Hollywood laps up Taj script for Rs 2 crore

MUMBAI: Hollywood clearly has a yen for the Taj. Months after Sir Ben Kingsley made his announcement about a film based on the celebrated mausoleum of love, Krishna Shah has sold the rights of his script Taj for a mind-boggling Rs 2 crore. GenNow may not have a clue about who Shah is, but the Hollywood-based film-maker created a flutter way back in 1978 when he brought Hollywood stars Rex Harrison, John Saxon and Sylvia Miles together with Bollywood stud Dharmendra and sex siren Zeenat Aman in one of India's most expensive films, Shalimar . The Yale-UCLA graduate later set up his company, Double Helix Films, in the West. Confirming to TOI that he had sold his script to Hollywood producers for an impressive USD 4,75,000 (nearly Rs 2 crore, making each page of the 122-page script worth Rs 1.63 lakh), Shah said, "Hollywood pays its scriptwriters well. Manoj Night Shyamalan can get five million dollars for a script without batting an eyelid. But in India, scriptwriters are still paid Rs 15-20 lakh for a script, which is a pity. Leading men here charge Rs 5-7 crore for a film but writers are shortchanged." According to Hollywood trade journal Variety , the film will cost 25 million dollars and will be produced by Michael A Simpson, Judy Cairo, Ken Atchity and Chi-Li Wong. (Shah had also got feelers from Hollywood biggies like Ridley Scott, Michael Rymer and Silvio Sardi, besides Indian producer Ramoji Rao.) The casting for Taj is under way, but Shah says that since he is only the scriptwriter, he won't be in on it. "The director will finalise the cast," he says. "I assume it will have a mix of Hollywood and Indian actors because that is a requirement in the script." claimed, India-born director Michael Radford to helm the film. Radford's Il Postino is the highest grossing foreign language film in the history of world cinema. Kingsley's version will reportedly cover the death of Mumtaz Mahal and then go on to the construction of the Taj (which took 20 years' of work by 20,000 masons) and Shah Jehan's subsequent imprisonment by his son in Agra Fort. Shah's version, on the other hand, is likely to focus on the emotional conflict between Shah Jahan and his stepmother Queen Noor, who was completely opposed to his love marriage to Mumtaz Mahal.