Ad guru Prahlad Kakkar recalled a campaign that he spearheaded in the 1970s, which involved putting the comedic actor Paintal‘s head literally inside a lion’s mouth. Of course, the actor wasn’t particularly excited to do this, but Prahlad narrated the story of how he got him to agree, and the darkly humorous interaction that he had with the client behind the campaign.
In a chat with Cyrus Broacha on the sidelines of the launch of his autobiography, one of Prahlad’s old colleagues brought up the lion story, and said, “I don’t know if you remember this, but in 1977 or 78, you were doing an ad for Bush radios. Prahlad needed a guy to come and play with a lion, so Prahlad hires this lion, brings him into the studio, and makes him sit on a chair. And then he gets this comedian to talk to the lion, and he tells the comedian – I can’t remember his name – that he has to put his head in the lion’s mouth.”
As Prahlad laughed, he informed the gathering that it was Paintal. The colleague continued, “Paintal said, ‘Nothing doing’. And Prahlad literally caught him, held him down, tells one of his guys to get him a bottle of rum, empties the bottle of rum in Paintal. Paintal is totally drunk, he opens the lion’s mouth and sticks his head into it, and Prahlad got the shot.”
Prahlad offered some more context about the campaign as a whole, and said that they shot a series of ads with Paintal. “Kamlesh Pandey had written this brilliant script, where Paintal was playing four roles. He was playing the role of a dying patriarch, and his son, daughter, daughter-in-law, and he’s leaving them parts of his will. They’re all waiting for him to say the last bit, and he closes his eyes, but they wake him up and ask about the Bush two-in-one, and he says, ‘I’m taking that with me’.”
Prahlad recalled that when they made the pitch the Bush family, they were incensed. The eldest son summoned the boss of the advertising firm and informed him that he’d just lost his own father that morning, and that he didn’t find the script funny at all, because his family members were fighting each other over inheritance in that moment. But because they were putting the pitch together, nobody in Prahlad’s team had read the newspaper that morning, and they weren’t aware that the patriarch had died.
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