Craig Freimond is trying to quit smoking. He is buying his cigarettes loose, as if that helps. He can’t take the cold, but we have to sit outside on the balcony of the Wits University theatre nearby the rehearsal room of his new play. It is a toss-up between heat and smoke, appropriate since his first movie is about the downside of addiction.
‘I am doing a new play I wrote a couple of years ago called the King of Laughter, for the National Arts Festival. It is about a laugh-track technician who is getting retrenched, who has to train in a young man of colour to take over his job in laughter. I’ve kind of had this on-off relationship with the university forever.”
Freimond is doing a master’s degree in, well, one’s not quite sure. It’s ongoing, and involves writing scripts and making plays. His previous work, Gums and Noses, about cocaine abuse in the advertising industry, launched here. Before being adapted into a feature film it was a three-hander — the Marx Brothers meet Trainspotting — it really worked. The movie shows at the Durban International Film Festival next week
The three were Antony Coleman, Lionel Newton and student actor Jacques Blignaut. In the new feature Blignaut plays an extra called Nightclub Barman, but in the original he played Calvin, a young coloured drug dealer.
Like many Jo’burg dealers, Calvin, now played by Mothusi Magano, delivers cocaine to the client’s door. ‘I think that cocaine peaked after the [first] elections,” Freimond observes. ‘Things opened up and there was suddenly this notion that you could get it like that. It was that easily accessible. Quite middle class people could have an interaction with someone who was from a very bad scene, who arrived at their front door to give them their drugs and disappeared again. That interaction always intrigued me.
‘It’s pure consumerism. You make a call and the guy arrives: ‘thank you very much’. But the fact is that the deal that you’re making has got huge ramifications in terms of where that person comes from. In the movie I suggest there is an underworld that is dodgy and very nefarious. And when it becomes a norm people don’t think about that anymore. They think it’s just a guy coming to drop something off.”
In Gums and Noses actor Antony Coleman plays an insipid boy next door who sort of drags himself apathetically into the advertising industry. With a foot in the door he is propelled into the creative department where he falls victim to art director Mike, played by a rasping, award-grasping Sean Taylor.
The advertising industry is really just a conduit, used with skill to show something about the frustration inherent in the commercial world where creativity is ordered in, like packaged pizza.
‘I have never worked in advertising,” Freimond confesses. ‘But I know a lot about the advertising industry. The notion of having to be creative on demand is something that I’ve done a lot of. I had to situate that in a world — whether it was the film world or the corporate theatre world — advertising just seemed to have a kind of drive, an emphasis on success that is quite out of proportion with what they do.”
When the original work played at the Wits theatre I got the feeling that Freimond and company had overlooked one crucial aspect of cocaine abuse. This is the paranoia that addicts have spoken about — binges ending with people crawling on the carpet looking for loose crumbs to smoke or snort, fear of noise and a continual listening out for intruders or the police.
In Gums and Noses, the movie, some of that paranoia now exists. ‘In the film I tried to address that by just suggesting that the wheels are starting to fall off,” Freimond counters. ‘He is actually starting to fuck out at work and he is irrational, his nose is bleeding and all of that stuff. But I never really wanted it to become a bitter, dark drug story.”
Instead, the movie is a black comedy. Lionel Newton does a superb job of the cocaine coaching buddy Dave, the kind of low-life scum one cannot resist having around. It is Dave who, when the noses are falling off, suggests that the chaps put the stuff up their bums. It is Dave who points out that dealers often smuggle cocaine through airports stuffed in swallowed condoms, which they deliver into the toilet pan — like eating, it is a cycle.
With this sort of subject-matter Gums and Noses provides a rare moment of truly alternative, local feature film. The work forms part of pay channel giant M-Net’s drive to make eight feature films on a budget of R1,35-million each. The movie was shot on high-definition digital stock and the filmmakers are hoping to raise more money to edit it on this standard and to blow it up on celluloid. With that Gums and Noses may get the distribution it deserves.
The work was produced by Robbie Thorpe of TOM productions, a company he shares with luminaries Akin Omotoso and Kgomotso Matsunyane, both of whom have bit parts in the film.
As for the white stuff, on this moderate budget the actors were treated to glucose, definitely not cocaine. ‘After excessive use they started getting a bit hyper, and it gets a bit gummy,” Freimond says with guilt.
The details:
Gums and Noses shows at the Durban International Film Festival on June 24 at the Elizabeth Sneddon theatre and on June 26 at Cinema Nouveau at Gateway. The King of Laughter shows on the main stage of the National Arts Festival that takes place in Grahamstown from July 1 to 10.