The two men alongside me in the theatre, clasping their hands and whooping with laughter like little boys, mirthful tears coursing unwanted down their faces, were two of the most serious film buffs I know. Let them say they didn’t think much of the new Leon Schuster movie and I’ll show you two bare-faced liars. (They seemed particularly to appreciate the lavatorial bits, but let us not dwell on this.)
The scene for this most unbecoming little display was Cinema Starz at Cape Town’s GrandWest casino, film producer Anant Singh’s post-apartheid riposte to the better-known multiplexes of the bigwig distributor-exhibitors. Singh is producer of Mr Bones, the first comedy from veteran funny man Schuster in several years and the first to be made primarily with the United States market in mind.
Not to say that South Africans weren’t also in mind. We’re getting first bite (the release date is November 30), but the formula, the whole broadly swept comic style, is overtly American.
But this is no vague “let’s put an American character into the story and see if the Yanks buy it” nod to the hope of making dollars. It’s far cannier than that. The thinking goes something like this: Americans want wild animals, African-Africans, jungle, exotic characters, broad hit-you-over-the-head humour and golf. So give them Sun City, the Million Dollar Golf Challenge, an African Paul Hogan and a Tiger Woods clone who looks tres cool in a loincloth. What could be more American than that?
There are in fact two American characters in Mr Bones, but they’re only the face of the intent behind the film. Knowing that Schuster has travelled and believing he can again (Germany, Japan and other territories will also be targeted), the film has been given the feel of a movie that has come cynically and with greedy green eyes out of the mind and budget of a Hollywood producer.
Not just any Hollywood movie. We are not claiming to have made an American Beauty. More like American Pie, or the Dumb and Dumber formula, or the kind of thing that seems to bring out the errant schoolboy in Brendan Fraser.
These are worth emulating? Hell, yes, if success is measured by “box-office”. If we can pull it off, why not? The message will be plain: box office successes can be made in South Africa, using South African crews. Just get the formula right, as you would with any money-spinning Hollywood production.
The so-called “South African film industry”, that great Never-Never Land of high hopes and steeper precipices down which all but the hardiest tumble, is in no position to be picky and choosy. We need output, and never mind the calibre. Let quantity come. Creative quality can follow. If Schuster, with Singh squarely behind him, can ape (sorry) a foreign formula that works, those who would rather make art should either do so or shut face.
Point is, he’s done it. He’s made the movie and it is funny — and better still, it smells of money. Technically, it rings with excellence: great sound, crisp visuals, sneaky camera work, awesome stunt work and sharp editing. Well-developed, perfectly timed gags. The thing is, no matter how cruddy your subject matter you’ve got to get these things right if you’re gonna crack Uncle Sam’s silicone armour.
Further, Mr Bones is one of only two South African feature-length movies to be completed this year (Akin Omotoso’s digital video movie, God is African, is the other). Are you going to tell them, “Well that’s very nice but we would have preferred something to get our teeth into”? So make the movie, honey.
‘Ape” isn’t a bad choice of word, it turns out. Animals are all over Mr Bones, not to mention the contents of their stomachs and noses. (Let’s just say the film gives literal meaning to “shitfaced”). Pigs fall out of the sky, tatty old lions growl at maidens tied to trees, elephants … you don’t want to know.
When you have animals doing the kind of low-jinks demanded by Schuster and director Gray Hofmeyr, you need a producer who can take it. Singh was not only prepared to field a budget of R40-million over four months, he was a brick when Hofmeyr had to break the news to him that they needed to run 10 days over schedule. (“Do it,” was Singh’s response.)
This kind of money is monkeynuts to Americans, who would have spent $20-million on a project such as Mr Bones had it been done on Uncle Sam’s home turf. But consider a milieu in which Omotoso’s movie was made on a laughable R60Â 000. Budget is the word. But this ability to produce a movie professionally for far less money than it would cost in the United States is the key to the potential our “industry” holds. Singh predicted on completion of Mr Bones that the industry could expect a boom thanks to a 47% depreciation in the value of the rand over 20 months. A veteran of 50 films, Singh is the most credible voice on the South African film scene and for him to say this carries substantially more weight than the same words out of a lesser commentator’s mouth.
Singh even cited examples of foreign producers who had expressed interest in filming in South Africa, including Summit Entertainment (producers of American Pie and Evita) and Mandalay Pictures (Rain Man and the Batman movies).
So is Mr Bones the kind of movie we would be proud to send out into the world to show off our wonderful locations, our impressive technical expertise and our breathtaking creative finesse? The bones are fuzzy on this point. Art it is not, but it does have more to offer than the toilet humour with which it is liberally splashed.
The movie has heart and that’s more than you can say of a lot of US fodder. It has characters you care about — no matter how outlandish and vulgar they may be — and this is an element that Schuster’s work shares with the films of the man whose mantle he has assumed, the veteran South African filmmaker Jamie Uys.
Uys, in movies such as The Gods Must Be Crazy, created characters you warmed to, put them in wildly wayward situations and watched them cope. He knew how to make an animal seem to behave for the camera too in the enchanting Beautiful People.
Schuster has the common touch (you can say that again) and, more importantly, he has the audience. His movies rate among the highest grossers in South African box office history — consider that it took a Titanic to topple his Panic Mechanic from the all-time hot spot.
Can he take on Uncle Sam and win? All that’s left for us is to gird our Errol Arendz loincloths, throw the bones and wait.