there was no Mother India or Gunga Jumna, there would have been no Deewaar. And Shakti, in one way, was Deewaar in reverse. I only wish that they had done something that was really their own.’ It is indeed true that Salim–Javed worked on scripts that Javed jokingly calls ‘totally original [but] have come before’. Khalid Mohammad puts it differently, ‘What I miss from the scripts of Salim–Javed is an experiential quality. Their stories have been derivative of western films and books.’
Salim Khan doesn’t dismiss this completely when he says, ‘Originality is the art of concealing the source’45 and adds that there has been no original story after Ramayan and Mahabharat. He says everything is derived or inspired from something that has ‘come before’. With this mindset, they have been absolutely open about their sources—going so far as to mention some of the more obscure films from which they had picked up even minor parts of films. Salim attributes Sholay’s coin toss to determine course of action to a film called Garden of Evil but the scene wasn’t an exact replica. It was a pack of cards that decided which cowboy would stay back while the other tried to escape with the lady.46 Salim also attributes the dockyard setting of Deewaar to On the Waterfront. There was hardly any other similarity between Deewaar and the Elia Kazan classic but again, it was openly called out. Salim says, ‘A lot of people who are not aware of these influences say Salim–Javed are geniuses. But the genius is placing the right thing at the right place after changing it to suit the new situation perfectly.’ It is rather obvious that they never blindly lifted material but brought a new touch that made their creation bigger or more memorable than the original.
Sriram Raghavan feels that they are certainly not un-original. ‘The journey of a four-line idea to a full-fledged screenplay is
an arduous and fantastic process, where the writer has to draw from within and from outside. The world of Salim–Javed was full of as many outside influences as it was of their own lives, their own struggles coupled with their imagination, ambition and intent. One can detect influences ranging from James Hadley Chase and Harold Robbins to Conrad’s Lord Jim, from our own films, literature, poetry, culture and mythologies.’ What he correctly notices is a rich tapestry of threads that were not groundbreaking but they were certainly innovative—in their own way. Kamlesh Pandey adds, ‘Taking plot points from different sources—American novels, Hollywood Westerns—and then weaving them into something so Indian was not easy. They had perfected that skill and that’s why we, modern scriptwriters, owe everything to them. We are whatever we are today because of Salim and Javed.’
Or as film-maker Jean-Luc Godard said, ‘It’s not where you take things from. It’s where you take them to.’
Salim–Javed’s lack of originality has also been seen in a different way, where they stopped experimenting with form and content after a point. While their earlier films had a lot of material—characters, plot devices—that was new to Hindi cinema, their later films were often repeats of their previous ones. And some even had exact repetitions of scenes or dialogues. Two of their last films together—Kranti and Shakti—had the same subplot of father putting his duty above his son’s life. In Shakti, the police officer father (Dilip Kumar) refuses to give in to the demands of the smuggler who has kidnapped his son, even telling the smuggler to execute his son. In Kranti (which came earlier), we have Sanga (again Dilip Kumar) who orders the execution of Shakti Singh (Shashi Kapoor), a traitor to his cause, despite knowing their relationship. After Sholay, they wrote Shaan for Ramesh Sippy—it turned out to be an exact replica of the former. Obviously under a lot of pressure to repeat the success of the earlier film, they attempted to do so by writing pretty much the same script in a modern, James Bond-style setting. Even Shakti—though still considered to be a classic—was the story of Deewaar, retold with a father and a son as protagonists.
Written by Salim-Javed: The Story of Hindi Cinema’s Greatest Screenwriters Page 25