Salim Javed: The duo who scripted super hit films who paid more than Amitabh Bachchan

 The documentary series 'The Angry Young Man' based on the life of famous Bollywood actor and filmmaker Salim Khan and poet Javed Akhtar is being released this week on OTT platform Prime Video.

It is an important occasion in the history of Indian cinema as films are usually made on the lives of actors, actresses, film producers, directors, musicians and singers.

However, the lives of screenwriters have never been captured on camera like this.

A film cannot be imagined without its writers. However, screenwriters are usually absent from the discussion of the film's success, like the character 'Mr India' written by Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar.

Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar often worked together due to which their duo is known as 'Salim Javed' in Bollywood.

Even after 50 years, no one could compete with the stories and characters of these films.

How did two writers of the same name write together?

When I was growing up and watched the movie 'Zanjeer' for the first time, I thought of the wonderful dialogue Amitabh Bachchan had uttered: 'Until you are told to sit, stand politely. This is the police station, not your father's house.'

I became a fan of Amitabh Bachchan after this movie.

Then I realized that this line was not spoken by Amitabh Bachchan himself. I was told that it was written by Saleem Javed.

For many years as a child I used to think that Saleem Javed was the name of the same person who writes these amazing lines.

We also had a family friend named Saleem Javed.

During the Amitabh Bachchan craze, I watched several of his films. All of them had one thing in common, their screenplay written by Saleem Javed.

I was quite surprised when I later found out that it was two different writers who wrote the films together.

I wondered what it meant and which of these two writers wrote what.

What is the famous dialogue of the movie 'Dewar' 'Today I have a bungalow, a car, a bank balance. What have you got?' Written by Javed Akhtar? And his answer was written by Saleem Khan, 'Mere paas maa hai'?

What a brilliant dialogue in Sholay movie 'if evil taught you how to shoot a gun then goodness will teach you how to plough'. Were Jay's lines written by Salim Khan and Veero's lines by Javed Akhtar in this film?

As a child, when I was very much a movie fanatic, I used to enjoy sharing the credit of my favorite dialogues half with myself

What was the role of Salim Javed in the duo? 

Many years later, when I joined film journalism and met Saleem Khan and Javed Akhtar separately, I asked them this question.

By now it was known that there are three main things that are important in writing a film: its story, screenplay and dialogue. The credit of these three together has been given to Salim Javed.

In 2014, the foreword of my first book (Biography of Rajesh Khanna) was written by author Salim Khan.

During the meetings with Salim Khan, when I asked him who used to work in Salim Javed's duo, he said that 'We used to interact so much that it is difficult to tell where my work started and Javed Sahib. Where did the work end?

'It used to happen automatically. It is a complex creative activity. Both of our minds worked perfectly together.'

This was not a direct answer. I tried poking around a bit but still got no clear answer.

Then years later, Javed Akhtar was asked the same question in an interview, and he replied, 'We were two people who worked together. It is not appropriate to answer who used to do what.' That is, there was the same mystery here.

Deeptokurti Chaudhry, the author of the famous book 'Salim Javed Ki Tahrir', written on Salim Javed's duo, told me that 'About how to divide the work of writing, Javed often said that I used to write nouns and Salim used to write verbs. .'

Obviously this was a humorous way of avoiding the question. Both Saleem Javed avoided this question for years.

Javed Akhtar revealed the secret 

 Hear many people in the film world talking about it, the most prominent of which was that 'Javed Akhtar was writing everything. Saleem Khan's work is limited only to PR and script narration.

All the scripts were taken from Hollywood movies like 'Sholay Film Ka Idea, Meera Gaon Meera Desh' was a copy of the movie.' And that 'both were extremely arrogant and had strange conditions in front of the film producers.'

But the real question remained and finally after years the answer to this basic question was given by Javed Akhtar.

Last year (May 2023), I had the opportunity to have a long conversation with Javed Akhtar on the occasion of the launch of his book 'Javed Akhtar-Talking Life' written by author Nasreen Mushani Kabir at the famous British Library in London. I then asked the basic question that who did what work in the pair of you and Salim Khan?

This time he openly answered the question that 'Most of the film's story ideas we wrote were almost always Salim Sahib's. All the movies like Dewar, Trishool, Sholay and Dawn were narrated by Salim Khan. And the twist in the story and the role of 'Angry Young Man' was also his idea.

In the same new book by Nasreen Muni Kabir, Javed Akhtar clearly credits Salim Khan with the idea of ​​the story and says 'There is a Thakur in Shale, whose hands are chopped off by a dangerous villain. That Thakur calls two youths to protect his village. This whole idea was Salim Sahib's.

While mentioning the film Sholay, Javed Akhtar admits another important thing that Ramesh Sipi was also with us in writing the script of Sholay. However, he was not given credit for it.

In the book, Javed Akhtar has only talked about Saleem Khan's work. I asked Javed Akhtar, 'Then what was the next step and where did your work begin?'

So he replies, 'From the script, we both used to write the screenplay together. The idea of ​​the story would be 10-15 minutes and then we would write each scene together and write the whole two-and-a-half-hour film.

Javed Akhtar added, 'Even during the script, new characters, new events and scenes would have been added, in which both of us would have worked together. But after the screenplay, writing the dialogues was my field.'

To which I questioned, does that mean that dialogue from the movie 'Dewar' 'I have a mother' or 'I don't care if it is cheap or expensive whenever I do enmity' or 'Catch the dawn is not only difficult but impossible', all these famous one-liners are written by the pen of Javed Akhtar?

On this he says, 'Yes, but the amazing story and twist of the movie Don was completely the invention of Salim Khan's mind.'

Javed Akhtar clarified about the role of both in the story, screenplay, dialogues of the film.

A period of success 

The duo of Saleem Khan and Javed Akhtar together wrote 24 films out of which 20 were successful. This is a great record. But during the period of their success, both were accused that the stories of their films were not original but inspired from Hollywood films.

When I asked this question to Salim Khan, he said, 'Look, nothing is real in this world. Everything has happened somewhere. If someone says it's a real job, they're lying. We have never stolen the story of any film. I read a lot, went to the library almost every day. Books and novels of every subject. We had so many ideas for a scene.'

About being influenced by foreign films, Javed Akhtar says, 'We were more influenced by our classic films. Mughal Azam, Mother India, Ganges and Yamuna. But I was also very fond of American movies and novels. Loved the novels of James Hadley Chase and Ramon Chandler. It helped me understand the impact of the one-liners from there. I was greatly influenced by Ibn Safi and progressive writers. Especially I, Kishan Chandra, used to read a lot.'

"If I liked a book, I used to give it to Salim Khan," he says. When 'Zanjeer' became a hit, someone wrote that it was a copy of the Hollywood film 'Dirty Harry'. See, the only similarity between the two films is that the hero of both was an angry police officer.

Javed Akhtar says that this character was written by Saleem Khan and let me tell you that we did not make 'Dirty Harry', but the name of the film which was a copy of Dirty Harry was 'Khon Khon' which was released in the year 1973 and It flopped badly.'

When the superstar couple broke up 

Every rise has a fall. Salim Javed's duo also broke up in June 1981. After that, both of them wrote films alone. Javed Akhtar wrote films like Beta, Dunya, Mashaal, Arjun, Dakit, Meri Jung and Roop Ki Rani Choru Ka Raja. Betaab and Arjun were also successful in the films written by him.

While Saleem Khan wrote films like 'Naam', Hizb, Tofan, Akila and Pathar Ke Phool.

Among them only 'Naam' was a big hit. Neither of them could achieve the blockbuster success that Saleem-Javed achieved as a duo as solo screenwriters.

His biographer Deeptokirti Chaudhary says that when all those films were written in the seventies, there was a lot of novelty in them.

He says that Hindi cinema has never seen anything like Zanjeer, Dewar, Trishul or Angry Young Man before. Even after Salim Javed's pairing ended, he continued to essay the same character.

Written by Sanjay Dutt Salim Khan, the film is Angry Young Man - an unemployed, disillusioned youth of the 1980s.

Similarly, Amitabh Bachchan was the Angry Young Man in his scripted film 'Akeela' even though he was not young at that time. The hero of Javed Akhtar's Meri Jung, Arjun, Dakoo was an angry young man.

'But after a decade, the hero and his anger have lost any novelty,' he says. Therefore, the same success as before could not be achieved.

He dominated the film world 

Those who know Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar closely say that there was another special thing about this pair that was lost after the breakup and that is that both of them built each other's trust together.

While narrating an incident related to him, writer Deeptokirti Chaudhary says that 'He was the don of screenwriting. Imagine that when Zanjeer was released, the poster had the name of the director and the producer, but not the name of the writer.'

Prakash Mehra asked him to write the names of the film writers on the poster? The duo of Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar was fearless. He paid a man and asked him to write 'Film Writers Salim – Javed' on posters put up across the city overnight. No one had done this before. It is an amazing event and I think they both encouraged each other to do this. After the breakup of the pair, this motivation was lost.'

And then for the last time in the movie 'Mr India' the magic of Salim-Javed duo returned. The film was released in 1987, six years after their separation. And the magic of Salim Javed's duo name worked again and the film turned out to be a blockbuster.

However, in the book 'Javed Akhtar-Talking Life', Javed Akhtar says, 'I wrote the entire screenplay of Mr. India myself and then the dialogues. I asked producer Boney Kapoor to write Salim Javed's name in the credits because the idea came during the 'Salim-Javed era'.

That era has not come again but its influence is heard in Hindi cinema even today. Years ago, Salim Khan had told the famous writer Abrar Alvi, who wrote Guru Dutt's films, that 'you will see that one day the writer will charge more than the hero of the film.'

Abrar Alvi opened his eyes in surprise and replied, 'Whatever you say. It will never happen.'

Salim-Javed did the same after many years, they got Rs 50,000 more than superstar Amitabh Bachchan for the film 'Dostana'.

This is the reason why, looking at the state of film writers today, it seems that repeating what Salim Javed did may be difficult if not impossible.