The Sweet Smell of Gangrene
Neal Sundstrom is nervous, his leather jacket creaking as he talks to me.
We're in a restaurant in Yeoville, and his voice drops as he whispers to me - as if someone might overhear and drag him off. "Don't you understand? It's tax-free! Tax free!"
I nod, thinking Jeez what an asshole. He's roared up in some ancient sports car for the meeting - I've traveled in it and I'm not impressed - it's one of these pieces of shit on wheels designed for people without knees. Neal Sundstrom is a film director.
I'd never seen his work, and only caught glimpses of his big TV opus Homeland. He'd seen one of my plays years back, and was impressed enough to remember it. Now he'd got in touch with me because he needed a writer for a film idea he'd had. And I needed the money. Standard motivation. Remora's and sharks. Symbiotic mutually agreeable parasitic relationships.
I'd been in a car crash recently. I was sitting in the back seat of a taxi, and a car on the road in front of us swerved, and we drive into it at speed. I'm launched forward in the sitting position, I crush the empty seat in front of me , luckily my head's down at the time, because I end up in the windscreen.
One minute I'm sitting with arm around a woman, heading back from the airport in the backseat of a taxi - the next - I'm in the windscreen thinking 'Cool, I survived this, I think.' My heads down, I've broken the windscreen, blood starts to pour down my face as gravity takes over and peels me off the windscreen and the crushed front seat now beneath me.
I walk away from it. My scalp feeling mottled and uneven, due to chunks of the windscreen that've rammed into the top of my head and forced under the skin. But I'm alive. My l;egs hurt from being the battering ram that crushed the front seat - but the skin isnt even broken - and I could've ended up with two broken legs out of this, so I'm quiite content. Shaken and stirred, but aware of the fact that in the bigger scheme of What Might Have Happened, I'm doing pretty damn well.
A week passes, and I have a nightly fun time of lying in bed reading, hand absentmindedly pushing and pulling at the pieces of glass still embedded in my scalp, trying to squeeze them out, like pimples. On my legs the bruises seem increase, as does the pain. Eventually it reaches a teeth-clenching level of constant 'exposed nerve' like pain, and my legs are swollen.
I keep on trudging around, although it's getting difficult.
Finally, I get taken to a doctor, who tells me I have 'necrosis'. Dry gangrene.
How cool is this? All thoughts of the coolness of having an exotic disease you don't
hear about, outside of Captain Midshipman Hornblower, fade rapidly as scissors
are produced, and the process of cutting open my legs, and cutting out the diseased
tissue, starts. Local anesthetic - I ask - pouring sweat at the unbelievable pain and
stink as the blades snick through and open the swollen and bruised skin. No, I'm
told, 'we' need to have you be able to feel when we're cutting the healthy tissue.
Let's just say it was up there in the list of most unpleasant experiences I've ever
known. You haven't experienced fun until you've had your body being cut into,
without any anesthetic to dull the pain.
The gangrene is deep, it's almost reached the bone itself in my left leg - another week
at most, and I'd have needed an amputation. The right leg's infection is slightly less
advanced - but equally painful, as the small medical scissors and scalpel cut away
at me.
Finally its done, and I'm left with a gaping wide hole on my left leg, and a lesser one
on the right. I'm shivering from the pain I've just been through, and pouring sweat
and I'm cold - presumably almost going into shock. I can smell the gangrene, the
carefull trimmed and cut off pieces of diseased skin lumped in a neat pile in the surgical
tray, has an odour to it. Diseased meat, is perhaps the nearest description I can find.
Rot and a strange sweetness, mixed up.
Fast forward, I have an industrial sized jar of betadene, bandages, and a daily routine
of cleaning out the wide and deep hole, and its smaller companion hole on my right leg,
and carefully filling it with the orange cold gunk, and then rewrapping both in bandages.
"Tax free!" repeats Neil, nodding enthusiastically at me.
I'd been round to his house in Orange Grove - a suburb adjoining Yeoville - and had a number of two and three hour sessions with the man, as he lay on his couch like a therapy patient, telling me to think of idea's for this film he'd sold to 'the French'. This was how he described the potential funders. 'The French'.
"I've got them man, they love me" he'd confide - "I told them this story over dinner and they loved it - now I've got to come up with the script"
And I'd nod, enthusiastically, sipping the coffee which his maid brought in. She's docile, and keeps all her thoughts hidden, while in his presence. Even though Neil makes a big point of chatting to her quite obviously, in a 'friendly' way when I'm there - as if to try and show that he and the maid are old pals in some way. This clearly isn't the case.
After doing his demonstration of 'we're old pals' with the maid, as if to offset whatever I might be seeing or thinking, Neil asks me "Want some toast?" as if she's simply a tool to be used for his comfort - which I suppose is what being a servant is all about.
I'm always both fascinated and edgy when observing Master Servant relationships - coming from out of the white heat of the anti apartheid struggle I'm always very uncomfortable when someone is playing Master or Baas. But the writer in me knows that this is where the true person reveals themselves. When they talk to the people who clean their dishes and houses and wash their underclothes.. He all but clicks his fingers imperiously, as he tells her to keep my coffee cup filled, while I'm here. Good grief, he actually says this. "Now you make sure to keep his coffee cup filled while he's here!"
She nods.
Neil has this thing about meetings. He wants to 'do meetings'.
I'd rather work via faxes or e-mail. Instead I have to schlep to one or another arbitrary restaurant or - as today - over to his house, in order to speak with him.
I've been coming up with idea's - given that all he's got is the concept that two people meet during a robbery. That's all. Neil's big creative idea. 'These two people meet during a robbery.'
And?
"Uuuhhh"
He does go to great pains to tell me how much he loves this country, and that he wants to bring this out in the film. Okay. Cute. I smile inwardly, thinking of his reaction if I were to tell him to do a Woody Allen and just stand in front of the camera and do a monologue, in that case.
His house is a dump. Upmarket in its lack of mess, but a dump in my view - mainly by virtue of the carefully placed 'Complete Works of Shakespeare' which rests artfully upright, on the mantelpiece - in a way which shows that no one, least of all him, has ever read it..
I'm not used to seeing this. I mean, does he think I'm going to assume that he's read it - because he or someone has carefully arranged the book to stand upright and in pride of place in his lounge? On the other hand, I wonder what kind of people he has coming round, and maybe they are the ones who'd get impressed by this.
I get the immediate feeling that if Neil were to come round to my chaotic slum, filled with books - he'd be one of those nudniks who'd look from the books to me and ask "Gee, have you really read all these?"
I don't like people who try and impress me. I'd rather be impressed by accident than design. He goes to great pains to show off the sports car, and casually lets slip about how his racehorse did well the other day. I go 'Uhuh?' Thinking, jeez, what an asshole.
But back to now, in the restaurant.
"Tax free!"
"Tax free!" he repeats, coming in close to me - his eyes red rimmed - it's early in the morning and evidently Neal isn't an 'up with the larks' sort of guy. This moist red eyes show that he's got some sort of bad habit that's slowly beginning to bite his ass bigtime.
I nod again, pausing and taking a sip of my coffee. "But you cant tell anyone" he continues - "I don't want the tax department to hear about this." I nod, thinking 'What the hell does this have to do with me?'
Inwardly I'm seething, the original deal was quite different. His story, my script - he's told me that he's asking for 100 000 rands, local currency, to be split 25% to him, 75% to me. (His story - my script)
He talks about these amorphous "French guys" who 'love him' and who dont know anything about anything, but who trust him regardless. They've got the money - that's all that counts.
Suddenly amidst the various meetings, he announces that he's managed to come up with a deal that involves getting around 70 000 rands, to be split between us, payable at various points. "Uhuh" I grunt in a thoughtful way, and Neal stares like a carnivore eyeing supper, all the while pretending not to.
It's nearing Christmas, we agree to take a break in these endless damn meetings. Their purpose, I gradually realise, is simply To Reassure Neil. About what? I have no idea.
I head to Cape Town. I'm involved in the car crash. I don't have the money for plastic surgery. I'm stuck with holes in my legs and ladling betadene and bandaging myself, and limping around, and hoping that one day I'll have less pain.
I'm also on my third course of antibiotics to stop the further spread of the gangrene. If this latest batch of ever increasingly strong antibiotics doesn't work, I'm going to lose a leg.
Neal's on the phone just about every day - not asking about the crash, but asking when I'm coming back. He wants to be reassured that I'm 'part of the project'. Doctors want to put me in hospital on an antibiotic drip, instead, I fly back to Johannesburg to meet Neil. He tells me everything's on track, and "He wants none of this legs crap." Unquote.
"I don't want to hear any more of this legs crap."
"Can I rely on you?"he asks, all big red rimmed eyes. I tell him, I'm here, arent I? He blinks, momentarily nonplussed.
He tells me there's been a 'breakthrough' in discussions with the French. It boils down to all I'm getting is around 45 grand in total - and he launches into a long monologue of how this has to be kept secret, he doesn't want anyone to know about this tax free deal. As if I give a shit. I'm on antibiotics, I should be in hospital, I might be losing a leg. And I'm facing Mister Red Rimmed Eyes Who Wants Reassurance.
His speechmaking continues in a lengthy oratory about "This way we avoid the income tax guys and bank stuff and everything".
He repeats himself about how no one must know about this deal. I nod every now and again - letting him do his thing.
I'm just a writer who wants to do his job, and get paid. But being a writer, I'm dumb - I'm stupid - I want to believe that he's not a total shark, so I sip my coffee and say "That's nice". My legs hurt. The world isn't staying still like it should, thanks to the antibiotics. I watch the red rimmed eyes watch me.
Neal pauses, and leaps on the phrase as an excuse to whip out his diary and work out the points of payment - this much by this point, that much by then. He's got it all worked out. I'm the machine, the jukebox - and he's worked out how many pages of what should be delivered by when.
I sip my coffee, my legs are hurting. It's been a long flight, or so it seems, up from Cape Town to here, and a very long walk across the park from my apartment, down to the open air restaurant here. Every step tugs at the bandaged holes in my legs.
Neil roars off in his - what else - red sportscar, after carefully noting down the next time we're supposed to meet. He wants me to be doing 10 pages a day, and meet with him every second day or so.
It dawns on me, he doesn't give a shit about content. He just wants the pages.The pages, and my willingness to go along with his salesman pitch.
Time passes, and working on delivering ten pages a day (15 - 20 seconds of screen time per page) I hand over around a hundred and twenty or so pages, then after chatting with my agent, who puts me onto a lawyer - and they both tell me "Don't be stupid - get a contract!"
Yeah okay, I'm dumb - I'm a typical writer - I want to trust someone at their word. But it dawns on me that I'm slowly but surely being screwed, big time.
I hand over pages. Neil says nothing about how good or bad it is. No feedback. No pats on the head for the dog. Zilch. But I keep on delivering. I mention the desire for a contract to Neil, who tells that
a) Gee he doesn't know much about 'legal stuff' and
b) 'Give me a piece of paper and I'll sign it' .
and stares at me with a faint surprised expression and a little grin which he thinks isn't visible.
I want to believe. I need the money. The medical costs are increasing. Throughout this process, I have to almost beg for some money - he hands over first a cheque for 2500 rands, and then after a few weeks - another cheque for the same amount. Thrill. A writer I know tells me that Neil came back with over a million bucks from France, to make this movie.
Hmmmm.
Neil on the other hand, keeps saying that the French 'have to approve the script' before there's money, and the little he's paid me comes from his own pocket. He's paying me out of the good of his own magnificent heart.
I have to beg for it almost.
He's pathetic in the way he keeps asking for reassurance that 'We're friends, right?'
Over and over.
"We're friends, right?"
And those red rimmed eyes watch, unblinkingly.
And to be fair, I'm pathetic for buying into this. Not that I ever believe it. You know how like some people just give off the impression of being dirty, even though they've bathed and are clean? Neil gives off this - this aura of something that I know I wouldnt want around me, or to babysit my children. I can't tell exactly what it is. The overly wide grin of the salesman with the special deals, working from the boot of his car.
But in the interests of getting the work done, and ultimately the money, I keep my mouth shut.
I finally reach my own cut off point. And decide, I've done enough writing. I phone him and tell him this, and that when there's a contract, I finish writing.
He flips, starts literally screaming abuse. I have to hold the phone receiver away from my ear its that loud. I mention that 'Sorry, but the laywer says-' He interrupts, yelling "Every cunt and his monkey's got a fucking laywer!" I grin, now there's a great line. Maybe Neil IS an artist after all.
I remind him that it may well be his story, but it's my dialogue. What he says then?
"You cant copyright the English language!" he yells.
Er what? Excuse me? I mention the Berne Convention, and there's a puzzled pause in his tirade. I almost smile, both at his bullshit, and my dumbness in letting things go on so long.
It's kinda funny - he starts sounding like the average paranoid megalomaniac in the movies. "You've been plotting against me from the start!" No kidding. He uses this. I start wondering if he's gonna let rip with the classic B-grade Evil Leader line about 'I am surrounded by idiots!'
He goes into a subsection of the Paranoid Evil Leader dialogue
"They warned me against you! They did! But I didnt believe them!"
Roundabout the " I thought you were my friend!!" area of his ongoing vitriolic shrieking monologue, I realise I don't really have to be bothering to even be listening to this.
And I put the phone down.
I feel both a sense of relief, at finally cutting off from something slimy, unwholesome, and unclean - and an odd sadness at understanding now, why everyone bemoans the lack of good movies in South Africa - given that Neil is one of these Local Film Directors.
His attitude is that 'seeing as he's paid me R5000, the script is now his' - and according to him, as we had an arrangement for me to deliver the final chunks of the script in time for his meeting with these mythical 'French guys' - I'm now in breach of agreement, and therefore the script is 'his property'.
No screen credit, no further money, nothing. Just five thousand bucks. Divide by eight to get the pounds value.
I later find out on the grapevine, that since from way back, he's been telling film people, that HE'S been writing this new brilliant script.
No one else. Just him.
Ouch.
As they say in Southpark repeatedly near the end of each episode. "You know.. I've learned something today."
I guess I learned what local film making is about, and how not to conduct film deals...
I figure, putting this up online, is a great way to publicize a story which no one will otherwise ever hear about. Partly to get it out of my consciousness - and partly as a Cautionary Tale, to any writers out there, starting in the business.
And I am grateful for being taught a few lessons, in human behavior.
Now, six months down the line, I'm walking around, mostly without a limp. A big scar on my right leg, and a hole in my left leg that requires surgery, which I can't afford.
And the other hole, stays mostly invisible - that in the writer who's created something, only to have it stolen.
I'm somewhat poorer, but definitely wiser.
But I'm cleaner, and I’m free.
We're in a restaurant in Yeoville, and his voice drops as he whispers to me - as if someone might overhear and drag him off. "Don't you understand? It's tax-free! Tax free!"
I nod, thinking Jeez what an asshole. He's roared up in some ancient sports car for the meeting - I've traveled in it and I'm not impressed - it's one of these pieces of shit on wheels designed for people without knees. Neal Sundstrom is a film director.
I'd never seen his work, and only caught glimpses of his big TV opus Homeland. He'd seen one of my plays years back, and was impressed enough to remember it. Now he'd got in touch with me because he needed a writer for a film idea he'd had. And I needed the money. Standard motivation. Remora's and sharks. Symbiotic mutually agreeable parasitic relationships.
I'd been in a car crash recently. I was sitting in the back seat of a taxi, and a car on the road in front of us swerved, and we drive into it at speed. I'm launched forward in the sitting position, I crush the empty seat in front of me , luckily my head's down at the time, because I end up in the windscreen.
One minute I'm sitting with arm around a woman, heading back from the airport in the backseat of a taxi - the next - I'm in the windscreen thinking 'Cool, I survived this, I think.' My heads down, I've broken the windscreen, blood starts to pour down my face as gravity takes over and peels me off the windscreen and the crushed front seat now beneath me.
I walk away from it. My scalp feeling mottled and uneven, due to chunks of the windscreen that've rammed into the top of my head and forced under the skin. But I'm alive. My l;egs hurt from being the battering ram that crushed the front seat - but the skin isnt even broken - and I could've ended up with two broken legs out of this, so I'm quiite content. Shaken and stirred, but aware of the fact that in the bigger scheme of What Might Have Happened, I'm doing pretty damn well.
A week passes, and I have a nightly fun time of lying in bed reading, hand absentmindedly pushing and pulling at the pieces of glass still embedded in my scalp, trying to squeeze them out, like pimples. On my legs the bruises seem increase, as does the pain. Eventually it reaches a teeth-clenching level of constant 'exposed nerve' like pain, and my legs are swollen.
I keep on trudging around, although it's getting difficult.
Finally, I get taken to a doctor, who tells me I have 'necrosis'. Dry gangrene.
How cool is this? All thoughts of the coolness of having an exotic disease you don't
hear about, outside of Captain Midshipman Hornblower, fade rapidly as scissors
are produced, and the process of cutting open my legs, and cutting out the diseased
tissue, starts. Local anesthetic - I ask - pouring sweat at the unbelievable pain and
stink as the blades snick through and open the swollen and bruised skin. No, I'm
told, 'we' need to have you be able to feel when we're cutting the healthy tissue.
Let's just say it was up there in the list of most unpleasant experiences I've ever
known. You haven't experienced fun until you've had your body being cut into,
without any anesthetic to dull the pain.
The gangrene is deep, it's almost reached the bone itself in my left leg - another week
at most, and I'd have needed an amputation. The right leg's infection is slightly less
advanced - but equally painful, as the small medical scissors and scalpel cut away
at me.
Finally its done, and I'm left with a gaping wide hole on my left leg, and a lesser one
on the right. I'm shivering from the pain I've just been through, and pouring sweat
and I'm cold - presumably almost going into shock. I can smell the gangrene, the
carefull trimmed and cut off pieces of diseased skin lumped in a neat pile in the surgical
tray, has an odour to it. Diseased meat, is perhaps the nearest description I can find.
Rot and a strange sweetness, mixed up.
Fast forward, I have an industrial sized jar of betadene, bandages, and a daily routine
of cleaning out the wide and deep hole, and its smaller companion hole on my right leg,
and carefully filling it with the orange cold gunk, and then rewrapping both in bandages.
"Tax free!" repeats Neil, nodding enthusiastically at me.
I'd been round to his house in Orange Grove - a suburb adjoining Yeoville - and had a number of two and three hour sessions with the man, as he lay on his couch like a therapy patient, telling me to think of idea's for this film he'd sold to 'the French'. This was how he described the potential funders. 'The French'.
"I've got them man, they love me" he'd confide - "I told them this story over dinner and they loved it - now I've got to come up with the script"
And I'd nod, enthusiastically, sipping the coffee which his maid brought in. She's docile, and keeps all her thoughts hidden, while in his presence. Even though Neil makes a big point of chatting to her quite obviously, in a 'friendly' way when I'm there - as if to try and show that he and the maid are old pals in some way. This clearly isn't the case.
After doing his demonstration of 'we're old pals' with the maid, as if to offset whatever I might be seeing or thinking, Neil asks me "Want some toast?" as if she's simply a tool to be used for his comfort - which I suppose is what being a servant is all about.
I'm always both fascinated and edgy when observing Master Servant relationships - coming from out of the white heat of the anti apartheid struggle I'm always very uncomfortable when someone is playing Master or Baas. But the writer in me knows that this is where the true person reveals themselves. When they talk to the people who clean their dishes and houses and wash their underclothes.. He all but clicks his fingers imperiously, as he tells her to keep my coffee cup filled, while I'm here. Good grief, he actually says this. "Now you make sure to keep his coffee cup filled while he's here!"
She nods.
Neil has this thing about meetings. He wants to 'do meetings'.
I'd rather work via faxes or e-mail. Instead I have to schlep to one or another arbitrary restaurant or - as today - over to his house, in order to speak with him.
I've been coming up with idea's - given that all he's got is the concept that two people meet during a robbery. That's all. Neil's big creative idea. 'These two people meet during a robbery.'
And?
"Uuuhhh"
He does go to great pains to tell me how much he loves this country, and that he wants to bring this out in the film. Okay. Cute. I smile inwardly, thinking of his reaction if I were to tell him to do a Woody Allen and just stand in front of the camera and do a monologue, in that case.
His house is a dump. Upmarket in its lack of mess, but a dump in my view - mainly by virtue of the carefully placed 'Complete Works of Shakespeare' which rests artfully upright, on the mantelpiece - in a way which shows that no one, least of all him, has ever read it..
I'm not used to seeing this. I mean, does he think I'm going to assume that he's read it - because he or someone has carefully arranged the book to stand upright and in pride of place in his lounge? On the other hand, I wonder what kind of people he has coming round, and maybe they are the ones who'd get impressed by this.
I get the immediate feeling that if Neil were to come round to my chaotic slum, filled with books - he'd be one of those nudniks who'd look from the books to me and ask "Gee, have you really read all these?"
I don't like people who try and impress me. I'd rather be impressed by accident than design. He goes to great pains to show off the sports car, and casually lets slip about how his racehorse did well the other day. I go 'Uhuh?' Thinking, jeez, what an asshole.
But back to now, in the restaurant.
"Tax free!"
"Tax free!" he repeats, coming in close to me - his eyes red rimmed - it's early in the morning and evidently Neal isn't an 'up with the larks' sort of guy. This moist red eyes show that he's got some sort of bad habit that's slowly beginning to bite his ass bigtime.
I nod again, pausing and taking a sip of my coffee. "But you cant tell anyone" he continues - "I don't want the tax department to hear about this." I nod, thinking 'What the hell does this have to do with me?'
Inwardly I'm seething, the original deal was quite different. His story, my script - he's told me that he's asking for 100 000 rands, local currency, to be split 25% to him, 75% to me. (His story - my script)
He talks about these amorphous "French guys" who 'love him' and who dont know anything about anything, but who trust him regardless. They've got the money - that's all that counts.
Suddenly amidst the various meetings, he announces that he's managed to come up with a deal that involves getting around 70 000 rands, to be split between us, payable at various points. "Uhuh" I grunt in a thoughtful way, and Neal stares like a carnivore eyeing supper, all the while pretending not to.
It's nearing Christmas, we agree to take a break in these endless damn meetings. Their purpose, I gradually realise, is simply To Reassure Neil. About what? I have no idea.
I head to Cape Town. I'm involved in the car crash. I don't have the money for plastic surgery. I'm stuck with holes in my legs and ladling betadene and bandaging myself, and limping around, and hoping that one day I'll have less pain.
I'm also on my third course of antibiotics to stop the further spread of the gangrene. If this latest batch of ever increasingly strong antibiotics doesn't work, I'm going to lose a leg.
Neal's on the phone just about every day - not asking about the crash, but asking when I'm coming back. He wants to be reassured that I'm 'part of the project'. Doctors want to put me in hospital on an antibiotic drip, instead, I fly back to Johannesburg to meet Neil. He tells me everything's on track, and "He wants none of this legs crap." Unquote.
"I don't want to hear any more of this legs crap."
"Can I rely on you?"he asks, all big red rimmed eyes. I tell him, I'm here, arent I? He blinks, momentarily nonplussed.
He tells me there's been a 'breakthrough' in discussions with the French. It boils down to all I'm getting is around 45 grand in total - and he launches into a long monologue of how this has to be kept secret, he doesn't want anyone to know about this tax free deal. As if I give a shit. I'm on antibiotics, I should be in hospital, I might be losing a leg. And I'm facing Mister Red Rimmed Eyes Who Wants Reassurance.
His speechmaking continues in a lengthy oratory about "This way we avoid the income tax guys and bank stuff and everything".
He repeats himself about how no one must know about this deal. I nod every now and again - letting him do his thing.
I'm just a writer who wants to do his job, and get paid. But being a writer, I'm dumb - I'm stupid - I want to believe that he's not a total shark, so I sip my coffee and say "That's nice". My legs hurt. The world isn't staying still like it should, thanks to the antibiotics. I watch the red rimmed eyes watch me.
Neal pauses, and leaps on the phrase as an excuse to whip out his diary and work out the points of payment - this much by this point, that much by then. He's got it all worked out. I'm the machine, the jukebox - and he's worked out how many pages of what should be delivered by when.
I sip my coffee, my legs are hurting. It's been a long flight, or so it seems, up from Cape Town to here, and a very long walk across the park from my apartment, down to the open air restaurant here. Every step tugs at the bandaged holes in my legs.
Neil roars off in his - what else - red sportscar, after carefully noting down the next time we're supposed to meet. He wants me to be doing 10 pages a day, and meet with him every second day or so.
It dawns on me, he doesn't give a shit about content. He just wants the pages.The pages, and my willingness to go along with his salesman pitch.
Time passes, and working on delivering ten pages a day (15 - 20 seconds of screen time per page) I hand over around a hundred and twenty or so pages, then after chatting with my agent, who puts me onto a lawyer - and they both tell me "Don't be stupid - get a contract!"
Yeah okay, I'm dumb - I'm a typical writer - I want to trust someone at their word. But it dawns on me that I'm slowly but surely being screwed, big time.
I hand over pages. Neil says nothing about how good or bad it is. No feedback. No pats on the head for the dog. Zilch. But I keep on delivering. I mention the desire for a contract to Neil, who tells that
a) Gee he doesn't know much about 'legal stuff' and
b) 'Give me a piece of paper and I'll sign it' .
and stares at me with a faint surprised expression and a little grin which he thinks isn't visible.
I want to believe. I need the money. The medical costs are increasing. Throughout this process, I have to almost beg for some money - he hands over first a cheque for 2500 rands, and then after a few weeks - another cheque for the same amount. Thrill. A writer I know tells me that Neil came back with over a million bucks from France, to make this movie.
Hmmmm.
Neil on the other hand, keeps saying that the French 'have to approve the script' before there's money, and the little he's paid me comes from his own pocket. He's paying me out of the good of his own magnificent heart.
I have to beg for it almost.
He's pathetic in the way he keeps asking for reassurance that 'We're friends, right?'
Over and over.
"We're friends, right?"
And those red rimmed eyes watch, unblinkingly.
And to be fair, I'm pathetic for buying into this. Not that I ever believe it. You know how like some people just give off the impression of being dirty, even though they've bathed and are clean? Neil gives off this - this aura of something that I know I wouldnt want around me, or to babysit my children. I can't tell exactly what it is. The overly wide grin of the salesman with the special deals, working from the boot of his car.
But in the interests of getting the work done, and ultimately the money, I keep my mouth shut.
I finally reach my own cut off point. And decide, I've done enough writing. I phone him and tell him this, and that when there's a contract, I finish writing.
He flips, starts literally screaming abuse. I have to hold the phone receiver away from my ear its that loud. I mention that 'Sorry, but the laywer says-' He interrupts, yelling "Every cunt and his monkey's got a fucking laywer!" I grin, now there's a great line. Maybe Neil IS an artist after all.
I remind him that it may well be his story, but it's my dialogue. What he says then?
"You cant copyright the English language!" he yells.
Er what? Excuse me? I mention the Berne Convention, and there's a puzzled pause in his tirade. I almost smile, both at his bullshit, and my dumbness in letting things go on so long.
It's kinda funny - he starts sounding like the average paranoid megalomaniac in the movies. "You've been plotting against me from the start!" No kidding. He uses this. I start wondering if he's gonna let rip with the classic B-grade Evil Leader line about 'I am surrounded by idiots!'
He goes into a subsection of the Paranoid Evil Leader dialogue
"They warned me against you! They did! But I didnt believe them!"
Roundabout the " I thought you were my friend!!" area of his ongoing vitriolic shrieking monologue, I realise I don't really have to be bothering to even be listening to this.
And I put the phone down.
I feel both a sense of relief, at finally cutting off from something slimy, unwholesome, and unclean - and an odd sadness at understanding now, why everyone bemoans the lack of good movies in South Africa - given that Neil is one of these Local Film Directors.
His attitude is that 'seeing as he's paid me R5000, the script is now his' - and according to him, as we had an arrangement for me to deliver the final chunks of the script in time for his meeting with these mythical 'French guys' - I'm now in breach of agreement, and therefore the script is 'his property'.
No screen credit, no further money, nothing. Just five thousand bucks. Divide by eight to get the pounds value.
I later find out on the grapevine, that since from way back, he's been telling film people, that HE'S been writing this new brilliant script.
No one else. Just him.
Ouch.
As they say in Southpark repeatedly near the end of each episode. "You know.. I've learned something today."
I guess I learned what local film making is about, and how not to conduct film deals...
I figure, putting this up online, is a great way to publicize a story which no one will otherwise ever hear about. Partly to get it out of my consciousness - and partly as a Cautionary Tale, to any writers out there, starting in the business.
And I am grateful for being taught a few lessons, in human behavior.
Now, six months down the line, I'm walking around, mostly without a limp. A big scar on my right leg, and a hole in my left leg that requires surgery, which I can't afford.
And the other hole, stays mostly invisible - that in the writer who's created something, only to have it stolen.
I'm somewhat poorer, but definitely wiser.
But I'm cleaner, and I’m free.
posted by * at 9:31 AM
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