Chandra Barot Death: How The OG Don Director Changed The Game Of Bollywood After Dev Anand, Dharmendra Rejected Don

When Dev Anand and Dharmendra rejected Don

The film that pretty much everyone wanted to pass on at first (Dev Anand, Jitendra, Dharmendra… the whole lot), and get this: when it finally hit theatres in 1978, there was barely anyone in the audience. No one cared. For a few days, it looked like another flop was in the making.

Producer Nariman Irani, who was already knee-deep in debt after his first film bombed, got a nudge from his friends—Amitabh Bachchan, Zeenat Aman, and director Chandra Barot—to give it one more shot. They even convinced him to work with them for free unless the movie actually made money. That’s how desperate things were.

Now, the story itself was a struggle to get off the ground. Salim-Javed, the legendary writing duo, couldn’t find a single taker for their script.

Ironically, it was Nariman’s wife, Salma, who happened to be Waheeda Rehman’s hairdresser, that slipped the script to the right people through Waheeda herself. In Bollywood, luck sometimes comes from the most unexpected places.

Finally, Nariman Irani decided to trust his gut and registered the film under the name “Don”—a title that both Salim-Javed and Chandra Barot liked. The soundtrack? Absolute fire. Kalyanji-Anandji crafted songs that would become classics, and here’s a quirky tidbit: ‘Khaike Paan Banaras Wala’ was originally written for a completely different movie (Banarasi Babu, with Dev Anand).

The cast ended up being a who’s who of Bollywood in the late ’70s: Amitabh Bachchan (pulling double duty as both Don and his lookalike, Vijay), Zeenat Aman, Pran, Helen, and a handful of other legends. \

The film, directed by Chandra Barot and penned by Salim-Javed, wasn’t just your average thriller—it turned Amitabh Bachchan into an icon and rewrote the rules for Bollywood blockbusters.

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