Heat, Dust and Celluloid

Merchant Ivory was the most enduring partnership in cinema: Ismail Merchant, the producer who could charm money out of thin air; James Ivory, the American director of A Room with a View and Howards End, who became an Oscar winner for Call Me by Your Name; and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the only writer to have won both the Booker Prize and an Oscar.

Our story starts in the early 1980s, when Merchant Ivory’s golden age was still to come. With two decades of film-making behind them, they turned to their most ambitious project to date: an adaptation of Ruth’s prizewinning novel Heat and Dust, weaving a scandal in 1920s colonial India with a present-day story, to be shot on location with Julie Christie and Shashi Kapoor.

Ismail is irrepressible. He has no office, so he borrows a corner of a publisher’s post room. He has no money either, so he works the Soho phone boxes with a pocketful of coins, assuring investors the stars are signed and the stars that the money is in place. By the time the crew lands in Hyderabad, the question is how long Ismail can keep the camera turning before the truth catches up with him.

Behind the elegant veneer we associate with Merchant Ivory lay something much closer to guerrilla film making. Imagined from the memories of those who survived it, Vinay Patel’s drama tells it the way they remember it, held together by charm and bluff, and a love letter to the art of making films against the odds.

Vinay Patel is the writer of the RTS award-winning Murdered by My Father and Doctor Who’s Demons of the Punjab. Alongside the drama we hear from the people who were there, among them James Ivory and Greta Scacchi, whom Heat and Dust made a star.

Ismail . . . . . Shubham Saraf
Jim . . . . . David Menkin
Ruth . . . . . Debbie Chazen
Greta . . . . . Madeleine Gray
Paul . . . . . Paul Heath
Shashi . . . . . Narinder Samra
Walter . . . . . David Holt
Kevin . . . . . Jack Nuttall
Clerk . . . . . Sumaiya Chaudhhary

Developed with the support of Richard Macrory. With special thanks to James Ivory, Greta Scacchi, Paul Bradley, Humphrey Dixon, Chris Cormack, John Pym, Barry Sack and Zakiya Powell.

The programme contains extracts from Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's novel Heat and Dust.

Production Co-ordinators . . . . . Sara Benaim, Emma McDonald
Technical Producers . . . . . Andrew Garratt, Sam Dickinson
Sound Design . . . . . Peter Ringrose
Writer . . . . . Vinay Patel
Producer and Director . . . . . Sasha Yevtushenko

A BBC Studios production.

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