Confessions of a Technophobe, New Series 27
Part 2 continued
1956–1966
Arriving in Johannesburg, I had no actual contacts in the local movie industry. At the time there were two major film studios in the city, with a number of smaller companies that were pretty well self-contained in terms of personnel. Most of the smaller companies also concentrated on making films for the Afrikaans-speaking market. It seemed pointless to approach them for work as I never learned Afrikaans at school, rather choosing French. Although Afrikaans as a second language became compulsory a year before I matriculated, the authorities sensibly exempted people like me who clearly had little hope of achieving fluency in one year.
So that left the two bigger companies. Killarney Film studios was the oldest in the country. Owned by New York-born Isadore W. Schlesinger who as a young man came to South Africa lured by the blossoming gold mining industry. He quickly made money with other ventures. In 1911 he bought some almost insolvent theatres, quickly making them profitable from producing variety shows and screening movies. He also bought the first cinema in South Africa, previously owned by my wife Hero’s grandfather.
In 1913 Schlesinger built Killarney Film Studios in the Johannesburg suburb of Killarney and produced newsreels under the name African Film Productions (AFP). The weekly newsreel was called the “African Mirror” and until the final arrival of television in South Africa in 1976, it provided a major source of news for the country.
As it happened, I wrote the commentary for the newsreel from 1966 to 1968. It was quite ridiculous in a way. I would be shown edited footage of a news item. More often than not, no data on the item was available so I had to scramble around to find out what in the hell it was all about. Somehow, I managed to get enough data from newspapers and friends to write a fairly coherent commentary. I would even have to get up in the middle of the night to write the commentary for an international rugby match that had been played that afternoon, again with very little data on the match. But having played the game myself until a couple of years previously, both with and against some of the Springbok (South African International team) players and, knowing more or less what was happening, I would write the commentary. The film would then go to postproduction where sound was then married to the picture and a number of prints were produced from our one and only film laboratory to be screened at the next cinema showing.
Killarney then went on to produce both full-length feature films and documentaries. Between 1916 and 1922 they produced a remarkable forty-two films. Killarney produced a handful of movies that made the international screens, none of them with any great impact in other countries. They even made a couple of movies in the ’60s with up-coming American actors Jaqueline Bisset and James Brolin. I had a one-line part in the one movie “Escape to Cape Town.” I was a security guard who rushed into a room and announced “He’s not in the building” or something like that. I’m not in line for an Oscar! The first South African musical in Afrikaans called “Kom Saam Vanaand” (Come Along Together) was directed by Pierre de Wet in 1949.
I never worked with Pierre but knew him quite well. One day he gave me a screenplay to read and then asked me for my opinion. I reluctantly decided to tell the truth. “Bloody awful,” I told him. He laughed and said “Guess who wrote it.” I had no idea, so he told me it had been written by Wilbur Smith, arguably the best and most prolific novelist to have been born in Southern Africa (Zambia) and educated at Michaelhouse school in Natal (South Africa). He and I were at school together for one year. He was in his final year in the 6th form and I was in my first year in a different house. We never spoke at the time, but I did meet him many years later at Waterstone’s Bookshop in London. I reminded him about his screenplay, the only one he ever wrote. He grimaced, then giggled. “It was awful, wasn’t it?” I cautiously agreed and we both felt that novelists were probably not the best persons to write for the movies unless they had some training in the vast difference in techniques. Having gone in the other direction myself – from movie screenwriting to novels – I could see how his truly fabulous talents as a novelist did not necessarily translate into screenwriting. We had a long and very enjoyable chat about a number of things. He will always remain one of my favorite writers despite his terrible screenplay!
The other major production house in Johannesburg was Alpha Film Studios. Owned by businessman Bill Boxer, it also used the name Empire Films. This had quite a sizable sound stage and although it was primarily a producer of cinema and later TV commercials, it did occasionally produce and/or facilitate feature films.
I’ll come back to the studios later. When I first arrived in Jo’burg, I called both studios and asked if I could get an interview with them regarding a job. Both turned me down, seemingly disinterested in my recent career in UK television. However, Ronnie Brantford, the General Manager at Alpha, did at least take my aunt’s phone number and said that he would keep me in mind.
Regardless, I needed a job. So putting my pride in my pocket after being considered an up-coming star of UK TV, I found a job as a chauffeur for a company called African Car Hire. Most of their customers were tourists: mostly they asked for a tour of the Witwatersrand area around Jo’burg. Having grown up in Cape Town I had to busk it (perform for tips) and pretend I knew the area backwards. Fortunately, I had a good grasp of the history of South Africa and with help from some of the other drivers I quickly learned to match the places with the events that took place.
Johannesburg was the formal name given to Ferreira’s Camp that had grown up on the edge of the gold mines with a couple of the mines offering tours of their above-ground establishments. One of the mines made an offer that anyone who could pick up the larger gold bar with one hand could take it home. Nobody ever succeeded! Ethnic mine dancing became an increasingly popular attraction with the African mine dancers displaying amazing agility and harmony. Zulus and Sothos created the most prominent dance groups. The dances were a mix of traditional African dancing fused with mining-related activities such as the Gum Boot dance.
Sterkfontein caves on the outskirts of the city was the site of a major anthropological find, a skull named Mrs. Ples. Dated originally at 2.5 million years old, very recent re-dating with new techniques have now put it at about 3.5 million years old. This makes Mrs. Ples one of the oldest skulls ever found and tends to confirm what is now called the Cradle of Humankind. This is a site near the Sterkfontein caves dedicated to what is claimed to be evidence of the earliest Homo Sapiens on the planet.
Left: The original complete skull (without upper teeth and mandible) of a specimen
so-called “Mrs. Ples.” (Wikipedia)
Many years later I was commissioned to research and make notes for a Canadian film company making a dramatized documentary film called “Skull Wars” which was screened by Discovery Channel in the US. It told the story of Professor Raymond Dart who discovered the Taung skull in the Northern Cape in the 1920s and Robert Broom who found Mrs. Ples (short for Plesianthropus) at Sterkfontein in 1941. These discoveries were hotly disputed by British paleontologists pointing to the earlier discovery of the Piltdown Man at Piltdown, East Sussex, which indicated that the origins of Man were to be found in Europe. However, in 1953 the Piltdown Man was proven to be a fraud, having used the jawbones of an ape attached to the skull of a human. It made for a fascinating film, which I line-produced and which was directed by Christopher Rowley who had lived in South Africa for many years before immigrating to Canada. He and I worked together on several documentaries before he left.
Anyway, I quickly realized that driving tourists around was getting me nowhere. I had for the moment given up on getting into movies. I saw an advertisement in the Citizen, a local newspaper, recruiting young men to become prospectors for precious minerals in remote parts of Africa. The successful participant would be given a vehicle, a tent, food supplies and sent off to remote parts of Uganda, where they would collect samples for analysis and send back to the Anglo-American laboratories in Johannesburg. At the time it was amongst the largest mining groups in the world. A number of Michaelhouse old boys with whom I had been at school worked in the head office of the company. I was immediately accepted after mentioning my prospecting adventures with my dad in Namibia after leaving school. My years in TV did not feature in the interview at Anglo-American.
I was quickly inoculated against various nasty diseases and booked on a flight to Uganda the following week. Two days before I was due to leave, I got a call from Ronnie Brantford at Alpha Films offering me a position as a film director for film and TV commercials. I was enormously grateful to the management of the Anglo prospecting division, who immediately released me from my obligation to them and wished me luck. The following week at the beginning of the month, I reported to Alpha for duty and was told to go and see Ronnie right away. Ronnie sat me down and told me he had bad news. Apparently his boss, the studio owner Bill Boxer, a very autocratic gentleman, had also hired a new film director without telling Ronnie. When Boxer heard I had been hired as well, Ronnie was told to fire me right away. Charming! Fortunately, Ronnie was a decent guy and persuaded Boxer that he could use me in some other capacity.
So I started in the props department searching for all kinds of things ranging from a paisley scarf to a motor scooter. I firmly told myself that at least I had a tiny toe in the door of the South African movie industry and was not sitting in a tent in the middle of darkest Africa! Frankly, there wasn’t really enough work to keep me fully employed. The other new director was a middle-aged German with many years’ experience. He was not particularly creative but he did know the mechanics of making a film. I on the other hand was years younger and although I understand the process of multi-camera shoots for television, filming with only one camera was an entirely new concept for me. Ronnie even gave me a very simple little commercial to direct. It had something to do with an actor swimming in a pool. I forget what it was for. An experienced actor Jon Whitely was the star. Both he and the cameraman were very helpful to me and I somehow produced a usable product but it would not have won any Oscars. I could see that the writing was on the wall for me and I began to wonder whether the mining giant had any more spare tents and a place for me to scratch around in the dirt or sand for signs of precious minerals.
My life has been a series of ups and downs. Just when I thought I was destined for some creative rubbish heap at the age of 24, one of the scriptwriters ran off with someone else’s wife and left town. He also left a dirty desk, some scraps of paper and an old sock. Ronnie called me in and asked if I could write. It was a no brainer. I said yes as convincingly as I could, feeling that if I had gone from a call boy to studio manager in TV, survived, learned the ropes on the jobs and did well, I could probably learn to write. Besides, Ronnie clearly saw it as the only hope for me to remain with the studio.
After tidying up the desk left by the chap called Dougie, I sat down to write my first commercial for the cinema. The other three more established writers were friendly and helpful and showed me how to structure a film script with the description of the action across the page and the dialogue or commentary in much narrower margins in the middle of the page. Learning the mechanics of writing the script was easy enough but did I have any original ideas? Fortunately, that’s the one thing I’ve always had in abundance. Everything else I’ve ever done, I’ve had to learn step by painful step but creative ideas bubble out of me like a kettle boiling over. I’m often accused of being a dreamer and it’s true. The universe of my own creation is far more exciting than anything I’ve encountered in the physical universe, even though I’ve had plenty of adventures in our funny old ramshackle world.
As Dick Lester, the TV and later film director, had told me a couple of years previously, learning to make commercials teaches one to tell a story very briefly and succinctly. It stood him in good stead as a movie director, and it certainly stood me in good stead as a writer.
Over sixty years since I first started to write commercials, I still apply principles I learned from people like Lee Marcus, the head of Alpha’s scriptwriting team. Learning any technique is invaluable provided that the technique is a fully workable one. This is why ExoTech is going to be such a major and positive shift in computing, when ExoBrain is launched in the near future. This brainchild of Peter Warren is establishing a paradigm shift in computer technology that will usher a glorious new era into our laptop-infested world!
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.