Part 56
When I arrived back in Durban, Dennis and I finished off the filming of my short film; then I spent a few weeks editing it. The finished product was not a bad effort. It was just a cute twelve-minute story about Kamal, a little boy who worked in an Indian restaurant every Friday after school so that he could save up to buy a birthday present for Veena, a girl in the school who in the final scene we see is a crippled child.
It primarily served two purposes. Dennis learned some of the basics of cinematography, as opposed to his existing skills as a portrait photographer. I also learned a number of things about directing that I thought I already knew from observing other directors both in television and in my brief forays into movies at that stage.
Editing quickly reveals all the flaws in the shooting of the film, and I certainly realized that I needed to visualize each sequence in my head or on paper before filming. Otherwise, the sequence would not necessarily cut together.
The other thing I learned was that every sequence has to take the story forward; otherwise, you lose your audience. In the case of my little movie “20 Cents by Friday,” I had the boy, Kamal, trotting through four or five visually interesting but totally irrelevant locations between his school and the restaurant.
Frankly, neither Dennis nor I made any huge effort to get the movie screened. He used it as a showcase for the talents of two of his three children, and I was soon involved with returning to the film industry. It was not a waste of time or money. We both benefitted from the experience, but it was probably a little below the professional standard that I would have wanted to have my name attached to.
Shortly after that, I travelled to the little Kingdom of Swaziland to visit my parents who had relocated from Walvis Bay to Mbabane, the capital of Swaziland. In an earlier blog, I told of my adventures with the Security Police who thought I was smuggling a politically “subversive” film out of the country during which I was searched and interrogated by some colonel from Pretoria near the border. The incident was both scary and farcical. Had they ever viewed my little “epic,” the worst that could have been said was that Kamal was grossly underpaid! In fact, all the master footage was already in a laboratory in London. Dennis had a print of it, and I told them that they were welcome to ask him to show it to them. I suspect that my earlier association with the dissident Ronnie Kasrils had caused them to get excited over my leaving the country.
At any rate, I spent a few weeks with my parents in Swaziland. They were in the process of renovating the house they had bought and did not have space for me. They “farmed” me out to friends who lived just outside Mbabane on a farm, what else! Years earlier, it had been the residence of the famous English writer Sir Rider Haggard, author of “She” and “King Solomon’s Mines” and other novels. My host took me into a cave which went deeply down, leading eventually to a strongly flowing stream, which it is believed formed the basis for Haggard’s “KIng Solomon’s Mines” novel.
I really needed to get a job. I phoned Killarney Film Studios in Johannesburg, at the time the biggest as well as the oldest film studio in South Africa which had opened in 1915, dating back to the making of some major silent movie epics. There was a brief moment in time when it was considered that South Africa could become the world’s center for the movie industry, rather than Hollywood in the US.
Hollywood won out because it was that much closer to the global centers of commerce than distant South Africa, even though the many days of sunshine, inexpensive labor and spectacular scenery has always made South Africa a desirable filmic destination.
At any rate, when I called Killarney, they said that there was a vacancy in the scriptwriting department. Could I come in for an interview? I told them that I would come in the following week, having no idea how I would get there.
My parents said that they wanted to visit Johannesburg and that they would be happy to take me there. However, what my Dad didn’t say was that he planned on driving there in a caravan, or mobile home, that he had bought while they were renovating the house, and stay in a caravan park while in Johannesburg. All very fine until we set off on the 400-mile journey to Egoli (Johannesburg, the city of gold).
The moment we reached about 40 miles per hour, the caravan started to swing alarmingly from side to side. The wheel balance was way out of alignment. My Dad, being my Dad, did not return home but struggled on, fighting the monster attached to the rear of his car every inch of the way. My Dad was never my favorite driver, even under ideal conditions. My mother and I seriously competed to see who would have the first heart attack!
Somehow, we made it to Johannesburg and, now exhausted, parked at a caravan park on the outskirts of the big city. The caravan was designed to accommodate two, so I spent a few nights on an inflatable mattress on the floor.
The following day, I caught a bus into the city center and made my way to the head office of a company called Filmlets, which I was to discover served as the marketing arm for film commercials (TV did not yet exist in South Africa) as well as housing the scriptwriters. I was very disappointed to find that the writers were based some miles from Killarney Film Studios and, worse still, they were banned from visiting the place!
The reason for this became more apparent when I succeeded in being offered the writing job. The managing director, whom I shall call by his first name, Pax, was undoubtedly the most difficult person I have ever worked for. To have a name like Pax (Latin for peace and the name of the Goddess of peace) it would seem that he spent his life trying to declare war with everyone, especially his employees!
Beggars, I was reminded, can’t be choosers. Despite my misgivings, after my interview with Pax and the ban on visiting the studios, I took the job. In my next blog I shall explain what life was like working for a man who should have been called Bellum (Latin for war, of course)!
If I compare conditions with my current work that I do for ExoBrain and its founder Peter Warren, with the nearly six years surviving the megalomania of a boss who would have made an excellent Roman Emperor at the time of the Gladiators, it is no contest.
ExoTech is composed of a fully harmonious, dedicated and motivated team. No slave driving required. We are all aligned toward a single goal, that of producing the next evolution in computing for anyone on this planet, and we’re very close to achieving just that.
Vive la difference!
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.