“I think that the licensing of foreign concepts, such as The Block or The Weakest Link, dilutes local talent,” remarks Greg Marinovich, his rapid-fire speech littered with the odd expletive or two. The Pulitzer Prize winning photographer turned documentary filmmaker is pissed off, not just at the quality of local television content, but also at the seemingly broad definitional parameters used in defining what constitutes local content. Seated on a first floor balcony overlooking Melville’s Fifth Avenue, the unassuming Marinovich declares: “With programmes such as those you end up placing local talent into a zero gain end product, one that really only benefits advertisers.”
Marinovich is not hesitant to venture an opinion; his history is too fraught to indulge in sophistry and innuendo. A member of the celebrated Bang-Bang Club, Marinovich was severely wounded by a gunshot, in 1994, while documenting the hostel clashes in Tokoza. His friend, Ken Oosterbroek, died instantly on the same assignment. Since those turbulent days, Marinovich has worked as a freelancer for the New York Times, Guardian and Der Spiegel, amongst others. In 1996, he was appointed chief photographer for the Associated Press, in Jerusalem, returning to South Africa in mid-1997. In recent years Marinovich has had several of his documentaries flighted by SABC and e.tv, and is currently completing an SABC documentary on David Goldblatt, the first South African photographer to be exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
“Documentaries are seen as something negligible,” Marinovich sighs, pointing out how foreign broadcasters, such as BBC or PBS, invest upwards of US$300,000 in a single documentary. “Local budgets are R3,000 per minute, for 24 or 48 minutes,” he says. “It’s doable, but you’re not going to make a masterpiece. You can’t use quality cameramen, sound technicians or editors. Our top cameramen, for instance, charge GBP800 per day. You can’t afford them on local budgets, so you either shoot yourself, inadequately, or hire a mediocre shooter.” An additional competitive reality is the cost of rerunning a foreign documentary, which is reported to be as little as R500 per minute.
In an ideal scenario, argues Marinovich, more emphasis would be placed on commissioning quality local content, or what he describes as “true documentaries and docu-dramas”. It is an opinion shared by Shan Moodley, Chairman of the SA Film and Video Foundation. In a Business Day interview, Moodley spoke of the “need to make dramatic documentaries to pass our stories on to our children. These extend beyond the struggle and apartheid stories. There are also incredible anthropological and wildlife stories to be told that should be archived for future generations.”
Of course, documentary programming represents only a small part of what constitutes local content production. And yet its problems are instructive, offering an insight into the issues informing the local content debate. It is a contest that pits two (sometimes) opposing realities. On the one hand there is the prerogative of nation building, shared (however tenuously) by a broad base of political ideologues and production visionaries who variously aim to develop, protect and promote a national and provincial identity, culture and character, one that will also sustain a vibrant, dynamic, creative and economically productive local industry. This also describes the core ambition of the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa), which administers local content regulation. But ideology does function in a vacuum, particularly when it has to be televised. The cut and thrust of broadcast economics also plays a key role in shaping what we see.
Take the SABC, for instance. Direct government support for this public broadcaster has been held at less than three percent for the past few years, according to ThisDay (September 15, 2004). As with its more commercially orientated competitors, the SABC thus relies heavily on advertising. Indeed, two-thirds of the corporation’s R2,7-billion revenue in 2004 came from advertising sales. The difficulty, for the broadcaster, arises when advertisers shy away from local programmes with high audience ratings when they do not target their primary targets. Local content broadcasting, it would seem, is a feckless enterprise.
It is, however, also an unavoidable reality, as local content and independent production quotas bind all local broadcasters. At present Icasa stipulates three sets of quotas for television: global local content quotas, genre quotas and independent production quotas. Concentrating on the first, global local content quotas, these apply to all television channels, and define the percentage of airtime, between 05H00 and 23H00, that should be allocated to local content. According to regulations promulgated in 2002, which came into effect from August 22, 2003, local content quotas for public broadcast television increased from 50 to 55 percent; 20 to 35 percent on commercial free-to-air television; and from five to eight percent on terrestrial subscription television.
Genre quotas, the second category mentioned, are more specific, and stipulate that if a television channel carries a certain genre of programming (such as drama), a percentage of that kind of programming must be allocated to local content. Icasa has defined six distinct genre areas – drama-, children’s-, educational-, documentary-, current affairs programming and informal knowledge building – each with its own prescribed minimum quota. Genre quotas distinguish between public and commercial television.
The last of the three categories, independent production quotas, stipulates the percentage of local content aired that must be allocated to independent television productions. In a report published in the Sunday Times (June 9, 2004), the SABC is credited with commissioning 227 local television productions, in 2002/2003, and excluding those for news, from independent production companies. The combined value of these orders was R376-million. Over 60% of these commissions, valued at more than R240-million, were awarded to black economic empowerment companies.
According to an SABC policy statement, the broadcaster believes that South African music and television content play a key part in reflecting and celebrating our country’s diverse people and cultures. Not that the broadcaster has its head in the clouds. The policy statement includes this revealing caveat: “In an environment where programming is funded primarily by advertising, there is also a pressure on the SABC to screen material that would draw audiences and revenue.”
Confronted with the totality of this sticky glob, I wondered what Franz Marx made of it all. Once described as “Africa’s equivalent of Hollywood’s Aaron Spelling”, Marx’s career straddles a huge epoch in local television history. The University of Stellenbosch drama graduate first hit it big in the early 1980s with the teen drama Skooldae, and then, in 1987, with his weekly series Agter Elke Man, which rivaled Dallas in popularity. His current reputation as an independent producer largely rests upon his flagship production, Egoli, which was South Africa’s first locally produced daily drama.
Seated in a single-seater lounge chair, surrounded by photographs of his Egoli cast, buff boys without shirts included, Marx is a relaxed speaker. He projects none of the clichés one expects of a big producer. He is attentive and polite, in a word gracious. After all, he’s heard this whole spiel about local content before, many times over.
“With television, you have a target audience and you work for that audience,” he boldly states. “You can’t alienate your audience. It’s not on. It would be wonderful to make something and say this is what I want to make, but it is not going to happen like that.”
Hmm, so Franz Marx is a pragmatist with his eyes firmly fixed on his audience, which prompts me to ask the same question, just differently. Egoli has aired over what will doubtlessly be remembered as one of the most epochal periods in our country’s history, I say. From a purely storytelling point of view, does he feel this outside “stuff” ever manifested itself in the daily life of Egoli, both on-set and off?
“Big time,” he responds, explaining how Egoli had to adapt its storyline, its characters, indeed the very manner in which Egoli‘s characters lived and the way they thought, to the community in which they featured. He still chuckles heartily when he recounts the uproarious response to a 1996 storyline that made mention of a burgeoning (and entirely fictional) squatter camp emerging in Boksburg. Marx is magnanimous enough in conceding that dramas cannot tell the whole truth. Referring to his recent SABC production, The Res, an ostensibly gritty 26-part weekly drama series, he states: “The amount of subtlety you use is not really real when you flight something at eight o’clock at night. You still have to consider a big segment of the audience, which will react very badly if reality is thrown in their face.”
Marinovich is less than convinced, his comments returning us to the standoff between economic pragmatists, such as Marx, and the nation-building idealist. “We live in a rich country. People from around the world come here to do stories and yet we cannot do anything better than Isidingo and the other soapies,” argues Marinovich. “What you want to do is tell great South African stories that don’t adhere to a certain formula of political correctness, and are not some glossy, smoothed over version of things, the end justifying the means.” He mentions the controversial drama Yizo Yizo as an example. “It was great, and also controversial, because it was true.”
Curious, I ask Marx what he thinks of the emergence of more liberalized storytelling modes, particularly those heralded by the likes of Soul City and Yizo Yizo. It is a fair question. Despite his current bowing act to the dictates of the market, Marx’s debut as a producer was with a small film titled Fred is in love, “a suicidal and dark story” released in 1969. Marx smiles at my question. It is the knowing smile of the seasoned journeyman. “Yizo Yizo was a lekker losgaat production, in all senses,” he laughs. “I mean that as a big compliment.”
Financial Bottomline
In a recent article published in ThisDay (September 15, 2004), it was reported that the SABC’s local content spend grew 28 per cent to more than R1-billion, for the financial year 2004. The broadcaster ordered 247 productions from outside companies. As ThisDay reports, many of these companies paid for the use of SABC facilities, making it difficult to provide a figure on how much the SABC spent on outside production firms. In 2001, the total worth of the entertainment industry (film and television production, broadcast, cinema and interactive industries included) was pegged at approximately R7,7 -billion, with television accounting for 36 per cent of this figure.