Adarsh Gourav (Kho Gaye Hum Kahan, Guns & Gulaabs) plays the director Nasir in the film, while Vineet Kumar Singh essays the role of the late Farogh Jafri, who penned the parodies and Shashank Arora is the late Shafique Shaikh, the thin, meek actor who plays Superman in Yeh Hai Malegaon Ka Superman. Nasir says when he came to know that a film was being made on his life, he was curious as to who was playing him. “When Adarsh ji’s name came up, I started watching his films,” he says. “I saw The White Tiger and gathered that he is a film lover. When I went on the set of Superboys for the first time and saw him act, there were some scenes where I thought to myself ‘It would be great if he does it this way’ and he did it exactly like that.”While Adarsh spent two weeks shadowing Nasir in Malegaon in order to get into the character (they also made another film in this brief time, a spoof amalgamation of Krantiveer and Hera Pheri), Varun too visited the place to fetch for stories. “There were so many tales that at one time I told Reema and Zoya that Superboys of Malegaon should actually be a series,” he says. “When I went to Malegaon, I met and spoke to the people who became the characters in the film. That rarely happens.”One of the characters written by Varun, Farogh (Vineet Kumar Singh), based on Nasir’s late writer Farogh Jafri, in a crucial scene, after his film idea is shunned, screams in frustration: ‘Writer baap hota hai, writer (The writer is the father!).” A line, improvised by Vineet on set, but which gives form to frustrations of probably all screenwriters in the industry. “I would have probably written the writer is both baap (father) and maa (mother). They are the originators of the story,” says Varun.When Hindi cinema is going through a bleak time, statements like “content is king” float around, but writers still don’t get adequately remunerated and in worse cases even not credited for their work. Since Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, there haven’t been any star-screenwriters. “It’ a systemic problem,” says Reema. “The dire state of writers reflects in the kind of films we are making. I wish to see writers get the kind of respect they got back then (in the times of Salim-Javed). But instead of things getting better, now certain platforms have a policy to not credit even the crew of the film. You want a writer to write better, better pay him enough so he doesn’t have to do ten other jobs to support his family.”
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