Mega Fanz

Ghantasala, SVR, Chiru Spl Article in South Scope

Chiranjeevi is the first south Indian actor to have been invited to attend the Oscar Awards presentation in 1987

TELUGU The great singer Ghantasala participated in the Quit India movement in 1942, and served 18 months in prison at Alipore and Bellary jails. He was convicted for rendering six patriotic songs. Each song fetched him three months' imprisonment. S V Ranga Rao was adjudged best actor at the 1964 Jakarta International Film Festival for his portrayal of Keechaka in Narthansala. It is the first time that an Indian actor received an international award in acting.

Surprisingly, this fact is not wellknown among many people.

After getting the award he felt very sad that his own country couldn't honour his talent even though it is accepted by all Indian film fraternity that no one can ever match to SVR's acting prowess. SVR and Gummadi went to the International Film Festival in Spain for the film Raju Peda where they met Richard Attenborough. SVR played Peda (meaning `poor') and, Attenborough commented that SVR should have played the `king'.

SVR's charisma worked even on strangers. Chiranjeevi is the first south Indian actor to have been invited to attend the Oscar Awards presentation in 1987. TAMIL Amin AR Rahman, AR Rahman's six year old son has lent his voice for a song which is still `in progress'. The song is to be used for the Hollywood film Couples Retreat. The film is a romantic comedy directed by Peter Billingsley and stars Vince Vaughn, Kristen Bell and Jason Bateman in lead roles. It is expected to release by the end of 2009.

Ride on the Side Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada South Scope

The Mani Ratnam directed Nayagan is undoubtedly one of the best gangster films ever made in India. But the Time Magazine listed the Kamal Hassan starrer among the 100 greatest films ever. The list was compiled by respected movie critics Richard Schickel and Richard Corliss in 2005.

It generated significant attention, receiving 7.8 million hits in its first week alone.
K Balachander, the director who has an uncanny knack of creating stars, first met Rajnikant at the film institute, where he was a student.

Balachander glanced at the dark young man and crisply asked him to meet him in his office the next day. When Rajnikant walked into his office gingerly, Balachander informed him he was going to act in his next film. Overwhelmed by the unexpected offer from a big director, Rajnikant just could not believe his ears. Later, Balachander confided in his close friend and associate Ananthu, "There is a fire in the young man's eyes. One day he will take Tamil Nadu by storm." How true the prediction turned out! Kamal Hassan has the distinction of being the actor with the most number of films submitted by India in contest for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Divya Spandana is considered to be the `golden girl' in the Kannada film industry as she has the success rate of close to 90 per cent in her career. Her luck, however, did not follow her to Tamil cinema, where her first film Kuthu bombed at the box office. Bangarada Manushya (1970) is the first Kannada film to have run for over two years, at the State Theatre in Bangalore. Kishan Shrikanth, aged nine is the youngest director in the world to have directed a movie. He directed the Kannada film C/o Footpath, about an orphaned boy.
In June 2006, Malayalam cinema made history with the release of its first-ever digital film, Moonnamathoral. While the digital format may not be new in the film world, what the distributors of this movie did different was to beam the film through satellite into the smaller and more distant theatres in the state. Mohanlal's 2008 film Akashagopuram, directed by P Kumaran was the most expensive Malayalam film ever, budgeted at about Rs 10 crore. The film, which was shot entirely in London, is adapted from Henrik Ibsen's play The Master Builder. Despite all the hype, however, the film played for barely two weeks in halls. Chemmeen (1965) directed by Ramu Karyat was the first South Indian film to bag the President's Golden Lotus Award for the best film. It is based on the famous novel of the same name by Malayalam writer Takazhi Shivashanakara Pillai. Actor Mohanlal has singlehandedly distributed more films in his home state of Kerala than the NFDC did.

These are usually films belonging to the parallel cinema genre, such as Santosh Sivan's The Terrorist.