A pregnancy shelved Pahlaj-Abhishek’s film

This is one of the untold stories of Bollywood. Wonder why no other section of the media stumbled upon it even after 28 years. It may be recalled that on Saturday, we brought you a detailed story of how most filmmakers are wary of signing a heroine who’s married because she might get pregnant midway through their film and are either unable to shoot or their weight gain allegedly disturbs the continuity.
Well, if we had asked senior film maker Pahlaj Nihalani while we were working on that story, you would have got this scoop yesterday. Anyway, we don’t believe in holding things back as long as they are true.
So this news story is one such that needs to be told.

Way back in 1993, Nihalani had signed up Abhishek Kapoor (who has directed ‘Kai Po Che’, ‘Rock On’, ‘Kedarnath’, ‘Fitoor’) as a hero in one of his films. The film had Rohit Shetty as a third AD (Assistant Director) and Kuku Kohli (Aruna Irani’s husband) as director. The film was 11 reels complete, which included 4 songs, when suddenly one day the team was jolted to learn that the film’s leading lady had got pregnant. Pahlaj tells us that the girl had a boyfriend in Hong Kong and she pleaded with him to relieve her from the film in progress. The girl’s mother even offered to pay up for Pahlaj’s losses as she envisaged that he will replace his daughter with someone else.
But Pahlaj told her to take it easy. However, he did ask them if the girl could somehow manage to complete her part as he would do a bit of a manipulation and shoot her remaining portions quickly in 20 – 21 days. The mother politely declined Pahlaj’s offer and shared with him that her daughter’s boyfriend had decided he would marry her daughter very soon and his parents were averse to their daughter-in-law being in movies.

Pahlaj says, “It was I who changed Gattu’s name to Abhishek which he uses in films now. Naturally, he was very excited about this film that he was doing with me as it had him in a very powerful role. The film was titled ‘Ek Aur Kohinoor’ and it would have been my next after the Govinda-Chunky Panday hit, ‘Aankhen’. There was a point when ‘Aankhen’ and ‘Ek Aur Kohinoor’ were being shot at the same time. I cannot tell you the heroine’s name as she went away from the film world but she was a new face.”

But the stage that was set up for ‘Ek Aur Kohinoor’ went up in smoke. Pahlaj decided to shelve the film as any further proceedings which would involve a reshoot would’ve escalated the cost big time.

Consequently, Pahlaj and Gattu were definitely disappointed. Ditto for the remaining cast of the film – Raj Babbar, Sadashiv Amrapurkar amongst others. But who can defeat destiny?

So now you know now, if at all you stumble in some corner of the internet that ‘Ek Aur Kohinoor’ completed just 10 – 11 reels, why it so happened.

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