RGV SHELVES SRK

One of Bollywood's most anticipated projects has been the super team-up between director Ram Gopal Varma and megastar Shah Rukh Khan in a project called THE TIME MACHINE. Varma has always stayed away from the star system, preferring to mint his own celebrities (Manoj Bhajpai, Urmila Matondkar, Vivek Oberoi, Antara Mali) rather than wait for a brief window of opportunity in the schedule of the notoriosuly overworked superstars like Shah Rukh Khan. But in recent years he's started working with this calibre of celeb, like Amitabh Bachchan in last year's SARKAR.

THE TIME MACHINE was supposed to be RGV's next movie, but he just announced in an interview that it's been shelved. The reason? He couldn't "get" SRK's image. Says Varma:

"With Shah Rukh's project I felt I was going back to school. I hated school. It was like something that had to be done. It was work. See, I never grew up watching Shah Rukh. I was just informed that he's a superstar. On the other hand, Amitabh Bachchan is a superstar to me because I sat in the theaters of Hyderabad as a boy watching all his films. It didn't seem right to do a film just because he's supposed to be a superstar. In my heart I felt no enthusiasm or excitement."

So Varma's next project will now be his much-debated remake of the classic curry western, SHOLAY.