Box Office Badshah

With a strike rate of over 95 percent, Sajid Nadiadwala is arguably the most successful producer in Bollywood

- RAJIV SINGH

Liberty Cinema, Mumbai, 1997. It was February 6, a quiet Thursday night. There was no queue for tickets outside the theatre in Marine Lines, South Mumbai, for the 9 pm show— the last before blockbuster Friday, when new films hit the screen.

Inside the cinema hall, the dark hid the empty seats. Sajid Nadiadwala, dressed in his favourite black T-shirt and blue jeans—was getting fidgety. The 30-year-old film producer had organised a private screening. The film was Judwaa, his fourth under Nadiadwala Grandson Entertainment (NGE), which debuted in 1992 with Waqt Hamara Hai.

Sitting next to Nadiadwala in the last row were six friends, including a distributor. Throughout the film’s running time of two-and-a-half hours, the buddies remained mum. After the screening, they looked pensive. “Picture theek hai (The film is okay),” deadpaned one of them. The grandson—that’s how friends addressed Nadiadwala because his grandfather AK Nadiadwala dabbled in production in 1948—sensed that they were trying to be polite.

The stocky film distributor, dressed in all white, couldn’t help himself, and moved his hand over Nadiadwala’s head to express sympathy. “It seemed as if they were at a condolence meet,” recalls Nadiadwala. Judwaa, he thought to himself, was meant to be a comedy, but there was not a peal of laughter from any of the six viewers in those two-and-a-half hours.

The unforeseen reaction took him into flashback mode. Two years back, a newspaper hack had taken a dig at Nadiadwala’s decision to make a movie with Salman Khan, because of the rough patch that the actor was going through. “Ek Salman