Malegaon is a fascinating city, fascinated with cinema. Situated at a distance of 280 kilometres from Mumbai, the dreams of its residents travel even further. In Superboys of Malegaon, the city’s people, most of them employed in the cloth manufacturing industry, after the day’s toil, rush to the dark of the theatre, finding both joy and solace in the bright lights of the big screen. What’s playing can be either a Bhai or a Buster Keaton film.
The city is also home to a fledgling film industry, pioneered by Nasir Shaikh, who, along with his friends, gave a local spin to films like Sholay (Malegaon Ke Sholay) and Superman (Yeh Hai Malegaon Ka Superman). Malegaon and its moviemakers were the subject of the 2012 documentary Supermen of Malegaon by Faiza Ahmad Khan. Now, with Superboys of Malegaon, director Reema Kagti and writer Varun Grover delve into their story with a mix of fact and fiction.
Reema says her friend and longtime collaborator Zoya Akhtar was the one who initially got intrigued by Nasir’s story. Zoya and Nasir met at a film festival in 2012. “She told him she knows him from the documentary, he said he knows her too since he had parodied his father’s (Javed Akhtar’s) film (Sholay),” Reema reminisces with a laugh. “Zoya asked him about his background, his friends, his family and his filmmaking. She realised there was a lot more to the story. The documentary is beautiful but we were not only looking at the making of one of his films, we were looking at the making of Nasir.”
Adarsh Gourav (Kho Gaye Hum Kahan, Guns & Gulaabs) plays the director Nasir in the film, while Vineet Kumar Singh essays the role of the late Farogh Jafri, who penned the parodies and Shashank Arora is the late Shafique Shaikh, the thin, meek actor who plays Superman in Yeh Hai Malegaon Ka Superman. Nasir says when he came to know that a film was being made on his life, he was curious as to who was playing him. “When Adarsh ji’s name came up, I started watching his films,” he says. “I saw The White Tiger and gathered that he is a film lover. When I went on the set of Superboys for the first time and saw him act, there were some scenes where I thought to myself ‘It would be great if he does it this way’ and he did it exactly like that.”
While Adarsh spent two weeks shadowing Nasir in Malegaon in order to get into the character (they also made another film in this brief time, a spoof amalgamation of Krantiveer and Hera Pheri), Varun too visited the place to fetch for stories. “There were so many tales that at one time I told Reema and Zoya that Superboys of Malegaon should actually be a series,” he says. “When I went to Malegaon, I met and spoke to the people who became the characters in the film. That rarely happens.”
One of the characters written by Varun, Farogh (Vineet Kumar Singh), based on Nasir’s late writer Farogh Jafri, in a crucial scene, after his film idea is shunned, screams in frustration: ‘Writer baap hota hai, writer (The writer is the father!).” A line, improvised by Vineet on set, but which gives form to frustrations of probably all screenwriters in the industry. “I would have probably written the writer is both baap (father) and maa (mother). They are the originators of the story,” says Varun.
When Hindi cinema is going through a bleak time, statements like “content is king” float around, but writers still don’t get adequately remunerated and in worse cases even not credited for their work. Since Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, there haven’t been any star-screenwriters. “It’ a systemic problem,” says Reema. “The dire state of writers reflects in the kind of films we are making. I wish to see writers get the kind of respect they got back then (in the times of Salim-Javed). But instead of things getting better, now certain platforms have a policy to not credit even the crew of the film. You want a writer to write better, better pay him enough so he doesn't have to do ten other jobs to support his family.”
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