102. Crossroads
I want to briefly recap on what I’ve written previously. I won’t go into any detail but rather consider what may have happened if I had made a different decision at certain key moments.
Some decisions were out of my hands, for instance, my parents’ decision to leave the UK and move to South Africa in 1946. Had we remained in Britain, I have no doubt that my life would have been completely different. Then, their decision was to send me to Michaelhouse School rather than keep me at St. Georges Grammar School in Cape Town where we lived. Michaelhouse, arguably the Eton or Harrow of South Africa, was 1,200 miles away and it took me three days to get there by train. However, my uncle Dennis was an Old Boy and, despite getting poor marks for the entrance exam, the school agreed to take me.
My five years of schooling there were a mixture of great success and disasters. I was academically challenged and did two years in the second-last form before matriculating. I only began to excel at sport in my last two years at the school and because of a high IQ and low marks they labelled me as damn lazy, which was untrue. I found most schoolwork boring (with the exception of history, geography and the essay side of English). Math, French and Latin belonged on an alien planet as far as I was concerned.
Then I fell foul of the headmaster (called the Rector) and senior prefects. The school matron, whose daughter I was seeing, persuaded me it was okay to go swimming with the girl in the school’s pool that was reserved for staff only on a Sunday. She reasoned that I was a guest of a staff member for the day, but the school bureaucracy was furious as I feared they would be. Bad decision on my part. In fact, it affected the rest of my school career including the Rector refusing to write a letter to Cambridge University in the UK recommending me as a future student despite my poor grades. How different would my life have been had I gone to Cambridge?
After leaving school and joining my parents in Walvis Bay (the port of what is now Namibia on the edge of the Namib desert), I ran a fish and chip shop for my dad, then later worked in a timber yard before deciding to somehow return to the UK. Crossroad. What I would have done by remaining in Walvis Bay, goodness knows. I managed to work my way over to Rotterdam on a cargo ship and arrived in the UK with £10. My dad firmly believed in my handling my own destiny!
After a series of jobs in England, which included being a pile driver’s assistant in construction, a night watchman, washing cars in Bond Street, a farm laborer and a bouncer in a Soho nightclub, I managed to get a job with BBC Television. It was not because I was interested in showbiz but because I needed to earn more money to get to Canada (where I had been offered a job provided, I played rugby for one of their leading clubs). It was another crossroad. Had I gone to Canada to follow my love of playing rugby, once again my life would have been so different. In the event, I quickly found that television (and later the movie industry) was something that excited me as an occupation for the first time. It still excites me 64 years later!
After a year and a half working on the bottom rung of the production team for BBC, I had the audacity to apply for a much more senior studio manager’s job with Associated TeleVision (ATV) in Birmingham. If I wanted a job for life and a slow but steady progress up the ladder, I should have stayed with the “Beeb” (BBC). But I had not yet found my niche in TV, other than knowing that I was close to doing something worthwhile with my life other than playing sport. To everyone’s amazement, including my own, I got the studio manager’s job with ATV, becoming the youngest in that position in Britain at the time.
Another year and a half went by and once again I pushed my luck, applying for the post of trainee TV director with ATV in London. My completely unorthodox “career path” and my enthusiasm got me from 130 applicants for the post, after two interviews, down to the final 13. My interviewer then explained that as the youngest applicant they would not give me the job at that stage, promising that the next vacancy would almost certainly be mine.
I returned to Birmingham pleased with what I had achieved but then got to thinking about the future. If I stayed and became a TV director, it would almost certainly tie me down to studio productions. By now I had realized that I did want to direct. With my previous outdoor life in Africa, I felt the need to progress into movies, starting with documentaries. Another crossroad. I made contact with a documentary company in London and pitched some ideas to them for films I would like to make back in South Africa. They liked them and said they would finance them once I gave them a final script and budget.
So, I resigned and returned on a Union Castle liner to Cape Town, where my parents met me. My dad bought me an ancient Morris Minor motor car and I drove to Johannesburg to look for a job in the movie industry while setting up documentaries for the London company. There were no immediate vacancies; so, on an impulse, I applied to the giant Anglo American mining group to become a field prospector for new mining opportunities in Uganda. It was simply a matter of driving around and taking rock samples in certain isolated areas of the country. They accepted me and I was booked to fly to Uganda in Central Africa the following week.
Then, out of the blue, Alpha Film Studios contacted me and said there was now a vacancy as a film director making film commercials, would I come for an interview? I got the job. Another crossroad. Anglo American released me from my obligation to them. How I would have coped on my own in the wilds of Africa, I’ll never know!
Unfortunately, Alpha Studios’ owner, Bill Boxer, hired a much more experienced man without telling the Manager. Oops, should I have gone to pick up rocks in Uganda after all? Anyway, they gave me odd jobs like sorting out props, etc., and even got me to direct one tiny commercial. But the writing was on the wall, they needed to get rid of me. Fate intervened once again. One of their writers ran off with someone’s wife and left a vacancy in the scriptwriting department. Could I write? I was asked. “Of course,” I replied blithely, hardly ever having put pen to paper. Luckily, I had a flare for it so survived for a year or so before the boss, Bill Boxer, needed to find a job for his nephew. I was the most junior of five writers in the department and I was simply told to go. Crossroads!
That’s when I went farming with my school buddy, Derek Lucas, for another year. I loved it but we were not experienced farmers and crops we planted never appeared. I then found a copywriting job with Grant Advertising, a top American agency in Johannesburg. I hated it. Writing ads for soap powders did not appeal to me but there were no film jobs available – until I heard Lintas Advertising in Durban was looking for a Film Production Executive, whatever that meant.
I got the job but had the poor judgement to share an apartment with Ronnie Kasrils who worked with me at Lintas. A short while later he fled the country after blowing up some electricity pylons. Ronnie was a communist and, although we both agreed that Apartheid should be ended, we did not agree on the means of achieving this. Lintas fired me because of my association with Ronnie and I ended up stage managing two plays in Durban, driving the cast of a musical to the theater in a dry-cleaning van, and finally returning to Walvis Bay, 2,400 miles away to visit my parents.
Returning to Durban I directed my first short film (with Dennis Bughwan, an Indian friend, as cameraman) whilst driving a taxi at night to survive financially. Thereafter, I returned to Johannesburg and managed to get a job with Killarney Film Studios as a scriptwriter of commercials and a weekly newsreel screened in cinemas. I was there for about five years when I was given a major documentary to write and direct. I left the studios in 1968 to finally go freelance as a writer/director/producer of documentaries. Crossroad.
In the years since then, I have remained on my own as a freelance, eventually including the writing of full-length feature films and television drama series as well as comedies. In later years I have also written a trilogy of novels which are currently being published. My life, although still adventurous, has aligned itself primarily in the field of writing and possibly producing, rather than directing, any movies that I may still be able to get financed.
A major part of my current writing is devoted to ExoTech because, even though computing is way outside my field of expertise, it represents the first real opportunity for us humans to actually use computing without brain damage. The sheer simplicity of using ExoTech will bring a new era of enlightenment to humankind currently overwhelmed by conflicting data and fake news. I can’t wait to write my next screenplay or novel on the ExoBrain system in the near future.
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.