Confessions of a Technophobe, New Series 36
Part 2 continued
1956–1966
I was invited to join the Filmlets scriptwriting team and started the following week. I found it strange that the writers were not located in or around Killarney Film Studios where all the commercials and other films were shot. Once I had settled in, I began to realize the primary reason for this. My boss, whose name I will not reveal, was – to put it mildly – a nut case. He spent a lot of time telling us about his wartime exploits with the RAF but often confused his role as a fighter pilot with that of a bomber pilot – two very different functions! Later, I discovered that he had in fact been a mechanic and never flew a plane!
He was also a megalomaniac. His approach to briefing his writers – there were three of us – was to give us just the bare bones of the client’s needs. We would then go off and write a commercial based on what he told us. Once written, we then had to present it to him. I cannot recall a single instance when he said that he was happy with the result. His response was identical every time. He would read the script, look horrified and start shouting. He would tell us that we had not listened to his briefing and we had come up with a terrible idea. He would then tell us what he would like to see in the script. We would go away and do a rewrite. He would reject it again and tell us that he wanted more of his ideas, which we would go back and include. After about five rewrites and more screaming, he would finally say “Now that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Why couldn’t you get it it right in the first place?”
After a number of these frustrating exercises, I finally realized what he was doing. As we reshaped the script a few times, he cleverly led us back to more or less our original idea but now the implication was that it was his idea! Looking back, I cannot understand how I or either of the other two writers managed to survive the constant belittling of our talents. I say we because he did exactly the same thing with all three of us. I eventually heard that when the writers had previously been located at the studios, one of them, a very large and powerful man, had phoned up the boss and asked if he would be in his office for the next hour or so. The boss acknowledged that he would be, and the writer said “good.” Half an hour later the writer strode into the boss’s office, put his large hands around the smaller man’s neck and lifted him into the air, saying “I came here to kill you but finally decided it wasn’t worth the hassle.” He then thrust the boss back in his chair and stormed out. Needless to say, he never went back to the studios.
My fellow writers were both interesting characters in their own right. Rodney had been there longer than I. He considered the job as something to be endured and spent his days dreaming and telling us how he was about to leave for Hollywood to become famous and earn a fortune. Eventually he did leave and ended up in Hollywood. However, he met a young lady who succumbed to his charms. She also happened to be an heiress with a vast amount of money. Last we heard, Rodney was still dreaming his dreams of fame and fortune in the movie capital of the world but lived in luxury in the process. He did have some talent, but I don’t think he made it in the rough and tough environment of Los Angeles.
That left just Hugh and I. He was a likeable youngster, with an enormous potential writing talent but sadly with a fatal flaw. At the age of twenty-two, he was already on his way to becoming an alcoholic. I was in awe of some of the short stories and parts of an unfinished novel he had written. Tragically, he drank himself into oblivion about three times a week. When sober, he had a delightful quirky sense of humor. One day I showed him a poem I had just written which told of, much as I loved Africa, how I was constantly looking for places that reminded me of England. In the poem I had one line which read “An English nook in an African cranny.” Hugh could not resist saying “An English crook in an African nanny.” It killed the poem for me forever!
I did have my revenge, though. Hugh had managed to rent a delightful cottage from a well-known South African ballet dancer, Gary Burne. Gary went off on a world tour, leaving Hugh the cottage for a few months. Predictably, Hugh invited all his drinking buddies to join him in a number of wild parties at the cottage. One night. I suddenly thought up a spoonerism of my own. I called for quiet, which took some repeating before I got their attention, and said “I hope Gary Burne will return home and find his cottage still standing despite the way these parties are going. To take a page out of ancient Roman history, it could be said that Hugh fiddles while Burne roams!” Hugh’s pals roared their approval!
To our surprise one day, the boss announced that we were to be relocated to the studios. I never discovered why that was. But for me it was an exciting opportunity to keep in touch with the production side of filmmaking. In addition to shooting commercials, Killarney had a long history of making both documentaries and full-length features for the cinema. It was in fact the first film studio in South Africa, built in 1913 during the silent movie days.
In the 1940s, the first local musical, “Kom Saam Vanaand” (Come along tonight) was made in the Afrikaans language and was enormously successful. The first commercial for Joko tea (a local brand) was made in 1950. At the same time that we moved to the studios in 1967, Killarney teamed with a US company to remake two previously successful movies under different names. International star Vincent Price and two US newcomers at the time, James Brolin and Jaqueline Bisset, featured in the pictures. I was plucked at random to deliver a ridiculous one line of dialogue in the one picture. I had to arrive looking flustered and say “He’s not inside and nowhere to be found!” This did not propel me to Hollywood as an actor.
The first cinema in South Africa was owned by my wife Hero’s grandfather, Costa Phitidis. This was bought by an American, I.W. Schlesinger, who developed a theatre and cinema group around South Africa. He was also involved with Killarney Film Studios, where a weekly newsreel was launched called The African Mirror.
Apart from writing commercials, I took over the writing of The African Mirror for a couple of years. I was seldom given any real data and had to figure out a commentary from the visuals supplied. Quite a challenge! When it came to reporting on sports internationals, for example a rugby match, the crew would film the match, send the footage to the lab, get it processed right away, have an editor put it together and in the middle of Saturday night get me into the studios to write a commentary on the match. This would be distributed to all the cinemas and screened over the next day or so. This was before television in South Africa. I was eventually allowed to direct a couple of commercials, both of which were among the official entries to the Cannes Advertising Festival in France as well as two that I wrote but did not direct.
A new general manager was appointed to the studio in 1967. He and I got on very well and unexpectedly he gave me a prestigious documentary to write and direct. It dealt with the personalities of the 1968 British Lions Rugby touring side rather than the filming of the actual matches. Rugby was still amateur in those days, so I linked the professions of the players to their South African counterparts, calling it “Lions Eye View.” In those days, tours lasted for about three months and included test matches between the South Africans (Springboks) and the Lions, as well as numerous provincial matches in between the tests. I filmed farmers visiting a banana plantation, veterinary practitioners visiting the world-famous Onderstepoort Veterinary Research Institute dealing with both wildlife and domestic animals. And best of all I introduced the doctors in the team to Professor Chris Barnard who had recently performed the world’s first successful heart transplant, Barnard proved difficult to find but I tracked him down to a nightclub in Cape Town and at two in the morning got his OK to do the interview a few days later. He was a difficult man but had a great chat with the rugby players.
As I finished the filming, I suddenly realized that I was being sabotaged by someone in the studio. I was told that a roll of a thousand feet of film had been ruined when someone dropped it into a bucket of water. In fact, the roll could not fit into a bucket. Furious, I prepared to re-film the last few scenes contained in the damaged roll. I was then called into my boss’s office where the person elected to edit the film announced that he couldn’t edit the film because I hadn’t used a clapper board to mark each scene. It was true that I did not use the clapper as all my subjects were non-film people and a clapper tended to make them nervous. Instead, I employed a well-known technique of using what is known as an “end clap” at the end of each sequence rather than at the beginning. I used my hands to clap rather than the clapper board, but this too was acceptable internationally. The editor insisted that I had ruined the film. My boss screamed at me as usual and told the editor to reshoot whatever necessary to complete the film. Later, I was called into a meeting of senior execs including my friend the general manager, the editor and my long-term boss. I was subjected to another screaming fit of harassment and formally removed from the picture, having shot about 95% of it less the footage “lost” in a bucket of water.
I later discovered that the editor had expected to be given the film to direct and made sure I was discredited. My general manager friend was too new to the movie industry and did not support me. I resigned immediately and some months later heard that the picture had won an award at an international sports film festival in Italy. Sadly, my name did not appear on the film!
This was my first but not last lesson in the art of being destroyed by the competition. In fact, it forced me to go freelance and was the best thing that ever happened to me.
What I appreciate so much about the ExoTech team is that I have had frequent validations for my input as a writer, a blog writer and a couple of low-budget videos in the early days. We are a team that work together, support each other and as we draw closer and closer to launching the industry-changing ExoTechnology, we recognize each member’s contribution towards a sane and simple form of communication.
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.