SA film needs an audience – that’s no joke
Shot in Fordsburg, ‘Material’ is the real deal for Ronnie Apteker
ID YOU hear the one about the Jewish oke and the Muslim guy? If it sounds like the opening line to a joke, that’s because it is. And now it’s become a full-length film – a serious and sad, hysterical and joyous film about a man who defied his family and his convention to become a stand-up comic.
Ronnie Apteker is a comedian. He also happens to be a lifelong entrepreneur who grew up waiting tables, running a stall at flea markets and writing software before becoming a self-made inter net tycoon. He founded Internet Solutions along the way, made himself a packet and promptly threw himself into making movies.
He’s been involved in the making of 11 so far, from Crazy Monkey’s Straight Outta Benoni to Jerusalema, but the Material movie, which opened last night, is the real deal. If it fails, it will wipe him out.
He won’t be out on the street, without a bean to his name, but it will clean him out emotionally, intellectually and spiritually.
He admits as much, torn by the fact that he thinks the movie is the best he’s done.
Apteker is always tightly spooled; a notorious workaholic, entrepreneur and ferocious taskmaster who drives himself far harder than anyone else on his team.
For someone who spends most of his time working with people and pitching ideas, he’s pathologically shy and painfully modest. He’s also an impossible dreamer and a romantic. This time the dream’s been an eight-year journey. If the film takes off the way they all hope it will, then the jour ney might only just be beginning – not just for Apteker but everyone involved.
It started in Joburg in 2002. Apteker wanted to put together a charity show featuring 10 of the country’s best comedians to raise money for charity. Among them was a relatively unknown Muslim doctor who wanted to be a stand-up comic. His name was Riaad Moosa.
Apteker and his partners at Internet Solutions financed and ran the one-off multi-million rand charity show called Laugh Out Loud, which not only recouped the original investment but raised a significant sum of money for Reach for a Dream.
It was also where Apteker met the comedian from Cape Town, whose story so gripped him that he was inspired to start penning a film script around it.
However, to make things simpler, the star of the story was a young man working in his family’s store, who chooses comedy as a career.
Apteker wrote Material and then turned it over to Joburg director and scriptwriter Craig Freimond who, over a period of seven years, worked on it and got it ready to shoot.
Even then Apteker and Freimond didn’t stop, Moosa got involved, coproducer Robbie Thorpe added his bit, as did Freimond’s wife Rosalind.
And then, when they were all happy, they decamped to Fordsburg, west of the Joburg CBD, to shoot for a month, with a cast that mixed Moosa with fellow funny man Joey Rasdien, Denise Newman and Cape Town-bor n British theatre actor Vincent Ebrahim, best known for his work on the hit UK TV series The Kumars at No 42, as well as Nik Rabinowitz and legendary SA comic Mel Miller.
That month was probably the easiest, notwithstanding problems with officialdom and cutting through red tape. Eight months of post-production followed, adding a musical score by Lizzie Rennie, editing, more editing down to a very tight 92-minute film and testing, over and over again, with focus groups across the country.
“It’s a miracle, this movie,” says Apteker, “the responses so far have been phenomenal, but if people don’t come out in their numbers to watch it, then it will be a failure.”
He’s vexed by the South African movie-going public’s distrust of locally made and produced films.
“I should know, I helped create that mistrust with films like Crazy Monkey,” he readily admits. “Every time we make something, hype it up and don’t deliver, (the disenchantment) just gets worse.”
It’s a conundrum that’s pulling him apart.
An insomniac and a worrier, Apteker has put off having an operation on his stomach for weeks; now he can’t put it off any longer because the stress is actually starting to kill him.
But before he does, he has to see what happens this weekend. Material opened in 41 cinemas simultaneously last night. Apteker’s hoping 100 000 tickets will have been sold by Monday night.
“There are five movies opening a week in this country, they each get a week. If they don’t make it, they get cut; it’s brutal, but that’s the way it is.”
Achieving a target of 100 000 on the opening weekend is an omen that the movie will survive way beyond that first week.
It’s not just his own reputation that he’s concerned about being dashed at the box office. He’s worried about everyone else he used his legendary powers of persuasion on – from the stars, including Moosa and Ebrahim (to work on the bare minimum and rather have equity... an agreement of profit sharing if all goes to plan) – to an array of companies who have all given help in kind to help market the film in a way that Apteker admits is “off the charts”.
He’s called on all the people he knows, built up over 20 years; from FNB to Discovery, M-net, Primedia and its radio stations, billboards, even Europcar. They’ve helped market the movie internally to their staff and externally to their clients.
He’s run the entire operation like one of his IT start-up ventures, costs pared to the minimum, with everyone totally immersed in the project. But unlike all the other projects, Apteker’s invested his soul in this one.
“All venture capital projects are about making money, but this one was about making something beautiful and having fun.
“This film’s good, but it’s not my film, it’s everyone’s. The film score took it to the next level, the cinematography is outstanding, the editing inspired, it’s off the scale. The acting is superb, the direction sublime. That’s what makes the movie.
“I’m called the producer, what is that? I don’t know, I’m the entrepreneurial custodian, I’m driving it, getting it made and selling it, but Craig’s the creative custodian, making sure we kept true to the dream. Robbie Thorpe is the real film producer. I am there to oversee everything. They’re all stakeholders, as well as shareholders, in the film’s success.
“You know, after Crazy Monkey my parents disowned me, but once they saw Material they decided to adopt me again. It’s the Jazz Singer of comedy, it’s Fiddler on the Roof, but with a Muslim star.”
Apteker is convinced the film is as good as Billy Elliott, the British coming of age film about a young boy from a mining town who was determined to defy convention and become a ballet dancer. In fact Britain is the next target market, followed by India, led by their partner Anant Singh.
To get there though, Material movie has to be a commercial as well as a critical success here.
“The UK has a cinema culture, there you pay £15 a ticket, hell even in Kiev and Moscow you pay R80 a ticket, but here in SA we baulk at paying R40 a ticket. The truth is we have the cheapest movie tickets in the world, but South Africans don’t think so. At £15 a ticket, even Crazy Monkey would have made money in Britain.”
The market is tough; nobody gives failures a second thought, particularly if they’ve been commercial failures.
“How do you go to the Brits and say ‘ look at this movie, it’s very good, but it tanked in the South African market’?”
If it does do well here, though, the benefits will be felt on a local scale too.
“Fordsburg will undergo a tourist explosion, because the Material movie shows it in its true, totally uncontrived beauty. It’s just like I remembered it from when I was a student at Wits in the 1980s.
“As for Riaad and Joey, imagine if this movie gets to open in India? Their lives may never be the same again.”
He’s been trying to get the movie entered into the various film festivals. One where where they did not get accepted was the 2012 Berlin Film Festival, which opened this week.
“They said it was a commercial film, not an art film. I said to them it’s unique and stunning. But obviously they didn’t get it. Here we are, a bunch of Jewish guys championing a Muslim film and asking Germans to help. Maybe it was too much like a bad joke for them after all.”
Last night, the man who honed his schtick as a comic waiting tables in Hyde Park, cracking jokes to survive the vagaries of difficult customers, impossible restaurateurs and hours on his feet, was back there.
“We just want to see the look of the people coming out of the movies. We’ll start at Hyde Park, move onto the Zone at Rosebank and then catch the late show coming out at Sandton City. We’ll know by the look on their faces if we’ve cracked it.”