Born on 28 July 1907, Avichi Meiyappan hailed from a Nattukottai
Nagarathar family of
Karaikudi in Tamil Nadu. Avichi
Chettiar ran a mini-department store, named AV & Sons. It sold gramophone records. Meiyappan, who joined his father's shop as a teenager, and decided to produce gramophone records instead of just selling them. He came to Madras where, along with friends K. S. Narayana
Iyengar, Subbaiah
Chettiar and others promoted Saraswathi Stores.
Maiden venture The dawn of the talkie era (1931) inspired Meiyappan to start Saraswathi Sound Productions and he launched his maiden film venture, Alli Arjuna a Hindu mythology based film. The film was shot in
Calcutta and proved a total flop as the one that followed named
Ratnavali. At this point, an aspiring amateur actor and college graduate A. T. Krishnaswamy joined the unit as assistant director who was associated with Meiyappan for nearly a decade and wrote and directed the early AVM productions. The reverses forced Meiyappan to lie low but only for a while. In association with Jayanthilal, a cinema house owner based in
Bangalore, he promoted a new company Pragati Pictures Limited. Grabbing an opportunity that came his way, AVM made
Nandakumar, Tamil version of a Marathi film launching it as a Pragati production. The highlight of this film was the debut of
T. R. Mahalingam in to Tamil film Industry. The film was a landmark because for the first time playback singing was tried, with Lalitha Venkatraman singing for the actor who played Devaki. Meiyappan took the sprawling Club House off Mount Road on lease and shot scenes without going to studios and erecting sets. Soon after he shifted his unit to another sprawling edifice known as Admiralty House in Adyar.
Later history In 1940, Meiyappan produced
Bhoo Kailas, a
Telugu mythological film which created history. Its lead players were from Telugu and Kannada cinema, and was directed by
Sundar Rao Nadkarni, a Mangalorean who had his training in Bombay. In 2007, AVM produced
Sivaji which at 95 crore, was said to be the most expensive film ever made in the history of the Indian film industry at that time. In 2013, AVM led by Aruna Guhan and Aparna Guhan started producing films to be screened only on the net. Their first such production was a 55-minute-film, titled
Idhuvum Kadandhu Pogum. AVM Productions ventured into
streaming space by announcing
Tamil Rockerz, a crime thriller series inspired from a real-life film piracy group, directed by Arivazhagan. == Filmography ==