Copyright 2009
I had not thought about Pietersburg for many years until it was announced that it would be the venue for one of New Zealand?s world cup matches. A search on Google maps was of no avail for like St Peterburg, it too had disappeared off the map.
On reflection I realised that it was now renamed Polokwane. It was a place that held a memory burnt deep into my psyche as I first ventured into the world of advertising. Here is the story of that moment:
There was a moment of sheer horror, just as the presentation began when the creative director got up and walked out of the room. I went scurrying out after him knowing that something was seriously amiss..
?What?s the problem Vasco?? I asked. The creative director, a tall elegant man with curly grey hair, a beautiful Mercedes SLC and a temperament like a black mamba with pre menstrual tension.
The only thing that made him happy was to bring his girlfriend, Jenny Potter, the media director to meetings so that he might perform his great leaps of logic and interminable verbal mastications.
His name was Vasco Zoia and he was a copywriter of the old school. You knew not to go near his office when you heard the keyboard of his typewriter pounding from the end of the corridor.
With a name like that you may not have taken him to be a prolific and accomplished copywriter in English but he was. You might certainly have assumed, quite reasonably, that a man with so distinctly Portugese a nom de guerre, would have no capacity to navigate the Afrikaans language.
We were about to present a TV commercial for a new Fruit Juice company. And Vasco had written an incredibly complex story about Tarzan, his tree house, and the origin of fruit juice (or perhaps the origin of man).
?What?s the name of the client? he demanded. Gawie Grobelaar was my reply. ?And what did we not do??
?Oh oh ?no Afrikaans translation.?
The problem here was simply that Vasco in his wonderful wisdom had come up with a line for the commercial that ended ?Fruitree tastes tremendous.? (Yes people do get paid large sums of money for this inane rubbish and they do go home to the dinner table surrounded by eager children to proclaim that they have been working).
A frantic call went out for the Afrikaans copywriter but she was stumped. Suddenly Vasco spun on his heel and marched back into the presentation room with me dragged behind in his vortex.
The solution was an elegant one for those who understand Afrikaans ? ?Fruitree smaak van-takties.?
So we presented our work to applause and approbation and headed off to shoot what for me would be my first Tarzan movie.
It was to be shot on a farm, on the road between Polokwane (nee the aforesaid Pietersburg) and Tzaneen. It is indeed beautiful dense jungle-like country in that neck of the woods and we had not only found ourselves a local farmer who had quite logically built for himself , some 6 feet up a tree, the most perfect tree-house, eminently suitable as Tarzan?s family domicile.
I need at this point, to relate the complex script of this intricate film for a cheap fruit juice.
In essence it went like this:
Tarzan comes swinging through the trees early one morning. He lands with grace on his treehouse?s front verandah, whilst ululating to the assembled dominion of animals. His son greets him and a conversation ensues along these lines:
Son: Did you find out where we come from?
Tarzan: No?(beats his chest and makes ape like sounds) but I did discover where the Fruitree comes from
Son: And where was that
Tarzan: From the trees
Payoff: Fruitree tastes tremendous.
Sounds simple if not stupidly so.
But words like these in the mouth of a muscle-bound actor hired from a local gym in Cape Town in the starring role became as intellectually challenging as Satre?s Iron in the Soul.
It was complicated by numerous humiliatingly unexpected challenges.
My role was to ensure that the important clients were well looked after on the set and kept as far away as possible from the creative geniuses of Vasco Zoia and a film director called Peter Smiley who went on afterwards to become a famous director in America.
What I did not count on was that Vasco and Peter would discover significant different interpretations to the story and have a significant fallout the night before shooting began.
In my innocence I had taken the clients to dinner whilst warfare between the writer and director ensued. In the midst of the dinner a medical emergency erupted as one of the clients accidentally spurted prawn juice in the eye of the other, who it turned out was significantly allergic to shell fish. I should have known that this was portent to the calamity that would then follow.
The next morning I had taken one client to the ramshackle hospital in Tzaneen, the other to the shoot and then returned to the hotel to pick up Vasco exactly on time as instructed. He was to be found pacing the corridor, foaming at the mouth in rage. It was I who wore the brunt of all his ills.
We arrived at the set out in the forest where all was set up to happen ? a beautiful Edgar Rice Burroughs abode had been built and decorated with various exotica, which I will describe shortly.
My creative director walked into the forest without greeting the client and refused to reemerge.
Eventually when he did emerge it was simply to demand that I arrange for him to take an immediate flight out of the nearest airport to Sun City where he would go and play golf and nurse his injured creative integrity.
So I was left to manage and direct a five-day shoot in a forest and keep a somewhat curious if not slightly blind client out of further medical catastrophe and at bay.
And then the trouble really started.
The set was tastefully decorated as any respectable Tarzan movie would have it. Laden with fruit bowls, elephant feet ashtrays, a remarkably decorous parrot, and a very horny chimpanzee.
For a few days I could not understand why it was that the two owners of the parrot insisted on lying directly beneath the tree-house where the decorous Amazonian parrot was perched. It emerged later that the parrot was unfortunately inflicted with a broken wing and so they ensconced themselves beneath him, lest he might fall.
The shoot was interminable. Tarzan, a beautifully muscle-bound lad had to come swinging in on a vine, land on the tree-house platform, catch an orange thrown to him by his son and then launch into his little diatribe on the origin of the species.
For the first day or so, he would fly in, to the welcome cry from the director ?Good morning!? Then, unable to free his foot from the stirrup we had created in the vine, he would fly back out again, to the departing cry from the director of ?goodbye!?.
When the landing apparatus and Tarzan?s timing had finally been sorted, the kid would come sauntering out like the city slicker he was, casually chucking the orange towards his Tarzan father.
It may just as well have been a hand grenade. For the errant son would throw it with random force and direction and Tarzan, busy trying to steady himself after and exhilarating swing through the vines, would, without exception, fail to lay a hand on it.
Film Directors get obsessed by these sorts of things and so this scene went to take 23 before the orange was finally caught. By this point the script had exited Tarzan?s limited brain completely ? so intent was he on simply laying hands on the orange.
By day three the monkey started to get irritable.
The monkey?s trainer had for some unknown reason decided that German was the apt language of instruction for his charge. His crys of achtung would scare the living bejeezus out of the miserable chimp.
And now it is time to mention the very camp art director on the shoot by name of Quentin. It was his task to arrange the fruit bowls.
The monkey had taken a shine to said Quentin, and every time he passed by, the money would hit his forehead with his own knuckles creating a resounding echo that would boom through the forest. For further elucidation and a fact you may not be aware of, monkeys like dogs, have little sense of privacy or shame and so every time Quentin passed, the monkeys penis would unsheath with alacrity. Monkeys it emerges, have very interesting penis that seem to spiral out of their casings as a bullet would from a gun.
On day 4 Tarzan was finally coming to grips with his landing sequence, catching the orange, remembering his Darwinian diatribe. But by now the monkey had decided that if Quentin wasn?t going to have him, the parrot would.
To loud shouts of ?achtung, achtung!!? the money scampered across the platform, made a wild lunge at the parrot and the parrot screeched, toppled a little and fell. Nary a wing was flapped. He landed slap bang, between his two owners . They didn?t flinch, nor even move a muscle. Lying prostrate in this position for 4 days in a cold wet forest is a distinct precursor to rigor mortis.
I eventually returned to my office where it was evident that a well- tanned creative director had improved his golf handicap substantially.
The edit was a nightmare. In those days film was still the medium and scissors and sticky tape were still the tools of the editor. It took weeks to plough our way through hundreds of takes. Orange missed, orange caught, words missed, monkey on the loose. But finally a commercial was revealed that though no one understood its storyline, seemed lush and exotic enough to be appropriate for a range of fruit juices.
And so Fruitree was released to the market. Available through national supermarkets in huge 5 litre casks.
Perhaps I should have seen it coming, but on the night before the commercial went to air, in supermarkets throughout the country, 5 litre casks of Fruitree, with an ineffective preservative, began to explode on the shelves.
No one ever saw the first commercial I produced, directed and managed on my own. And perhaps, some might say, we are a little bit better off for that mercy.