First silver jubilee film, family drama

With ‘Mosagallaki Mosagadu’ we missed the family audience. So we decided to do a film with that genre. My brother Hanumantha Rao, resigned from his government job and joined our film production. He was very good at stories and screenplay and that’s how we started ‘Pandanti Kapuram’ (1972). His name also appeared for the first time as a producer with that film. The inspiration for this family drama was the Hollywood film ‘The Visit’ and the Hindi film ‘Do Raaste’. It had a big star cast like SV Ranga Rao, Prabhakar Reddy, Gummadi, Devika, B Saroja Devi with Krishna and Vijaya Nirmala as lead pair. Jamuna played an important role in it. Initially, we wanted to cast Bhanumanthi, but somehow she didn’t do it. Jamuna was a very popular lead actress at that time, but there was a negative shade too, but she accepted it and got a very good name.
There was a big talk at that time that Bhanumanthi is making a film with the same story, so we completed it within a month. This film was a silver jubilee hit. NT Rama Rao the chief guest for the 100 days function.