Boney Kapoor slaps 'Sridevi' with legal notice: Well played Ram Gopal Varma!

Following a spate of disastrous films like The Attacks of 26/11 and Satya 2, Ram Gopal Varma is all set to return to silver screen with a film titled Sridevi.  The first look of the film was launched recently and actress Sridevi’s husband, Boney Kapoor wasn’t amused to see a woman flaunting her midriff in a saree, as a teenage boy looked lecherously at her , on the poster of the film. Reportedly, the film is about a teenage boy’s infatuation with a much older woman.

Needless to say, that the woman in the poster isn’t actress Sridevi. One of the stories doing the rounds of the internet is Varma didn’t seek the actress’s permission before using her name in the title, which infuriated Sridevi and her husband. Though there is no ground to prove that the filmmaker is referring to her in the film, the actress and her producer-director husband took offence.

The fact that Boney Kapoor slapped a legal notice on Varma indicates that there is more to the story than what is obvious.

Reports suggest that Kapoor feared that because the title of Varma’s film is Sridevi, the audiences may be misled into believing that the film is actually about his wife. Since the film has already been labelled ‘sleazy’ for its first-look and content, Kapoor is possibly reacting to the use of his wife’s name in the film with alarm.

However, unless Kapoor thinks that Indian film audiences have the intelligence less than that of pigeons, there is no real reason for alarm. It is evident from the film’s plotline, available just a click away on the internet, that it has no resemblance to anything we know about Sridevi, the actor.

What Boney Kapoor did, however, by slamming RGV over the title of the film, is give the latter the kind of publicity that he wouldn’t have garnered otherwise. Given Ram Gopal Varma’s less than flattering track record over the past few years, the film might have just come and gone without making much of a dent on either our pockets or Sridevi’s reputation.

But by kicking up a fuss over the name, Kapoor gifted RGV’s film a whole new audience who might want to watch the film just out of curiosity.

Ram Gopal Varma’s publicity machinery deserves one good pat on its back for making sure that there is enough fodder for the media and the gossip mills to chew on. First Varma reportedly changed the name of the film to Sridevi from Savitri. While the filmmaker might cry himself hoarse saying that his film has nothing to do with the actor, it is clear that he wants to cash in on the curiosity that will be stoked once he names the movie after the yesteryear’s sex symbol. There is no denying the fact that Sridevi, in her heydays, was a rage among teenage boys for her raw sex appeal.

Now, his PR machinery has released stories in the media claiming Varma had a huge crush on Sridevi in his youth . The filmmaker has dutifully come out and declared after that, his film that nothing to do his past infatuation with the actor. However, his team has successfully made sure that the audiences are suitably lured into checking out the film, if only to guess whether any aspect of the movie can be linked to the actor and the director’s lives.

In fact, Varma put up a Facebook post as follows: “In the legal notice sent to me, there seems to be an apprehension that the film Sridevi is based on a crush I personally had for Sridevi in my college years…I, many times over the last 5 years expressed this publicly in both the media and also to her which was taken by all concerned in a humorous and healthy spirit.”

Finally, with Boney Kapoor stepping in as an adarsh bharatiya husband defending the honour of his wife against her alleged ‘admirer’, the incident has acquired epic Bollywood proportions - two men fighting over a gorgeous woman!

Reports suggest that when Kapoor heard about the name change, he tried to contact the filmmaker but Varma did not answer his calls and instead send him a Whatsapp text which was a press release.

Sridevi is a Telugu film, least likely to have interested a lot of Hindi film watchers. But after this ‘controversy’, the film is sure to grab some eyeballs. Let’s hope Varma is getting his subtitles ready!