The biggest showman in Bollywood, if there ever was one, was Manmohan Desai and Amitabh Bachchan would agree. Desai was the man who gave Bachchan some of his biggest blockbusters - Amar Akbar Anthony, Naseeb, Mard and Coolie to name a few. On Manmohan Desai’s 79th birth anniversary, here are excerpts from Big B’s blog, in which he remembers the filmmaker of the masses:
That is the genius Manmohan Desai, on the sets with me for the film Naseeb and the picturization of the song John Jaani Janaardhan. He conceived this quite remarkably.
How he managed to convince all of them to come over for just a day, and how he completed their work in that shift is a marvel in itself. He booked an adjoining floor at Filmistan Studios, where we shot this song, and would send me racing there to rehearse the next shot while the lighting was being done, so that no time was wasted in rehearsals on the floor of the shoot, and also to prevent the embarrassment of making the big stars wait while we got our act together.
It was this identity that appealed to the front benchers, the ones that repeatedly patronised the films, in those good ol’ days... far removed from what the youngistan of today does at the multiplexes...
He saw the rushes of the drunk scene in AAA almost a month after it was performed - that is how long it took in those days to get a final print in some viewable state - since he was not present on the set when I did it. We were shooting two of his films at the same time in the same studio - RK Studios - AAA and Parvarish… he gave instructions for the drunk scene and left to the next floor to shoot some action scenes simultaneously with Amjad and by the time he came back we had already canned the scene .. he trusted his assistants in the compliance of the drunk scene and a month later when we were shooting the climax song and scene in this studio in Dadar, now defunct and raised to the ground with better real estate possibilities.
Within a few months he shifted back to where he originally came from Khetwari, a middle class congested colony in the interiors of central Bombay, then.
He would call me over to his abode often. The houses were cramped and almost stuck to each other. One could merely stretch their hand from their window and reach the window of the neighbour. On those tiny ‘galis’ of the colony he would play cricket with a wet rubber ball, a most challenging feat for the most accomplished batsmen, and his kids that surrounded his home. We would sit on the first floor balcony, taking in the noise and conversations and the atmosphere of the air about us ..
It was Man ji that gave me the very first so-called vanity van in the Industry. I would use it as a regular travel car for years .. until the ‘vanity’ became a constant with all the shootings and the stars, a regular now... no one uses make up rooms… except at the YRF studios!!
They have not made another like him... yet...
(This article is from The Quint’s archives and was first published on 26 February 2016. It is being republished to mark Manmohan Desai’s birth anniversary.)