The beleaguered South African film industry has one prop that keeps it moving – Peakviewing Productions, and it knows what it’s doing: making family films with a firm marketing plan behind them.
Altogether the company has made eight films in South Africa over the past two years, and over that time shot more than 607 000m of Fujifilm, making Peakviewing the biggest user of Fujifilm in the southern hemisphere.
Peakviewing’s latest production (which wrapped last week) is, predictably, a “family flick”, this time in the guise of a fairy story. Co-written by comedian and columnist Gus Silber and Steve Francis (one of the originators of the Madam and Eve cartoon series), the film, called Dazzle, revolves around a best-selling author of children’s books whose magic in life disappears after his wife dies. His only joy in life is his nine-year-old daughter – the biggest fan of his fairy tales. Then one night a dazed and beautiful stranger knocks on his door – it’s a fairy who accidentally knocked into a tree. They fall in love, but she is being chased by two bumbling gnomes, who are dispatched to bring her back to fairyland, as well as a ruthless and magical bounty hunter known as the Collector.
Set in some imaginary village, reminiscent of a quaint north England town, it’s quite the opposite of a “Sarf Effriken” flick but, unlike most local movies, it’s a product that will sell – to cable television most likely. Through Peakviewing’s distribution arm, sales have already been made to several territories.
Silber and Francis say they pitched the idea to Peakviewing CEO Elizabeth Matthews last October and it took about three months to write, but they also firmly insist that the movie is more of a romantic comedy than a slushy, kiddies’ fairy movie.
On a location visit to a forest just below Jan Smuts’s historical house in Irene, I was able to speak to the upper echelon of the crew – director David Lister and director of photography Vincent Cox.
Lister started out as an SABC TV director, making series like Barney Barnato and The Big Time. Cox is the only cinematographer to be made a member of the American Society of Cinematographers. Over the past few months it has been Peakviewing that has paid Lister’s and Cox’s rent.
“What makes Peakviewing unique,” says Cox, “is that they almost work backwards, getting the deals first, then making the picture. Whereas South African film-makers are generally good at making a movie but very bad at selling it.”
Playing the lead in Dazzle is English-born, Hollywood-based Maxwell Caulfield, who achieved brief fame in 1982 as the lead in Grease II opposite Michelle Pfeiffer.
“There’s a lot of work that can be made in South Africa,” Caulfield says. “Peakviewing, for example, have built an infrastructure to make movies,” and then adds tongue-in-cheek, “because they’ve built the sets and want to use them three times in a row.”
In addition to the company’s practical sense of using the same sets, it has a permanent set of three “western” towns plus several medieval villages ready for shooting at any time. It casts mainly B-grade or one-time stars in its movies. Caulfield diplomatically says: “They don’t undercut you, they honour their quotes and one is given the feeling that one still has leading-man potential.”
The other overseas actors in Dazzle are Jeff Fahey (as the Collector), who achieved once-off fame in The Lawnmower Man, and Mia Sara, who also had a one-off hit as a nosy schoolteacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
Then there’s South African Chantelle Stander, one-time soap opera star in Egoli, who has leapt to fame in Peakviewing’s productions, first taking the lead role of a gun-slinging female vigilante during the United States Civil War in the $12-million production of Glory! Glory!, which was shot in South Africa last year.
About her experience of playing a fairy – including daredevil stunts for special effects shots – Stander says: “It’s bloody hard being a fairy. You cannot play it totally straight because the character’s not a mortal. So I made every emotion totally pure, because fairies don’t have hidden motives.”
About the local industry, she says: “I think South African actors are compromised because of bad scripts and stilted dialogue. Actors feel compelled to make scripts work, so they might end up looking bad. We don’t have the money or the inclination to spend more time refining screenplays and coming up with good scripts.”
Another local who has scored big with Peakviewing is Brett St Clair, son of Barry St Clair (producer of Zulu Dawn). Brett St Clair has started his own grips company supplying dollies, tracks, cranes and all the rigging expertise for Peakviewing’s films. “With them we were able to bring in three cranes from overseas and they will be sending me to Italy next month to buy a dolly,” he says.
As I’m about to leave the freezing set at 10pm, they’re co-ordinating a complicated special effects scene which will be completed on computer. Lister, despite the pressure, turns to writers Silber and Francis and says: “Please, guys, don’t ever write digital stuff again, it’s an epic, you know, like ‘the army crosses the bridge’, or ‘the Titanic sank’, etcetera.”
These kinds of fantasies are a mission to create on screen, and cost a lot of money. On one level they seem as impossible as the fantasy of a legitimate South African feature film industry. In this climate, though, Peakviewing is trying something new; and that’s no fairy story.
The company starts its next production here – a western called Silverwinchester: A Ghost Story – in less than a month.