Confessions of a Technophobe, New Series 41
Part 4
1976 and beyond
Looking back on my working life, I liken it to a rollercoaster. There was a constant stream of highs that usually appeared out of the blue, followed by lows that cut me down to size. It’s not in my nature to have enormous regrets, although from time to time I did wonder what would have happened had I remained in the UK working in television.
I left when my career with ATV was in the ascendency. Had I stayed I had been promised the next available post as a director. It would have meant directing multi camera programs, virtually all of them in studios. When I finally got to direct films in South Africa, they were always exterior shoots with a single camera. Two very different techniques. The only exception to this was when I ran the Greatermans/Checkers
in-house studio. Despite my difficulties with incompatible equipment, I did have four cameras with a rather primitive editing suite. It was, in a very minor way, like being back in a UK TV studio. I enjoyed the challenge, but when I left I was very relieved to move to single camera filming out of doors. The only negative to that was the uncertainty of my income. Freelance cameramen and editors were much more in demand than freelance writer/directors, so my family and I experienced a feast and a famine lifestyle. Somehow, I managed to minimize the famine but there were times when I honestly had no idea where my next pennies would come from. I have to say that both Hero and the kids were magnificent. Without their on-going support I would never have survived in the movie industry. Unfortunately, payment for my work was far lower than in countries like the UK and the US. I had to find work far more frequently than a writer/director in either of those major movie and TV producing countries.
Ironically, had I been Afrikaans-speaking, work opportunities would have been far greater. Because television arrived so late in South Africa, the Afrikaners poured a lot of energy into both films and theatre. Being instinctively a creative people, they were quite successful. Both the Afrikaners and the Africans were natural performers, whereas the English-speaking South Africans were a much more inhibited bunch. English-speaking actors tended to learn the techniques of acting, some with great success, but both the Afrikaners and the Africans had a natural uninhibited flair for performing. There was also a political angle to this with the Nationalist government giving a ten-percent subsidy to Afrikaans-language pictures and nothing to English-language productions. The Afrikaans film industry flourished, and its English equivalent struggled.
At any rate, shortly after completing “Madadeni Big Day” for Checkers, I received a phone call out of the blue from Lee Marcus, who had been the senior scriptwriter for Alpha films while I was there. In addition to her work with Alpha, she had an on-going relationship with the South African Tourist Board (SATour). Every four years they would make a film which encompassed the entire country as a tourist destination. In between, they would also make films featuring tourist attractions of each province of the country. They had an in-house film unit that made the pictures, but they always turned to Lee to write their scripts. For a number of reasons Lee was reluctant to write the script for SATour’s next film but she promised to find them a replacement. I was delighted that she approached me and asked if I was interested. I jumped at the chance. I needed the work but the prospect of making a tourist film covering the whole country excited me enormously.
Lee set up a meeting for me with the Board of SATour and I travelled to Pretoria where their head office was located. There were about five Board members present. They questioned me extensively about my experience and seemed satisfied, but I suspect it was largely Lee’s recommendation that got me the job. They then briefed me on what they expected, which was predictably a visually beautiful film extolling the pleasures and comforts of each featured area of the country. They added that they would expect to see each region at the best time of the year. Having usually been given no more than two to three weeks to make a documentary, I was stunned to discover that they anticipated the film would take somewhere between a year and eighteen months to make.
They then told me of a major problem that had occurred. Tragically their long-time director, Johnny Da Silva, had been killed that year in a motor accident. His senior cameraman, whom I shall call X for reasons that will become apparent, would be taking over the unit and would direct the picture. The chairman of the Board asked me if I could write the script with as much detail as possible on the visual side, as X was a first-time director and would need all the help he could get. For the first time in South Africa, I was offered a good fee for the script and promised that I would help X as much as I could.
I took about a month to research and write the script, deciding that the film should start in Cape Town and travel up the rather barren but interesting west coast on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. It would then travel inland and, when reaching the Orange River bordering on Namibia, cross over to the Northern Transvaal with its Kruger National Game Park, then head for the Indian Ocean and the port of Durban on the east coast. Thereafter, the film would feature the majestic Drakensberg mountain range and return south down to the Transkei. We would then feature the Garden Route, a magnificent stretch of coastline with lagoons, indigenous forests and mountains. The film would end in the Mother City of Cape Town surrounded by winelands and the remarkable Table Mountain overlooking the historical city itself.
I presented the script to the Board, received a positive result and then spent some time with X discussing the style and approach to filming an entire country contained in thirty minutes. X seemed to be very confident. I wished him luck and put my attention on finding more work. A few weeks went by, and I began to get an uneasy feeling about the SATour movie. I called the Board and asked if I could see what X had shot up that point. They readily agreed and set up a viewing. As I watched the footage my heart sank. The cinematography was generally quite good, but it lacked any shape or form. I had created a storyline, but X had clearly ignored it. I tried to visualize how the footage could be edited together and failed. It literally made no sense.
Terribly worried, I spoke to the chairman of the Board and said that I didn’t think that the film as shot would work. I urged him not to take my word for it but to ask an experienced editor to take an independent look at it and give his opinion. The chairman agreed to do so. A couple of weeks later I was called back to SATour. The chairman looked at me and shook his head. “I have to agree with you,” he said.
The editor looked at the footage, then asked me to join him. He explained in detail why the footage he had seen did not make any sense. He told me that it would be best to start again with another director. I took no satisfaction with being right. I just wanted the picture to work, especially if it was to have my name on it. The chairman then asked if he should fire X. I thought it over. X was clearly a competent cameraman, and he had been with the SATour film unit for some years. The reality was, however, that he had no idea how to direct a film.
I replied that I felt he had value as a cameraman but should not be allowed to direct anything else. I added that I doubted if he would ever understand what was involved in the process of directing – but because he had given loyal service to the unit as a cameraman, he should be given another chance in that position. The chairman nodded then stunned me by asking if I would be prepared to direct the picture. I thought it through again. X would know soon enough that it was me that had killed his directorial debut. Now I had suggested that he remain as a cameraman. I took a deep breath, replied that I would be happy to direct the picture on one condition. I wanted X to give the Board an assurance that he would give me full support in the making of the picture, and he would not try to sabotage me in any way. The chairman agreed to extract a promise from X to that effect.
That’s how I got to direct as well as write the picture. I soon discovered that it had an enormous budget, far greater than any other documentary I had worked on. This allowed for us to film on the best season for any specific scene. For example, there are usually only two days in the year when the apple blossoms blossom. The best place for apple growing is in the surrounds of Elgin, a small town forty miles from Cape Town. The budget allowed us to fly from Johannesburg to Cape Town, drive to Elgin, film the newly opened blossoms and return to base two days later. The blossoms took about five seconds of screen time, but they were very beautiful!
Another trip to the Cape was made in autumn to film the world-famous, five-star, Blue Train. At that time, it travelled between Cape Town and Johannesburg twice a week. We set up our camera on a hill overlooking the stunningly beautiful vineyards in their autumn colors. These were close to the railway line running through the Hex River Valley, with the Hex River Mountain range behind the grapes.
The Blue Train was scheduled to pass through the valley at 12:05. By 11:50 the entire sky was a murky grey, hopeless for filming. I was determined to get the shot and literally willed the clouds away. By 12 noon most of the cloud had gone and five minutes later the Blue Train thundered through the valley, past the vines against a glorious blue sky. Perfect.
On a separate occasion, we travelled down to Cape Town again and boarded the Blue Train, taking both a male and female model with us. It was the only time in the film where I used models. The man, whose name was Joe, was an American male model and a bit-part actor from Los Angeles travelling around the world and modelling as he went. I showed the film in LA few months later to a movie company I was visiting. When Joe appeared on screen, there were shouts of “Hey, that’s Joe!” Great excitement all round and, by the way, they loved the film.
Before the film was released to the public, the Administrator of the Transvaal, Danie Hough, as a senior Nationalist Party official, had to give it his approval. He and I sat in a private screening. He watched it without comment, and I had no idea how he was going to react. I couldn’t conceive of anything in the picture that would have offended the Apartheid mob but then I didn’t have their twisted minds. He looked me and smiled. “I like it, except for one thing.” My heart sank. The only thing I could think that might have offended him was a shot of some African men, very smartly dressed in suits, crossing the road. All previous SATour films did not feature modern blacks at all. They only appeared in tribal costume, usually as Zulu dancers. In fact, he either missed or ignored this point and came up with something I could not have thought of in my wildest dreams.
“You’ve shown a white choir singing a Zulu song! You can’t have that. Whites sing white songs, blacks sing black songs. Take it out.”
To my distress, the then all-white Drakensberg Boys Choir, with an international reputation as a choir on a par with the Vienna Boys Choir, never appeared in our film. As I knew the headmaster of the school where they were based, I was acutely embarrassed. He and I had been delighted with the idea that the boys would sing a Zulu song. Of course, in the years after Apartheid with 50 percent or more of the students now black, it would not have been an issue. However, this has always epitomized for me the total insanity of Apartheid’s separate development philosophy. In the event we went on to win seven international awards for the film. This included the Theodore Roosevelt award for the most innovative travel film for 1984.
I was grateful at the time for X’s impeccable behavior towards me during the making of the film. He never once tried to sabotage me, even though I half expected him to try something. Little did I suspect he had a far darker plan in mind. Incidentally, although he was a pretty good cameraman, I discovered that he quite often failed to create the best framing of the shot. His sense of composition was very slightly off. I always checked the shots through the camera viewfinder before actually filming and I would quite often adjust the framing to improve the composition. Ironically, X received a gold medal for the best photographed picture in South Africa that year. As we had finished the film on the best of terms, I did not mention this to him or anyone else.
The fact that we had won so many international awards despite the rocky start to the making of the picture (as well as the fact that South Africa was at the height of Apartheid’s regime in the 1980s) was enormously exciting for me.
When I think of the trials and tribulations that ExoBrain has also undergone, albeit of a very different nature, I am reminded that sheer perseverance usually wins through. I am enormously confident that ExoTech will receive both the accolades and commercial success it deserves. Making a successful film is very satisfying but being part of something that will create a global paradigm shift in the very near future promises to be even more exciting!