FOR many years Bollywood has been remaking a long line of Hollywood films without first securing permission.

Hollywood has been acutely aware of the plagiarism, but reckoned it wasn't worth pursuing their Eastern cousins through the courts.

But with Bollywood exploding across the globe and eating into the profits of US blockbusters, Hollywood is turning up the heat and investigating the copycat films.

A test case is set to be Kaante, the Indian remake of Reservoir Dogs, which is scheduled for release this month.

A Hollywood lawyer says that if the film does as well as is predicted, then damages will be sought.

If so, then Mahesh Bhatt will be especially worried, as he has built his lucrative production house around remakes of The Silence Of The Lambs, Jagged Edge, What Lies Beneath and It Happened One Night.

Meanwhile, Shah Rukh Khan is on the verge of taking a major gamble by kicking leading lady Aishwarya Rai out of his next production.

He was prompted into action after Salman Khan invaded his film sets and had a major spat with his on-off girlfriend Rai and disrupted shooting.

Things have got worse for Salman when he was involved in a fatal accident, crashing his car into a bakery, killing one sleeping pavement dweller and seriously injuring three others.

The volatile Bollywood star was driving back from a party in his Toyota Land Cruiser with his friend Jamal Khan and a police bodyguard when the accident occurred in the plush Mumbai district of Bandra.

The next surefire hit from Bollywood is most likely to be Main Prem Ki Deewani Hoon, the latest film from record-breaking director Sooraj Barjatya.

Lead stars Hrithik Roshan, Kareina Kapoor and Abhishek Bachchan were in New Zealand recently to put the finishing touches to the film.

Now Roshan has his sights set on a possible project with maverick director Ram Gopal Varma.

He says: "We have been discussing various ideas and possibilities for some time now."

JP Dutta's latest magnum opus, Line Of Control, has finally finished shooting and is now in post-production.

The war drama, starring many of Bollywood's biggest names - Sunjay Dutt, Sunil Shetty, Abhishek Bachchan and Saif Ali Khan - received the divine blessing of His Holiness Dalai Lama on completion.

But this may have come too late because the film, which has been shooting in freezing conditions in Leh in the Himalayas, has been beset by many problems.

Some of the stars were injured or became ill in the treacherous and unrelenting conditions.

Then disaster struck when lighting man Frances D'Souza died on the set of the film from a massive heart attack because of a lack of oxygen in the freezing altitude.

But Line Of Control continues and a record-breaking 15-minute song has now been added to the film.