The muggers may have been resting, it was Sunday after all when I went with a large party of about seventy people into downtown Jozi to watch a man walk diagonally across Commissioner Street while a motley, selected collection of traffic roared across the intersection of Commissioner and Joubert.And roared and roared, forwardsandbackwards on the commands of "ACTION!" and "First positions"..
Forwards and backwards and the man doing the crossing was about ten stories up in the air on a piece of wire stretched across the diagonal; from the lower parapet of His Majesties Building [yes it’s still there] on the south east corner to the top of the old Johannesburg Building Society place on the north west corner. He walked with a certain caution: sliding each foot forward in a near shuffle. Nonetheless I wouldn’t do it.
And because the director was a man of principle who wanted to get as many permutations on his renta-crowded street scene as possible, he moved us, the visual décor, around and around from the cold side of the street in the early hours after dawn to the warm side at midday and back into the shadows when the sun drops over the roofs of the canyon buildings later in the day.
There will be a flash of me, a marginally featured extra… squinting into the sun unable to believe my eyes… a man walk across a road on a piece of wire fifty metres or so above the ground! Why? There are obviously more comfortable ways to make money so he must have another purpose… mustn’t he?
But what if he just does it for the money.
We on the other hand were definitely doing it for the money.
Where else can you earn a reasonable day’s pay, receive a first class lunch and copious cups of tea, not to mention transport to and from the studio to simply stand around and wait. Presumably we were doing it for a lot less than he was: even if you had to add all of us up together. At the same time it was a pleasant day. It was a day for hurry-up-and-wait-deluxe.
On some movie sets the Extras are on the move the whole time … that was us: the extras… once an extra always an extra, as they say… one becomes typecast. Sometimes you can be in the thick of battle; on other occasions you are simply hanging around in the background. This was a wonderfully convivial shoot, with time to swap stories over copious cups of tea and an excellent lunch: with a merry band of fellows in fantasyland..
The French film crew were amused. They had taken a reasonable budget and finessed it. Come to Jozi for a shoot. Shoot downtown on Commissioner Street. There are building there that represent early twentieth century “me too” architecture of a type cast aside in the great post-modernist revolution elsewhere. [could that have been a bizarre benefit of sanctions?] And of course it may yet be razed to the ground in a fit of post revolutionary building fervour as we demolish the past and all its tourist dollars..
In the meantime you can shoot a Gotham Time Ad in a Gotham type place with a ring of police to keep the muggers at bay. Eventually the police presence seemed to wander off. Maybe they melted into the sea of extras as unpaid confetti. Someone did get through the inherently non-existent cordon to snatch a packet of sausages, I was told, from the hot dog stand that was so carefully arranged against the pavement, complete with hot dog man. He was allegedly chased to the corner. No one from our team fussed about it. We’d all known it would happen and weren’t surprised. Everyone hung onto their handbags and their spare kit was under guard. But the sausages were fair game, and were had. It passed almost without comment.
The big score for the foreigners who came to make the movie is the relatively large supply of experienced and skilled extras that exist in Jozi. You can cost a movie in Euros, come out to africa shoot the thing with aprofessional skilled crew and cast; satisfy your Incustomer and pocket a bundle of windfallo profit.
In this this case they specifically needed the kind of Extra with whom their European targets could identify* and we were it. This was the new rare occasion when the demand was for “Whiteys”.
One suspects that we represented the largest body of “whiteys” to visit the corner of Joubert and Commissioner in a decade and we were as much a source of fascination for the assembled local citizenry as was the the tightrope walker.
A straw poll of responses from my fellows revealed that few had ever been downtown and for many of the younger team members this occasion was their first experience of downtown Jozi. I found that weird remembering the first time I went to His Majesty’s cinema to see Lawrence of Arabia in about 1958 or something. How can you have lived in Jozi and never been downtown? We dined in the underground parking garage below the newly named Ghandi Square and i recollected a glorious "prohibition" party celebrated in that same place thirty five years ago.
But downtown became no-town and in the great flight from the auld city to Edge City in the eighties and the nineties the place was left to rot, with all the buildings around us down there on the corner of Joubert, boarded up and all the entrances bricked over to preclude hijacked access.
*Identify: The point of being an extra is that you are simply background. Who ever notices the Extras, aside from the odd crazy person or pernickety film critic. Therefore because the target can identify with the background characters they are unnoticed and therefore do not steal inadvertently from the message being sold. To use black extras for viewing in a place that has relatively few black residents would cause the background to become obvious and defeat the point of the extras.
So isn’t that strange: here is a Gotham City in Africa complete with cut price White skinned extras [ there were of course also a handful of darkies demographically representative of a modern first world city which presumably we were simulating.] [Twenty years ago we remaining mass of whiteys were described disparagingly as the "poorest white people in the world" and what is working as an extra if not work for the poor.] I don't know if that is still true but nonetheless the irony was subtle and largely unnoticed.
Curiously most of the dark guys i spoke too seemed as unfamiliar with downtown Jozi as the rest of the crowd. Maybe they too were from elsewhere.
So there is a bizarre tweak to the business of business in SA. Our city in its present form is a tourist attraction in its own right; and a day parked off downtown gave me plenty of time to observe the completely retro-architectural feel of the place. Until Sunday I had never considered our city to be a place of beauty, so either I am going soft or I just missed it before.
One hopes that as the place gentrifies, in the wake of the various urban renewal programmes that are currently unfolding in our town, that some of this so-called Art-deco architecture that represents so much of the original splendour of the old Golden City can be recaptured.
It is more probable though, that we will treat the old city with the same contempt that the developers of the new Greenstone Shopping-experience Mall on the North-eastern corner of Greater Jozi have done, where arguably the finest view site in the Metropole was conveniently trashed with a blisterpack heap of concrete, stainless steel: and fake lawn.
As it stands right now though, downtown Jozi has a feel of Gotham City and the French Connection had lined up an eclectically Gothamesque collection of motor vehicles: aging Chevvies and Caddies and Comaros n all, lined up with some of more plebeian hue; plus those belonging to the most glittering present to parade a cavalcade again and again as we shot take after take after take after take after take….
And through all this not once, not twice, not even thrice across that deadly gap: he walked and walked and walked, and walked and... until he knew the way.
The Blogospherian.
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