Botha Hollywood on the Veld

When movie mayhem gripped the City of Gold
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-77619-469-8
Verlag: Jonathan Ball
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

In 1913, a secretive American millionaire, who lived on the top fl oor of the famous Carlton Hotel, had a crazy idea: to make movies in Johannesburg. And not just any movies but the biggest in the world, huge spectacles with elaborate sets, thousands of extras and epic story lines. Isidore Schlesinger - better known as 'IW' - built a studio on a farm called Killarney, where he set out to challenge a place in America that was in its infancy: Hollywood. The glamour, gossip and high drama of IW's studio fitted perfectly into a city experiencing an intoxicating golden age. There was as much action on the movie sets as there was on screen: from political intrigue and the clashing of massive egos to public outbursts, fiery judicial inquiries, disaster and death. Behind this mad enterprise was a maverick, a tycoon, a recluse, a friend of the famed and the connected. Schlesinger could have held his own in California but he chose as his base the City of Gold, and his indomitable ambition saw his 'Hollywood on the Veld' soar. This is the untold story of the rise and fall of the strangest and most unique movie empire ever.

TED BOTHA has worked for Reuters in New York and has been published in The New York Times, Esquire, The Telegraph, Condé Nast Traveler and Outside. He has written numerous books, including Daisy de Melker, the forensic thriller The Girl with the Crooked Nose and Flat/White, about living as an immigrant in a chaotic and battered tenement building in Harlem, New York. He has also written the novel The Animal Lover. See more at www.tedbotha.com.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Botha, Ted

Leseproben

A CONFLUX OF APPARENT MIRACLES

It’s hard to imagine today, more than a century later, how chaotic and messy the advent of motion pictures was – even the very word ‘movie’ was tussled over, considered by some Americans to be vulgar – with countless people trying to get in on the action. By 1913, it had built up into a global frenzy.

If, in the clandestine world of invention, there can be such a thing as a beginning, for movies it had come 20 years earlier, in the early 1890s. A number of men in England, America and Europe had been working on devices to show moving pictures – something more elaborate than just shifting slides in a magic lantern. Then, at about the same time, there were several remarkable breakthroughs.

In New York, a Scotsman named William Kennedy Dickson came out with the Kinetograph. What it filmed, though, could be viewed by only one person at a time, looking through a peephole in another machine called the Kinetoscope. The slightly more advanced Pleograph was brought out by the Polish inventor Kazimierz Prószynski.

Finally, in Paris in 1895, the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière introduced the world to the Cinématographe, both camera and projector, which finally gave moving pictures wings to fly onto walls and screens. On 28 December, the first projection of a film before a paying audience took place at the Grand Café, near the Place Vendôme. It was hardly an auspicious start: the brothers could get barely 35 people to pay admission. ‘No major daily newspaper covered the event. (But) within days, lines trailed down the Boulevard des Capucines for four hundred yards.’

In London the following year, 1896, the American magician Carl Hertz, famous for his vanishing birdcage act, was finishing off a run at the Alhambra of his popular show – ‘Entertainment of Wonders and Conflux of Apparent Miracles’ – and was about to set off on a year-long world tour, starting, as most tours of the Pacific region did, in South Africa.

The Alhambra happened to have two models of a brand-new British projector called the Theatrograph, one of which, kept for emergencies, Hertz kept bothering the theatre to let him take on his travels.

The ship to Cape Town, the Union-Castle line’s two-year-old Norman, was the perfect place to test the new machine. The ‘first truly “modern” Cape mail steamer’, it boasted a beautifully panelled dining saloon, with light pouring through a dome, and a lounge with recessed settees, where Hertz set up his Theatrograph.

One can imagine the first-class passengers sitting enthralled as they watched the short films – five segments of 30 seconds each – barely noticing the strange west coast of Africa pass by outside. Hertz, after honing his new ‘entertainment of wonder’ at sea, was now ready for Johannesburg … and the Empire.

The ten-year-old City of Gold was more on edge than usual when he arrived, for it was only a few days after Dr Leander Starr Jameson, a close associate of Cecil John Rhodes, had led a force of 500 armed men from Bechuanaland to seize Johannesburg and precipitate a rising against the Boer government, which the Uitlanders accused of denying them political rights and of charging exorbitant taxes but delivering little in return. The raid failed, the men were quickly rounded up, and the ringleaders were sentenced to death.

‘Those were stirring days in Johannesburg,’ Hertz wrote. ‘Martial law was in force … One night some shots were fired just outside, and everyone in the theatre jumped up and rushed out, leaving me standing there alone.’

Suddenly, cheering could be heard outside – the ringleaders’ sentences had been commuted! The jubilant crowd came back inside, but it wasn’t to watch Hertz but to drink and celebrate at the bar. ‘When things had quietened down, we did big business and played to crowded houses.’

Of all the acts in his ‘Entertainment of Wonders and Conflux of Apparent Miracles’, it was the short showings of the Theatrograph, tagged on at the end, that had the audience on their feet.

‘It is hard today to comprehend the full impact on audiences of 1896 of their first exposure to motion pictures,’ was written of a very similar scene playing out in New York that year. ‘Their amazement … shows what a great jump it was from the mechanically produced moving images in the magic lantern.’

So popular was the Theatrograph that Hertz stayed on in South Africa for six months, long enough to befriend the mining magnate Barney Barnato and go to the races at Turffontein with him.

Posters outside the Empire declared it ‘The Photo-Electric Sensation of the Day! The latest invention in photography, the most startling scientific marvel of the age.’

Cottoning on to its potential, the Empire’s Edgar Hyman quickly got his own camera shipped out from London. Rather than waiting for film segments to arrive from abroad to show at his theatre, he would make his own.

His most famous excursion was in 1898, when he set out for Pretoria with his orchestra leader, David Foote, doubling up as his assistant. Their goal was to film President Kruger, who was known to be publicity-shy, as he entered the republic’s parliament, the Raadsaal.

The film, even though it was only seconds long, was taken to Kruger’s residence a while later, along with a small screen and a piano to play music to accompany the presentation.

‘We have come to show the picture of His Honour going to raad,’ Hyman told Kruger’s wife, Gezina.

The president, a fervently religious man who read the Bible regularly and knew many passages off by heart, immediately demanded that the piano be removed. ‘What is this godless thing doing in my house?’ he asked. He could be convinced, however, to allow an organ to be brought in, and then the show began.

By the following year, when the Anglo-Boer War broke out, Kruger would soon flee from the advancing British forces and Hyman started filming for the Warwick Trading Company in London. The war became a ‘happy hunting ground’ for foreign cameramen, and there were at least a dozen traipsing around the country, including even William Kennedy Dickson, the inventor of the Kinetograph. News, it soon became obvious, was a readymade source of entertainment for audiences always clamouring for something fresh.

When the war was over and people returned in even greater numbers than before, theatres like the Empire had to carve out space on their already bloated – and expensive – list of offerings. To vaudeville, plays, magic acts, opera, orchestras, comedians, dancers and acrobats, they now had to add moving pictures.

‘“Bioscope fever” or “movie madness” had afflicted the country.’

Small venues opened that offered pictures only, often shown in basements or sparse back rooms. In the Royal Arcade on Pritchard Street, people flocked to the Popular Bioscope Café, a ‘High-Class Tea-Room’. Even in the poorest neighbourhoods, such as Vrededorp and Chinatown, where you had to manoeuvre across a plank over a gutter and through a curtain, there was a projector flickering away. For the price of a cup of tea you could sit and watch a constantly repeating series of shorts, much the same as in London and New York.

‘Bioscope teas were particularly popular at the New Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, where in 1908 the lady from the suburbs could pause in her afternoon’s shopping, and for a shilling enjoy a “dainty cup of tea and an animated display”.’

Shortly after it opened in late 1911, the Orpheum showed a short, locally made movie about a diamond heist. It was the first and last one made in the country until 1916.

The American versions, ‘nickelodeons’ – where access cost a nickel (five cents) – were usually located in storefronts, and despite being uncomfortable and unventilated, were always packed.

By 1910, Great Britain had 5 000 of these small venues, the US 10 000 (a number that would more than double in the following two years). Bigger premises came next, hybrids that could accommodate mixed bills, both stage shows and pictures – ‘bio-vaudeville’.

In Johannesburg, there was ‘a band of fanatics … who used to hire halls anywhere we could and, sewing two double-bed sheets together, hung up the first cinema screens this country ever knew’.

Then came the Bijou, the Clifton, the Union Picture Palace, the Gem, the Electric Theatre, the Apollo, the Adelphi – all names taken from abroad. In 1910, so eager were audiences to get inside the new 600-seat Tivoli Picture Palace, on President Street, that it opened even before there were any doors or windows and ‘the operator had to be hoisted up into his box since there was no stairway’. The projector was an old ‘“dog beater” machine … turned laboriously by hand’.

Even more excitement was generated by the ‘Mammoth Theatre and Picture Palace’ the Orpheum, on the corner of Joubert and Jeppe streets, which advertised itself as ‘The Most Magnificent Bioscope Theatre in the World, 1 500 Beautiful Upholstered Arm Chairs, Spring Seats, Foot Rests, etc. Eleven Pure Marble Statues imported from Rome at a cost of £800.’

Rufe Naylor, the young Australian who was well known at the racetrack, owned both the Tivoli and the Orpheum, even though his partner, a man named Marks Prechner, was less convinced about the viability of movies: ‘They are a passing phase like roller-skating, but we must try to make something out of them.’

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