13/03/2013
VANITY NOTE # 18
WHY A FILM INDUSTRY
In my quest to sell my movie screenplays or at least get them produced, the one persistently recurring question has always been, “Why do you want to make this movie?” to which my reply has always been, “Because it is a story that needs to be told.” To me this answer seemed self explanatory but with benefit of hindsight I can see why I didn’t get much mileage, (I have not produced a single movie to date, rather I have been contracted as a staff writer on several television productions). Allow me to explain what I meant.
The average Westerner’s perception of Africa is a huge jungle with half naked savage hunter-gatherer natives still living on trees and in caves. Can you blame them when their only source of information about Africa while growing up was Tarzan! When the house of the snobbish neighbor who keeps to himself catches fire and while trying to salvage the little he can he is mistaken for a thief and beaten up, whom does he blame? The neighbours for being ‘neighbourly’ or himself for not being identifiable? Only we are responsible for the image we portray, not the other way round. If everyone talks smack about you, there is something amiss with you. Dismiss them as haters at your own peril.
Any company worth its salt has a good Public Relations (PR) department that is charged with projecting the right image of the company or at the very least a friendly one. In this regard, cinema is a country’s first line of PR.
Example 1: The most aped (pun intended) man in the world is the African American male. Coincidence; you be the judge. The leader of the free world is a black man (Barrack Obama). The biggest movie star in the world is a black man (Will Smith). The highest earning musician in the last five years is a black man (P. Diddy); all people in show business (politics is show business). Any wonder? While the African American of the eighties and nineties was viewed as a gang banging, dope selling, crack smocking no gooder, recent films, plays and television productions by the likes of Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry( For Better or For Worse and Good Deeds) portray him as a successful man with a beautiful house, family and running his own business. Who wouldn’t want to be him? Even the previously nefarious rappers have adopted a new take for their videos, the good life as depicted by the top of the range cars, designer wear and bling; gone are the guns and forties. The world’s perception of the African American has come a long way from the idiosyncrasies depicted in John Singleton’s, Ice Cube’s and Spike Lee movies all thanks to cinema.
Example 2: Today every man who shows a modicum of compassion is branded ‘a Mother Teresa’. Were it not for……… “A Beautiful Life’, the world would have little known about this all inspiring figure. My point; one film gave the entire world something to aspire to. If that is not absolute proof of the power of cinema then I don’t know what is.
Example 3: My bucket list (things I would like to do before I die) reads thus:
i) Visit the opera in Vienna Austria, the cultural and music centre of the world.
ii) Grab the bull statue above located in Manhattan New York by the balls.
iii) Take a stroll along Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.
iv) Attend Rio Carnival the Brazilian annual carnival.
v) Attend at least one wrestle mania.
vi) Have my stag party in Las Vegas then honeymoon in Hawaii.
vii) Swim with the sharks in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and,
viii) Take a ride on Tokyo’s metro train.
This list has been created purely from what I have been exposed to by cinema. There is no doubt in my mind that bigger and better adventures exist out there perhaps even in my back yard. Only problem is, no one has exposed them.
Kenya Tourism Board are you listening? Instead of spending billions of Shillings talking to the same old people at the same old tourism fairs and printing the same old brochures why not finance an action adventure comedy (think Road Trip meets the playfulness of Hangover). In this movie 4 Ivy League students on their way to a dream holiday, to say Brazil, mistakenly end up in Kenya and despite initial protests they end up having the adventure of their lives altering their perception of life in general and Africa in particular. For good measure the 4 can be an American play boy, a British aristocrat, a Sheikhs son and a computer whiz kid from South Korea just so you can cover all your target markets. This story can be played out in our scenic tourist attraction sites and the script doctored to give Kenya the new tag of “a premium adventure paradise” or any other you may so wish. For maximum effect, splash out on a foreign production team; it will be worth it in the end. I can guarantee you that this film will be seen by more people than have read all the brochures you have printed since independence and voila! Before you say pristine sandy beaches and game drives ten million tourists will have landed at JKIA. A vision 2030 pillar achieved by 2016!
Forgive my running mind but an image of a drunk hot headed American dangling out of a hot air balloon 300m above the Mara as lions and millions of wildebeest watch him having called a temporary truce to witness the antics of the ‘gringo’ while his friends laugh at him captures the imagination more than any advert on CNN would. Me thinks such a film could be the funniest thing after The Gods Must Be Crazy series.
In any case, this can be a gift that keeps on giving because you will also be advertising Kenya as a filming location thereby killing 2 birds with one stone. How often do you do that?
Another case in point for which cinema would have been far more effective than idle talk was during the post election violence. A multi layered film depicting the following storylines would have opened people’s eyes and achieved far better results than anything else done at the time;
i) The media and a few people unrelentingly suing for peace and compromise from the ‘rivaling’ political class.
ii) An oblivious political class who are hobnobbing with each other in complete disregard to the suffering they are causing while using their aides to stoke further violence.
iii) A perpetrator of violence who after hacking a neighbour’s cows and burning their store now can’t buy food or milk locally and has to walk a greater distance to get to the next store with his journey being made more perilous by his victims who are planning retaliatory attacks.
iv) Islands of peace where communities take it upon themselves to promote peace and therefore suffer little or no destructions amid the sea of chaos around them.
v) Looters and other busy bodies just so we can laugh at ourselves amidst all the barbarism.
A film like this would have served two distinct purposes: show the world what truly happened at that dark moment in our history: that neither was Kenya burning nor had we all gone mad, it was just a few rogue elements out to disrupt peace for selfish gains as well as showcase how the 1% upper class furthers itself at the expense of the other 99%.
The portrayal of a man hiding his wife from his murderous clansmen and a mother crying over her son’s lifeless body (think Sarafina) while the political class and their consorts toast champagne in an exclusive resort at tax payers’ expense would have rent the air with cries of “never again” negating the need for all the peace conferences and prayer rallies. Needless to say, this is not a story typical to Kenya alone; rather it is a worldwide phenomenon with but minor alterations. (Could Kenya really offer the world a solution? For you nay sayers think Mpesa! )
Other than exporting culture and being an agent of social change cinema plays other critical roles such as creating employment and developing other line industries including hotel and catering, fashion/costume design, carpentry for the sets, music for the soundtracks, hair and makeup as well as many other jobs along the distribution chain.
An often understated role that the film industry plays is its contribution to technology. For you doubting Thomas’s take a look at 24 season 4. Back in 2004/2005 Chloe O'Brien was walking around CTU with a tablet, technology that would be available to the masses a long 5 years later. The next frontier in computing is, you guessed it, holographic displays, a fete already achieved in Minority Report, Eagle Eye, CSI Miami and most recently at a Dr. Dre concert. Your prized i7 quad core computer with the ‘latest’ graphics accelerator that you brag about to your boys is child’s play compared to the super computers needed to render 3D animations. Conventional wisdom has it that cinema is technologically 4-5 years ahead of the general population: if you want to know the next technology vis-a-vis fashion trend, follow cinema. For a country that wishes to play with the big boys in the field of technology, cinema is not a bad place to start.
Finally movie stars have proved to be the biggest celebrities the world over with some of them using their star power for good, think Clooney and Anil Kapur the King of Bollywood. We too need home baked stars we can gravitate to while our kids need role models other than politicians. Perhaps with other people to occupy our minds we can finally quit our unhealthy obsession with politicians.
Yes, I am very bullish about a Kenyan film industry because to me cinema is more than mere entertainment. Anyone feel like commissioning a screenplay?
