Part 2

(continued from part 1)
Those were the times when the term "richness" was slowly gaining ground and producers often used the words "richness" and "quality" interchangeably (though not much has changed since). No one really knew what the correlation between quality and the amount poured into the production was and consequently cliches like "every penny spent would appear on the screen", "there never was a compromise on the quality", "whatever the director asked for was provided for" started to become common parlance. The reason was the big elephant in the room that no one talked about - producer's ignorance. In all the earnest eagerness to please the star and/or to kowtow to the demands of the director, the producer forgot his primary responsibility, which was to count the pennies put into production, and importantly, demanding the reason/justification for the expenditure. Lavish sets, exotic locales and other eye-candy tried to make up for (or account for) the deficiencies in the script. Amidst all the humdrum associated with handling a high profile production, the producer forgot the cardinal rule of film making, that huge budgets often work to the detriment of the written word. The contrary is also true - creativity truly shines in the face of minimalism. If what could be achieved through the glitter of glamor, can be had at a fraction of the cost, with the sparkle of the written word, then there simply was no reason to over-fund the production and pad it with other costly extraneous and unnecessary items. Usha Kiron unit was founded on that common sense principle and almost all of their ventures clearly reflected their disdain for expenditure, holding the writing team more responsible and accountable for the overall quality of the movie. Though it is a bit unfair to accord the entire credit and success of all Usha Kiron productions to Ramoji Rao alone, while ignoring his creative department, considered to be one of the strictest and most miserly in the business, without his seal of approval and without his business philosophy of insisting on bare-bone budgets to maximize creativity, movies like Mayuri, Aswini, Chithram and the like, would have never seen the light of the day.

And heralding the era of minimal budget, yet highly profitable, ventures, was the movie that was arguably the funniest one ever made in telugu - "Srivaariki praemalaekha". Usha Kiron's entry into movie making coincided with Jandhyala's meteoric rise as a star writer, who had a string for low budget films like "nelavanka", "mudda mandAram", "nAlugu sthambAlATa" already to his credit. In the new production, Jandhyala stripped his high quality script off any cost-inducing setups, staging the movie more as a glorified drama, only avaialing the editing and musical score faculties pertaining to the film lingua franca. Whatever sacrifices the movie made in regard to the look, it more than made up for it in sound. Probably one other movie released a couple of years ago with almost similar budgetary restrictions, could compete with "Srivaariki..." in terms of hilarity per screen time quotient. "gOpAlrAvu gAri ammaayi" shares the same bare-bone wasted away look, but the audiences were so transfixed by the proceedings of the screen that it never occurred to them even for a moment, that the movie lacked sets, stars, or foreign locations, that were mandatory and prescribed items for success back then. "Srivaariki..." also had the added advantage of being backed by a studio that already had solid infrastructure in place that the movie could readily make use of, further cutting down on the production costs (Ushodaya offices that doubled as hero's company's locations, the areas in and around Dolphin hotel that accounted for a few more shooting locations etc), and the well oiled publicity and distribution machinery, that chipped in to maximize every penny of the investment and turn into pure box office gold. The success of "Srivaaariki..." was quite a validation to the penurious philosophy and an auspicious start for a fledgling film company.

There is nothing more dramatic than a human life, said a wise man once. Vagaries, twists and turns, unforeseen results, bitter/sweet endings - real life had it all. Ignoring the drama of every day life in the search of even more dramatic stories with even more twists and turns, does not make common sense, leave alone business sense. Human interest stories, which have been the fodder of Hollywood ever since its inception, had never met with the same kind of enthusiasm in the Indian film fora, telugu included. If movies were meant as an escape from reality, why would anyone want to reflect the everyday life back on the silver screen again, remained the stock reply of the producers. Until, one such story plucked out of an obscure magazine article and passed on to the Usha Kiron story department, was made into a fine movie that captured the essence of human spirit in the face of adversity. Though dramatized a bit for the movie, the loss of the leg of the real life Mayuri (Sudha Chandran), who was a trained classical dancer before her accident, was as much real, as her struggle to overcome her handicap and step on the stage once again, this time with an artificial leg. Her story, as scripted by fate in the first part and by determination and sheer will in the second, was more dramatic and inspirational, than anything that could be concocted by human imagination. Here, the suffering was real, the struggle was real, and the success that followed was even more real, sans the swelling background score, with the clanking cymbals, and the key characters raising their heads and hands towards the heavens in slow motion. While Hollywood has many many movies that can termed as inspirational ("Schindler's List", "Gandhi", "Chariots of Fire" and many such), that reflected the human condition, one of the most prolific film industries in the country, the telugu industry, could come up with only ONE, JUST ONE, movie that could be called uplifting, in all this time. Never before and never since.

The making of the movie, Mayuri, was no accident. In fact it is the perfect symbiosis of art and reality, business and creativity, print and visual media. The article about Sudha Chandran appeared in a non-local publication, which was routinely picked up by the Ushodaya news media, and was passed on the Usha Kiron movie unit for a possible exploration of the article as the basis for a movie idea. The actual circumstances of her accident, recuperation and her resurgence might have been different from what was portrayed on the screen. But the resolve, strength and struggle remained just the same, which could, and was, translated on to a different medium, without the loss of any information or even the emotions. By creating a conducive environment for the flow of ideas from one medium to another, Ramoji Rao laid the foundation for a well-spring of a human interest stories that his movie unit could dip into and draw out of. When most the reviews for his movies used the phrase "ripped from the headlines", they truly were. A producer was much more than mere money bags. He should be able to look at a story (real or otherwise) and determine whether the idea has enough dramatic legs to it to carry forward a movie. And years of sitting in the editorial board meetings of his highly successful newspaper, and determining which story goes on the front page and which would not make the final cut, Ramoji Rao developed enough instincts to see through the reality of life in the print medium, and dared to dramatize it in the movie medium. And one such instinct led to the making of, probably what remains as the best political movie ever made in telugu, "pratighaTana".

(continued in the part 3)

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