It’s suddenly YRF’s turn to once again be in the sun. The streaming of The Romantics, a four-part docu-series on Yash Chopra and his cinema, couldn’t have been timed better, coming close on the heels of Pathaan, the banner’s first box-office acceptance after floundering for years. The documentary’s biggest USP was the coming out of recluse Aditya Chopra. Director Smriti Mundhra, late filmmaker Jagmohan Mundhra’s LA-based daughter, was so chuffed about getting the scoop interview that she wound up the first episode with an elaborate build-up, trumpeting his arrival. Adi’s sensible inputs in the second episode, along with the timeless footage of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, was perhaps the best part of the entire series.
For the few of us who’d known Adi before DDLJ, he was not a revelation. I always knew Adi as the total film buff one would bump into at Gemini-Gaiety-Galaxy, the trio of theatres which was where all the action used to be every Friday, before the multiplex culture changed the film business. Adi was not only communicative and well-spoken, his cinema-craze went beyond watching movies. He knew all of us, read all that we wrote and kept track of the handful of publications that existed in the pre-digital era. I still remember meeting Adi after the Sunday morning screening of a Subhash Ghai film and he asked me why we were closing down Lehren Cine Tab, a fortnightly tabloid that I was editing. He told me how much he loved reading it, that it was one of a kind and that we shouldn’t down our shutters. So he knew everything that was going on in the film industry.
Unfortunately, his turning recluse turned him into an enigma, which also got labelled as arrogance. Fortunately, The Romantics has corrected that impression of him because he came across as the nice, sorted guy he really is. Close friends have told me about the many instances when he’d drop into their homes and go into the kitchen to help himself. One doesn’t expect Adi to turn into an extrovert like Karan Johar and be all over the place but coming out the way he did in the documentary on his father was much needed. The first sign of Adi thawing was that YRF held a wine-and-dinner preview inside the studio for the media before the Yash Chopra documentary started streaming on Netflix.
After The Romantics, we’re going to be flooded with documentaries. I personally know that apart from a five-part Beyond The Actor series on Salman Khan and another on Salim-Javed, where their coming together will be a highlight, there are documentaries being made on a couple of famous film families and another on S.S. Rajamouli who’s making his presence felt at the Oscars this year. Production houses that make shows for OTT have designated one creative director exclusively to oversee the making of documentaries on various banners and families. Like The Romantics, every director is also trying to dig into the past and create the ambience of the 70s before telling the stories of, say, Ramesh Sippy or Salim-Javed. Another film family that has actors, filmmakers and music directors in its fold, is avoiding on-camera interviews so that their documentary stays exclusive. For the series on Salman Khan, the whisper is that more than 60 people have already been interviewed but Salman wants more.
And the big wait has been for Shah Rukh Khan. Now that Pathaan is behind him, one hears that SRK, who is recouping from a bout of flu, is finally ready to discuss Salman on camera.
Film buffs may still be reluctant to venture into cinema halls in big numbers. But they will have all the famous faces inside their homes in the next few months when an assortment of documentaries starts streaming on their TV sets.
Scepticism about the cinema-going audience continues because Pathaan may have successfully pulled the stops to create the perception of unprecedented numbers. But young Kartik Aaryan, who believed so much in his stardom that he even turned producer with Shehzada, is in for a reality check this weekend. The see-saw that saw him flying high last year is poised to come down with a thump.
