Megastar Chiranjeevi graced audio function of “TEJ, I LOVE U” movie , Sai Dharam Tej in the lead and produced by KS Rama Rao. KS Rama Rao on his banner of Creative commercials, produced many movies with Chiranjeevi and most of them were blockbusters. But both ad some gap later. Chiranjeevi explained the reasons openly during this audio function about his rift with KS Rama Rao.
KS Rama Rao produced several movies with Chiranjeevi as hero and Kodandarami Reddy as director. Most of those movies based on novels written by Yandamuri veerendranath. In fact it was KS Rama Rao’s “Marana mrudangam” movie that gave him the tag of Mega star. Until then he was tagged as ‘Supreme Hero’. The last movie they workd together was ‘Stuartpuram police station’ that was biggest disaster in Chiranjeevi career that time. After that disaster, they both did not work together for any other movie.
‘Stuartpuram police station’ movie was directed by Yandamuri Veerendranath himself. Many people think that it was his debut movie as director. But actually this was his second movie as director and the first movie “Agni Pravesham” was also a big flop. Chiranjeevi explained during the audio function that, KS Rama Rao actually asked Chiranjeevi to change the director but it was Chiranjeevi who insisted Yandamuri Veerendranath to be continued as director for this movie. That decision proved costly for the producer. During those days, even flop movies of Chiranjeevi used to recover the cost of production and there was no major disaster movie from him. But “Stuartpuram police station” defied all the calculations. Chiranjeevi remarked that he was responsible for that flop. Because even though the producer wanted to change the director, he did not obliged it.
Actually Yandamuri Veerendranath himself analysed why this movie became biggest flop in some of his books like – “ Vijayaniki 5 metlu” and “ Popular rachanalu cheyadam elaa”. He also told same thing that after working for couple of days, even before producers wanted to change the director, he himself went and told Chiranjeevi that – he may not be able to justify the role as director and asked him to relieve from the role and he will work only as writer for that movie. However, Yandamuri added, “ Chiranjeevi felt I have the capability of becoming a good director and he encouraged me. But I lost interest on direction completely and did a very lousy job”. He even apologized for not being able to live up to the expectations of Chiranjeevi. It is to be noted that, reviewers those days reviewed – “ the film had a novel point but failed purely because of direction failure”
Anyway KS Rama Rao later bounced back with other hits, so is Chiranjeevi. And Yandamuri moved from fiction writing to self help genre.
-ZURAN