Bollywood

With Pangaa Na Lo, Om Puri and Satish Shah are doing a film together after Jaane Bho Do Yaaro (1983) - a rewind to the cult comedy that launched many careers. Batches of talented students were coming out of Pune’s Film and Television Institute, their heads brimming with ideas. Kundan Shah was one of them, and with him on his first film, were his friends from the Institute. Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, like most films produced by the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), was not an immediate success, because it did not get a wide release. But it launched many careers, and went on to head the list of the best comedies made in India. Vinod Chopra (Naseeruddin Shah) and Sudhir Mishra (Ravi Vaswani) are two professional photographers trying to start a photo studio. They get their first proper assignment from the investigative magazine Khabardar, with Shobha (Bhakti Barve) as its editor. In the course of their work, they discover that one of the biggest builders in Bombay, Tarneja (Pankaj Kapoor) is trying to bribe Municipal Commissioner D’Mello (Satish Shah) into giving him a contract for a flyover. D’Mello is also negotiating with Tarneja’s arch rival Ahuja (Om Puri). Quite by chance Vinod and Sudhir get a photo that shows that Tarneja has murdered D’Mello. The body goes missing, however, and it turns up at the drunken Ahuja’s house. They locate the cadaver take pictures of it and take it with them in the hope of exposing Tarneja. Between one comic incident and another, Vinod and Sudhir are on the run with the corpse, with Tarneja, Ahuja, the new Municipal Commissioner Srivastava (Deepak Qazir), Shobha and others in pursuit, resulting in a hilarious chase that ends up in a memorable climax at a Mahabharat nautanki performance, where the hapless corpse is dressed as Draupadi. The film was a non-stop laugh riot, which also included an anti-corruption message. Nearly a quarter of a century later, it remains as fresh and as entertaining as ever. Interesting Trivia: The two photographers were named after two crew members Sudhir Mishra and Vinod Chopra. The former assisted Kundan Shan on the film, appeared as a reporter in a scene and co-wrote the story and screenplay–he is a now a director himself. The latter, Chopra, was the production controller and appeared in a brief cameo as Dushaasan in the nautanki sequence - he is now an acclaimed filmmaker too. Satish Kaushik played a small part and co-wrote the dialogue-he is also a filmmaker and comic actor today.Neena Gupta and Deepak Qazir are now TV stars.Bhakti Barve was a Marathi stage star, who later married Shafi Inamdar. She appeared in just one more Hindi film-Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa. The collapse of the flyover shown in a TV news clip in the film was in fact footage of the real Byculla Bridge which collapsed in Mumbai. The film was made on such a shoestring budget that Naseeruddin Shah had to bring his own Nikon camera to the shootings to use as a prop for his character. At the end of the shooting, this camera was stolen! Anupam Kher was cast as a ‘disco killer’ in the film, but his portion was cut in the final edit. The park where the two photographers get their crucial picture was named Antonioni Park as tribute to the Italian director’s Blow Up, from where the idea of the blowing-up-of-photograph sequence was borrowed.

Original post by sonia