Nasir Shaikh, sleeves with antelop jacket rolled, used a camera like a pocket mirror to touch her hair. He then stepped on the red carpet (actually blue) and stood under a banner dedicated to film giants like Chaplin, Scorsese and Spielberg.
His own films, the lush production “Do alone” made with a simple camcorder and acting line -up, were about so far from the large budget blockbusters as it could be. Still, he was here in Mumbai, home of Bollywood, celebrated as a cinema dreamer, attended the opening A movie based on his life.
He put one leg forward, rammed his thumb in his jeans pocket and smiled with cameras.
“Here, sir, here!” The photographs shouted. “Nasir, sir! Nasir, sir! “
Three decades ago, Mr. Shaikh was a student at the “Video Salon” of his family, as they were called and called films about pirate and unlicensed films. He had an idea: why did Malegaon, his small town of textile mills, couldn’t have less than 200 miles than Mumbai, have his own film industry?
His “Mollywood” formula was Shoesting. He and his friends would recreate popular films, but has changed enough to avoid copyright problems. Since there has already been so much sadness in his deluded city, every movie would be comedy. Workers and waiters at a restaurant would play heroes and villains in parcels who felt close to the house, speaking dialogue of their own streets.
The VHS camera, Mr. Shaikh, who is now 52 years old, has used her wound films, also used to make a wedding. Costumes came from saving stores. The actors were friends who did not get a salary, although Mr. Shaikh tried to find replacements for their shifts at the mill or restaurant.
For Spoof “Superman”, Mr. Shaikh threw a cunning textile worker as a hero. On one step, Malegon’s steel man struggles with a local tobacco Don that destroys human health; In the second, he dives into the channel to save the children. (Little was important for editing that he couldn’t swim in real life.)
This superman could fly, binding it horizontally to a pole stretching from a moving wagon, and the assistant hovered a robe to simulate the wind or shoot it in front of a green screen that hung on the side of the truck. This Superman could synchronize his lips and dance with heroin in the yellow flower field.
“Why not?” She was the philosophy of Mr. Shaikh. “Why not?” was his attitude.
His productions have crept into something universal: the dream of something more in the place where the routine is suffocating and every mobility is out of reach.
Mr. Shaikh’s entry in Moviemaking – a scary endeavor in the time before smartphones and a light digital creation – was part of a solution to the encouragement of the Piracy Police for which the city video salons fought for content.
His films, most parodies of Bollywood hits, have become wild successful in Malegon. When his first movie started in salons, he brought four times over a few hundred dollars of borrowed money he and his friends spent to make it.
“Two months, constantly, the movie launched” House full ” – three shows a day,” said Mr. Shaikh. National news channels rushed to the city to interview him.
Varun Grover, who wrote a screenplay for a new movie about Mr. Shaikhu, “Superboys of Malegaon”, said most children in India were adults wanting to become a crunch or film star, although the odds of any are impossible little ones.
The story of Malegon “is not only inspiring to those who want to come to the cinema, but also for every person who dreams of at night, but moves from it in the morning,” said Mr. Grover. “They turned their dreams into the reality of their days.”
For his first project, Mr. Shaikh chose the parody of the movie “Sholay”, from the time of “Angry young man” in Bollywood in the 1970s and 1980s, his formative years.
For copyright issues, signs names, only so much is adapted. Gabbar Singh, a villain from “Shlay” and One of the most recognizable characters of Indian cinemabecame a tire of singh. Basanti, the heroin he abducts, has become a basmati.
In order for the actors to play, he would seek some similarity – in height or eyes or voice.
“We couldn’t find the original heroes in those parts,” Mr. Shaikh said. “Duplicates would do that.”
In one of the most famous scenes of “Sholay”, Thunder Gabbar Singha, on a horse, the train is sitting, wearing the protagonist of the film. There was no chance that Mr. Shaikh could afford horses or train. So his heroes made by bus. And rubber singh robberies? “I said,” Let’s do one thing – we put robbers on the bikes, all the robbers on the bikes, “Mr. Shaikh recalled.
But as he achieved success, he found – as many do in India – a bureaucracy that is waiting. After their initial films, the police would not allow projections unless Mr. Shaikh received certificates from the Censorship Committee. In order to get the approval for one movie, he had to travel forward repeatedly to Mumbai all year.
The industry also changed: Video salons switched off with an increase in multiplex cinemas and internet currents.
In the end, Mr. Shaikh moved on to make films. His family salon is now a clothing trade.
But his legend still existed because of a 2008 documentary. About the making of Malegon’s “Superman”.
At the New Delhi Film Festival, more than a decade ago, Mr. Shaikh approached Zoya Akhtar, a filmmaker whose father was a writer of many main films by Ere Angry Young Man, including “Sholay”. She wanted to produce a biopic.
“I know who you are,” Mr. Shaikh told her. “I copied all your father’s movies.”
The decade was needed for the biopic to test Mr. Shaikh’s patience on the screen. But he partly held the agreement because of how a full circle felt.
“It’s all pretty target,” said Adarsh Gourav, an actor who plays Mr. Shaikh.
Mr. Gourav grew up in a place unlike Malegaon. He remembers his first experiences at the only family cinema in Jamshedpur, his hometown. He would be on his older brother’s shoulders among the crowd outside the hall, waiting for the eyelids to open.
“There is like this metal bar, which looks somehow like a prison, and people are like rattling in prison, as they were basically screaming at the guards to open the door before the show,” he recalled. “And as soon as the door opens, everyone just runs inside as their life depends on him.”
Reema Kagti, director of a biography, who grew up in a small town in northeastern India, said her passion for a small -scale crowd allowed her to explore the basic questions about what the cinema means in places where there is little more.
“This movie is needed to capsulation of many things, starting with cinema magic. Why are we going to the cinema? Why do we need a cinema?” Mrs. Kagti said. “Why do we have to see each other represented in art?”
Much has changed to Malegon from Moviem Days Mr. Shaikh. But the passion for China and the escape that offers remains. In at least one traffic alley, even old video salons are still working.
In a recent evening, men – and only men – they got rid of. (Malegaon is a deep patriarchal place, a fact that is reflected in Mr. Shaikh’s productions.) In the salons, men found a respite of 12 hours of mechanical sounds that occurred in the weaving mills. In 30 cents, they could lean for a few hours, turn on a cigarette and take away.
“There is nothing in these parts – just to work, work and work,” said Shabaz Attar, 25, who occasionally stops in salons.
The big posters that appeared in the alley were weather capsules: dramatic collages of bloody and bruises, with hand -painted signs that listed exhibitions and promised to “double action” worth money.
On one screen was a Hindi version of the 2014 Hollywood movie. (“Weird movie”, an older man muttered to his companion as he came out.) In the second hall, he was a 1995 Hindi movie called “Jallaad”, about a police officer, played by Mithun Chakraborty, trying to find out the truth about his parents.
“I bet even Mithun forgot that he made such a movie,” said Raes Dilawar, who runs Salone. “But we keep it here.”
His method of deciding which films to display?
“Whatever my heart wants,” he said with a smile. “If it works, it works. If not, so what?”
Last month, while promoting Biopic, Mr. Gourav returned to Malegaon, where he spent weeks working on understanding the world and passion of Mr. Shaikh, a man he would play on the screen.
The star and the subject started around town. Whenever Mr. Gourava’s passenger makeup passenger makeup or touched her forehead, Mr. Shaikh stepped down, pulled out the camera for the phone and fixed his own hair. He still thinks in frames, light and corner.
Their last stop was Mr. Shaikh’s home: a small apartment with an open roof yard above a series of shops in a crowded street. In anticipation of Mr. Gour’s visit, Mr. Shaikh came out in the morning and bought plastic flowers to decorate.
As the sunset came to prayer around Malegaon, uniformed bodyguards who came with Mr. Gourav from Mumbai tried to control a small crowd outside the building. One by one, Mr. Shaikh launched visitors to his roof for a photo with a star.
These days, Mr. Shaikh is somewhere between this between acknowledgment for his work and thinking in advance to projects that could be next, from YouTube shows to the big screen movies. He is a reflective, yet Fidget, like boxers in an insecure retirement.
But first, he wants to set up an electronics trade down for his sons, 20-year-old twins who have completed their studies.
“Then, with free mind, I can return to that,” he said.
