Amitabh Bachchan and Salim Khan reveal the moments that revolutionized screenwriting in Bollywood!

This week on HISTORY TV18’s Bollywood@100 Behind the Scenes episode catch up with some little known facts about blockbuster movies.

Salim Khan – Javed Akhtar, undoubtedly one of the best writer duos of the industry before their controversial split, delivered megahits like Zanjeer, Deewar, Seeta Aur Geeta, amongst others. But how many of us know about their painstaking efforts to just get acknowledgment for their own work?

Salim Khan, expert screenwriter of the Salim-Javed duo, recalls the days of struggle of scriptwriters in the industry, where they were neither respected, nor duly credited. In this episode, Salimji discloses that during the promotions of Zanjeer, initially he and Javedji were not credited in any form. In order to prove their worth, they hired a man to spraypaint “Written by Salim & Javed” across all the posters and banners in Mumbai. While this incident brought a revolutionary change for screenwriters in the industry, but it also permanently soured their relationship with producer Prakash Mehra.

Megastar Amitabh Bachchan recounts his numerous narration sessions with the men who created the iconic “Angry Young Man”. Revealing their unique style of story-telling, Big B discloses that at every session of narration for Zanjeer, the duo would bet on the number of weeks the film would run at the box-office. During the initial scripting of the movie, Salim-Javed bet that the movie would run for 6-7 weeks, however by the end of the narration, the pair finally predicted a box office run of 75 weeks.