A poster of Dev Anand?s latest offering

Location: Fame (Hiland Park)

Time: 10.30 am

Film: Mr Prime Minister, first day, first show

Tickets sold: One

No prizes ? and certainly no movie tickets ? for guessing who the least popular Prime Minister in history has to be. Dev Anand, of course.

If there was a solitary viewer to watch the latest Dev Anand offering in the latest multiplex in town, things just got worse over the weekend. Reason enough for the Fame think tank to unseat Mr Prime Minister on Monday, marking a first in the plex history of the city.

?It is not viable to run a movie for one person, even though we did just that for the opening show,? reveals Ravi Raman, vice-president of Fame (Hiland Park). ?We had to take it off as the situation showed no signs of improving in the coming days.?

And it?s not as if Mr Prime Minister is winning any votes at the other Calcutta constituencies. 89 Cinemas (Swabhumi), too, is ready to remove the two shows ? morning and night ? from Tuesday.

Says vice-president Prashant Srivastava: ?Usually taking off movies after a couple of days doesn?t really pay because the weekly programming is done keeping the demands in mind. But this film is doing so badly that we have had to drop it. We have put in extra shows of the two movies doing the best, Bluffmaster! and Ek Ajnabee.?

The fortunes are just as bleak at the INOX properties where the daily ticket count just refuses to go into double figures.

At INOX (Forum), the Friday and Monday morning shows had to be cancelled, while the Saturday and Sunday shows had a total of 37 viewers.

At INOX (City Centre), three of the four shows got cancelled, while four people saw Mr Prime Minister on Sunday morning. ?We usually cancel a show if we don?t have at least five patrons, but we made an exception because we wanted to run the movie at least once at City Centre,? reveals an INOX spokesperson.

Mr Prime Minister joins a long list of unwatchable duds written, produced and directed by Dev Anand for the past couple of decades.

The 130-minute film revolves around ?a romantic looking, elderly bum? Johnny Master (Anand) who sells newspapers in an earthquake-ravaged township of Gujarat.

He contests the parliamentary elections, wins handsomely and is then kidnapped by his opponents. It is then that Johnny regains his memory to discover he is actually Prem Batra, the richest Indian and a victim of the earthquake. He goes on to buy the baddies first and then the government to become Mr Prime Minister.

But why did the film make it to so many screens in town? Explains Calcutta distributor Arijit Dutta: ?The returns for Mr Prime Minister are on the basis of commission. If the film does well, the distributor and exhibitor make money. If it fails, only the producer stands to lose money. Despite such an arrangement, I wasn?t too keen to take up this film. But when such a senior industry person like Dev Anand kept requesting me personally, I didn?t have the heart to say no.?

And now for the final twist in the tinsel tale: having premiered the film in Ahmedabad last week, Devsaab is to visit Calcutta at the end of this week to promote Mr Prime Minister.

If he does make it here, what he will see at the plexes is ? true to the film?s tagline ? ?an earthquake of a story? that will shake him ? Mr Prime Minister voted out well within a week.