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Sholay at Minerva: The Film That Ran for Five Years

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Sholay at Minerva

Sholay opened in August 1975 to quiet houses and reviews that called it a failure. Within weeks word of mouth turned it into the longest running film in Indian history, playing at Minerva in Mumbai for five years. Siddharth talks to the son of a Minerva projectionist and to a Polydor executive who sold the dialogue cassettes.

  • The first week, the flat reviews and the decision not to recut
  • 70mm and stereophonic sound in a country of mono projectors
  • The dialogue records that outsold the soundtrack
  • The original ending with Thakur killing Gabbar, and the version that was released
  • Why Sholay changed how distributors booked films

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Transcript
Namaskar and welcome to Interval Bell. I am Siddharth Venkataraman, I spent eight years writing about Hindi films in Mumbai, and this is a show where we go back to one landmark film at a time and find out how it was made and how it was watched. There was only ever one place to start. Sholay, August 1975. The reviews were lukewarm, the first week was quiet, and the producers seriously discussed reshooting the ending. Then something happened that nobody in the industry had seen before. People came back. They came back for the dialogues, which they knew by heart from cassettes, and they came back to Minerva cinema for five straight years. Today we talk to the people who ran that theatre, and we hear the ending the censors would not allow. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts. The bell is ringing.
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