Hollywood Hitmaking, Township Style

The future of South Africa movie attendance is in safe hands – well, it is for the 43m South Africans who prefer to keep it affordable, anyway. Producer Sello ‘Chicco’ Twala has sold a million DVDs of his first three township comedies and estimates that 25m more pirated copies are being hawked on street corners. Now he’s teaming up with government and the private sector to develop his brand of ‘Jozi-wood’ flicks as a viable extension of today’s cinema business.

Advertisers are interested in placing spots ahead of the movies on his hi-res DVDs, Twala says, but corporate multiplex operators like Ster-Kinekor and open-channel broadcasters etv and the SABC are yet to stake production funds.

“No one in South Africa’s cinema or TV business has taken an interest so far in investing in my movies,” says Twala, whose success in the record industry has taught him to follow public taste when it comes to backing winners. “That’s why my company, Mzansi Films, has ploughed every cent we’ve made so far from our DVD sales into setting up our own infrastructure.”

Mzansi Films has a small release catalogue but already has its own DVD pressing plant, with a film studio, camera, sound and lighting equipment and an editing suite established in Midrand, between the large urban markets of Johannesburg and Pretoria.

The breakthrough release which got Twala’s DVD operation up ‘n running in 2008  hit all the buttons of contemporary township culture. The story, about a nerdy teenager winning the day against family abuse was titled My Shit Father And My Lotto Ticket. It sold 300 000 copies within six months and established its unknown star Mapuduthu

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“We do promotional visits to townships like KwaMasha outside Durban and he pulls bigger crowds than any candidate running for election,” says Twala. “His fan following is at pop-star level, bigger than any soap star from TV. Yet this is his first film. I chose him and taught him how to work on camera and developed his character into a kid that every family can relate to – the clever young guy who outwits all the misfortune that comes at him and finally triumphs by doing the right thing.”

It’s a rags-to-riches formula that’s built fortunes in Hollywood and Bollywood from the era of Charlie Chaplin to last year’s Slumdog Millionaire.

Twala has been making his 80-minute homegrown comedies for under R500 000 (roughly equal to $70 000), workshopping the scripts with his mostly amateur casts from real-life situations that are topical gossip in the shebeen bars and corner shopping spazas.

OUTSELLING CELINE WITH TOWNSHIP POP

That’s where the buzz in generated. That’s where 46-year-old ‘Chicco’ Twala is the byword for entertainment for the majority of South Africa’s working class consumers. It’s where stars can be made outside the mainstream media on word of mouth.

One example was South Africa’s hottest-ever female pop star, Brenda Fassie, rose to fame during the worst of the anti-apartheid conflict. Slender, sexy and fearless, she defied all the racial and gender stereotypes with her songs and stage performances. She became the postergirl for the young, fast township generation in the highly-political 1980s decade by exposing women-abuse with hits like ‘(I’m Not Your) Weekend Special’.

Too controversial for State TV and most radio stations, Fassie launched her early success on the concert circuit. Her peak commercial phase began in 1986 when Chicco Twala became her record producer and targeted the broad family audience from their first collaboration, Too Late For Mama.

The empowerment of a vast new consumer society in 1994 under a democratic government brought a demand for the People’s own entertainment icons. The sales trajectory of Twala and Fassie’s hits rose from gold to multiples of platinum. They out-muscled all competition, even the box-office success of the movie Titanic. Twala’s anthemic ballad Vulindlele (Make Way) topped the SA pop charts in 1998 against the movie’s theme song, My Heart Must Go On – a townships v. suburbs showdown in which Ms Fassie’s 800 000 sales outsold Celine Dion 2-1.

OUTSELLING HOLLYWOOD WITH TOWNSHIP STORIES

Chicco Twala’s feel for the market is just as sharp today, with home entertainment’s rapid expansion from stereos to multi-media theatre systems.

“It’s important to understand what the people want in whatever entertainment you provide,” he says. “I don’t want to criticize the programming on TV channels with a majority black audience like SABC1 and etv but they are hopelessly out of step with their viewers when it comes to films.

“The endless crime and karate programs have no history or social values that resonate with today’s South Africans. I grew up with classics like Jamie Uys’s Dingaka and Simon Sabela’s Inyakanyaka. They were rooted in our own village legends of tribal leaders and family life. The comedies I make now are likewise filled with people and stories that everyone recognizes and relates to.”

Moruti wa Tsotsi (The Con-man Priest) was Twala’s first homegrown movie release. It  starred veteran comic Senyaka and Brenda Fassie and steadily accumulated sales via word of mouth across the country. More importantly, as millions of township households were hooked into the national power grid, it fed the demand for entertainment on CD and DVD.

By 2006 when another township movie, the R30m ($5m) Tsotsi, won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, Chicco was already streets ahead of the game. By then his Moruti wa Tsotsi movie had sold 300 000 DVDs priced between R50-70 ($7-10), the average cost of a local music CD. Tsotsi’s take on the national cinema circuit was around half a million dollars.

The follow-up, Moruti wa Tsotsi 2, has sold the same numbers. “Seeing this as a business with unlimited potential,” says Twala, “my backers and I have kept production costs down by investing in our own facilities instead of renting them from film to film. Our biggest challenge is not to maintain the run of hit movies: we have six new scripts in pre-production. The only threat to our ongoing business development is film piracy.”

BEATING FILM PIRACY AT STREET LEVEL

The Mzansi Films brand is a target nowadays that’s hotter than the latest Hollywood blockbusters. Twala estimates there are at least 25m fake copies of his DVD movies in circulation.

On the upside, the consistent 300 000-plus sales of each release show that Mzansi Films has a core following. They prefer to buy the authentic product to use in their expensive DVD players, computers and home theatre systems. It’s a viable client base, but just a glimpse of the true Big Picture. Twala believes the South African DVD-movie market can sell a billion legitimate copies annually by 2014.

Hi-tech methods of controlling the piracy problem are expensive and depend on government and the cellphone companies becoming involved. Coding the film data on the disks, for example, to protect the Mzansi Films copyright, is one option. Making the films available for digital download is another. Taking the fight to the bootleggers on the streets also has merit; one tactic that Twala is discussing with private sector companies has a shock twist reminiscent of one of his movie plots.

“Our plan is to make our own pirated versions of popular films with the same cheap labels and covers and sell them at traffic lights and street corners,” he says. “But when you get home and pop your R20 rip-off into the slot all you get is a message that piracy is illegal. The rest of the disk is blank.”

It would be a wake-up to movie fans who take a chance, but the idea stems from brainstorming sessions at Mzansi Films about ways to replace lost revenue. “Several ad agencies are interested in putting commercials in front of our top-selling movies, just like they do it in the cinemas,” says Twala. “One of our biggest business assets is our distribution network, a model we’ve developed in every community countrywide.”

SELLING MOVIES, GRASSROOTS STYLE

The initial release of each movie places 10-15 copies with every township spaza shop and shebeen on the network. “We have at least 10 000 outlets,” says Twala, “which means we can test-market the launch of each film with around 150 000 sales. Our plant can press up to 25 000 DVDs a day so when the follow-up orders come in we can meet them very quickly.”

His township marketing system has practical advantages over the cinema trade. Spending R50-70 on a brand-new DVD is more economical than taking a taxi ride with a date to and from the cinema and the cost of the movie ticket and snacks.

Chicco used the same grassroots distribution network to sell his music releases on cassette tapes, vinyl records and then CDs back in the chaotic days of apartheid unrest. Today, he pitches it as an incentive for government to get behind his initiative.

“With so many people out of work, our distribution system creates jobs in the urban and rural areas,” says Twala. “We are now expanding it to bus and taxi ranks as well. If the black consumer doesn’t go to the movie houses, you bring the movies to them. Wherever the people are, that’s where we are on sale.”

NEXT FOR MARTIN LAWRENCE – BAD BOYS, SOWETO STYLE

Johannesburg’s budding movie mogul has a few more ideas he’s discussing with the Departments of Trade and Industry, and Arts and Culture. Exports are high on the agenda – primarily, the potential of South African township comedy in Nigeria’s booming ‘Nollywood’ market, which entirely comprises low-budget films on video and DVD.

He also has a plan to export South African movies worldwide by casting American co-stars – the biggest on the market.

“People rent Martin Lawrence DVDs because they know they’ll be laughing from the first scene,” says Twala. “I have a script that I’m now discussing with financial backers. I want to bring Martin Lawrence here to Soweto to star in it. He will play a guy who comes to South Africa and confronts all the problems that we live with day to day. It will make the Bad Boys hits seem very tame and it would launch our export drive with our first international release.”

 

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