I am a 90s kid which essentially meant that I was way past the golden years of the Hindi Film Industry of the 70s which was ruled by the writing duo of Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar. But, I still remember sitting to watch the reruns of their iconic films with my grandparents as a child, while being enamoured by the various scenes and dialogues. And what this documentary does is tap into the nostalgia of their filmography in a rather pulpy manner with anecdotes from a plethora of film stars along the way. While the documentary is a three part series, almost like three acts of a film that highlight the early days, the rise to the top and their ultimate separation, the documentary does its bit in allowing the viewers to invest in their journeys, which itself was inspirational.

The struggles of Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar cannot be discounted while celebrating their super stardom. And the early days of failure definitely makes the journey even more sweeter. The entire first act is dedicated to their early footprints in the film industry with one being a struggling actor who never rose to fame with his acting chops, and the other, a film assistant who stumbled upon the writing process by sheer accident. This was particularly an interesting watch while being inspirational given how destiny had other plans for the duo. In between, the documentary does supplement some interesting anecdotes about their personal lives(including their early days with family), and how the scars of their initial days was fuel to produce some of the most memorable outings in the years to follow with the first huge outburst being Zanjeer, that was not only a career defining film for Mr Amitabh Bachchan but also the start of the legend of the writing duo Salim-Javed.

The year 1975 will go down as one of the iconic years of the Hindi Film Industry, particularly if you retrospect the 2 huge contributions of Salim-Javed in the form of Sholey and Deewar, both of which released in the same year. And both films have a legend of their own to boast of, given that the dialogues of both films are still used today, even in our daily lives. And each film had a story to tell from a writing point of view, something that the documentary highlights pretty well through the interviews of Javed Akhtar and Salim Khan themselves. The idea of a film being written off, only to emerge from the ashes like a phoenix to be the then longest running film in the history of Indian Cinema, is a story that needed to be highlighted at a time when the entire Box Office game is of the first weekend. And it is another reminder on how irrelevant we critics are, and we can never be a great judge of cinema in terms of forming opinions. I also liked how the documentary wasn’t just an image white-washing and crowd pleasing work, only highlighting the highs of the duo. Even the case of pride and overconfidence coming in way of writing films, was nicely touched upon, even as the people around them called them out in whispers to be ‘arrogant’. The harsh truth of the film industry celebrating the failures more than the success is a known fact, and also validated by a couple of guests on the show. The screenplay here is well written by also being successful in transporting the viewers to the bygone era of dissatisfaction(years later also seen today), something that the writer duo of Salim-Javed tapped into rather well.