Producer reveals how movies with Pawan Kalyan, Nagarjuna fell apart

Distributor-turned-producer Avula Giri has spoken to IndiaGlitz about a project he had meticulously planned with Pawan Kalyan back in the late 1990s, only to receive a jolt. A distributor of films like ‘Kushi’, ‘Aadi’ and ‘Idiot’, Giri was also a partner of Dil Raju in the 1990s.

“In the late 1990s, I planned a film with Pawan Kalyan as the hero. The scripting work was done for six to eight months. I tried my best to get an appointment with Pawan Kalyan. In the meanwhile, however, my partner told the actor that the script doesn’t look promising. No matter how much I tried to get in touch with Pawan later, my attempts didn’t bear fruit,” Giri tells us.

Giri recalls the days of ‘Toli Prema’. “I bought the movie for Rs 81 lakh in Nizam. Just in a single theatre at Hyderabad’s RTC ‘X’ Roads, it made more than that amount. For 175 days, it had a deficit-free run at the theatre. You call a movie deficit-free when the distributor doesn’t have to pay the theatre any amount for the shortfall in revenue. Pawan Kalyan was not a superstar until ‘Toli Prema’ came. After that movie, he became a big name,” Giri says.

Giri also shares an interesting project that he had planned with Nagarjuna, Bollywood actress Madhuri Dixit and AR Rahman back in 1998. “I, my partner Mahendar Reddy and someone else started a movie in the combination of Nagarjuna, Madhuri Dixit and Rahman in 1998. When Nagarjuna listened to the story, he said that it feels like an art movie. It was not commercial enough as per him. And Madhuri Dixit’s stardom was on the decline, with flops in a row. Those were the days when I wanted to become a big producer. Nag didn’t take an advance. I had paid an advance of Rs 50 lakh to Madhuri Dixit. The film had the backdrop of displacement and rehabilitation of people displaced by dam-building. Nag was to play an Engineer, while Madhuri was to play a victim of the dam construction,” Avula Giri adds.