(By Andrew Rice) - “Most of [Nollywood] movies … are awful, marred by slapdash production,
melodramatic acting and ludicrous plots. [Kunle] Afolayan, who is 37, is one of
a group of upstart directors trying to transcend those rote formulas and low
expectations. His breakthrough film, the 2009 thriller “The Figurine,” was an
aesthetic leap: ... it announced the arrival of a
swaggering talent keen to upset an immature industry. Unlike most Nollywood
fare, “The Figurine” was released in actual theaters, not on cheap discs,
playing to packed houses next to Hollywood features. “Many observers,” Jonathan
Haynes, a scholar of Nollywood, recently wrote, “have been waiting a long time
for this kind of filmmaking, which can take its place in the international
arena proudly and on equal terms.” …
The economic
realities of African filmmaking conspire against an improvement in quality. The
consumer base is huge — there are more than a billion Africans, [200] million
of them in Nigeria alone. But access to those buyers is controlled by the
clannish merchants who congregate on the outskirts of Lagos at the Alaba
International Market, the distribution hub of the African movie business. …
Nollywood’s bawdy
humor — or fright or fantasy — appeals to a public seeking escape from
depressing living conditions. The industry itself was born out of economic
desperation during the early 1990s, a period of military dictatorship, low
prices for Nigeria’s oil and Western-mandated “structural adjustment” of its
economy. Actors and cameramen were out of work because of budget cuts at the
national television station. Movie theaters were closed because no one wanted
to venture into the dangerous streets at night.
According to [common
accounts], the first Nollywood movie was made by a small-time electronics
trader named Kenneth Nnebue, who, stuck with a large shipment of blank
videotapes, decided to unload them by making a movie about a man who sells his
soul for wealth. That movie, “Living in Bondage,” sold hundreds of thousands of
copies and established Nollywood’s archetypal plot elements: martial discord,
greed, a conflict between Christianity and juju, as the occult is called in West
Africa. From these accidental origins, a cultural phenomenon emerged.
Other merchants,
overwhelmingly members of Nnebue’s ethnic group, the Igbo, followed him into
business. They literally made things up as they went, shooting movies in just a
few days, based on vague scenarios instead of scripts. Directors approximated
tracking shots by pushing their cameramen around in wheelchairs. Quality was
shaky, but the buying public didn’t care. Between 1994 and 2005, production in
Nigeria went from a handful of feature movies a year to more than 2,500.
“We watch these
Africa films like ‘Blood Diamond’ and ‘The Last King of Scotland’ — they’re always from the perspective of the
Europeans,” says Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen, who has directed more than 160
features. He was the subject of a documentary called “Nollywood Babylon,” which was shown at
the Sundance Film Festival, and he told me that when he went to the
festival, he was shocked to discover that some American directors had been
working for years to make just one movie.
Kenneth Nnebue
quit Nollywood a few years ago, retiring to his village to devote his life to
preaching the Bible. But the industry he established remains tightly controlled
by the same group of Igbo businessmen, an insular guild sometimes called the [Idumota
Marketers]/Alaba cartel. …
To make the more
costly kind of films he envisions, Afolayan has been compelled to devise a
strategy that goes around Alaba. “They’re just businesspeople,” Afolayan says
dismissively. “They could not really care less about content.” In an
evolutionary inversion, his strategy depends on theaters, which have returned
to Nigeria along with democracy and the global oil boom. Movie tickets have
become a fashionable indulgence for Lagos’s expanding population of prosperous professionals.
It is in this privileged world — not the slums — that Afolayan’s movie “The
Figurine” takes place. Since its sensational release, people have begun to
speak of an emerging movement — New Nollywood — that has captivated a new
generation of would-be filmmakers. …
Nollywood
movies, both old and new, often play on traditional
African beliefs about magic and spirits. “The Figurine” is about two young
university graduates — rivals for the same woman’s affections — who stumble on
a shrine and uncover the statue of a god. The figurine is supposed to grant
seven years of good luck, followed by seven of misfortune. Afolayan’s character
brings it home to Lagos, wins the girl and great wealth, at which point the
plot takes a horror-genre turn. …
Of
course, profit motives drove the development of the
medium long before pretensions of artistry. The first American movies were
disdained by respectable society, but the price of admission — 5 cents, hence
the term “nickelodeon” — made them popular with working-class audiences. One
day in 1906, an unemployed clothing merchant named Carl Laemmle, who was
thinking about starting a five-and-dime, happened to walk into a packed Chicago nickelodeon. “It was evident that the basic
idea of motion pictures and Mr. Woolworth’s innovation were identical,” Laemmle
later wrote, “small-price commodity in tremendous quantities.” Laemmle started
his own theater, and eventually expanded into producing content, founding
Universal Pictures.
The businessmen
behind Nollywood have followed a similar path from upstart to mogul. In the
absence of strong legal institutions, Nigeria’s movie marketers formed a guild
to govern their industry, colluding to regulate supply and production costs.
The guild has resisted all attempts by actors and producers to push for a
larger share of revenue.
“We created the
industry,” Gab Okoye, a marketer who goes by the name Gabosky, proudly said one
afternoon. We were standing near the red carpet outside a Lagos banquet hall,
where the local chapter of the guild was about to inaugurate new officers. To
celebrate and pay homage, all of old Nollywood had turned out in its flashiest
finery, lots of bright ankara cloth and dark sunglasses. …
Inside, the
powerful guild president, Emmanuel Isikaku, took the stage. “Nollywood is still
alive,” he told the audience. “Nollywood is still great.” The defensive tenor
of his declaration was indicative of the marketers’ mood. They had built an
entertainment enterprise without precedent in Africa, and yet they felt
unappreciated and besieged. The government was trying to crack down with
increased fees and oversight. The event’s written program warned of the
calamity of regulation and maligned Nigerian actors as “lazy.” When stars
become too demanding, marketers deal with them ruthlessly. A few years ago,
they put several prominent actors on a blacklist, and none were allowed to
work, according to a guild official, until they begged forgiveness.
The marketers say
they can’t afford the extravagances of talent. The production budget for a
typical Nollywood movie ranges between $25,000 and $50,000, less than a tenth
of what Afolayan was proposing for “Phone Swap.” The marketers contend that
spending more would be foolish, because the low price of Nollywood movies is
part of their appeal. “You must first identify who your primary market is,”
Isikaku, a shrewd and sinewy operator, told me. “If your primary audience is
the elites and the middle class, the people that can go to the cinema, fine,
well and good. But there are some programs that are meant for the people on the
street.” …
Perversely, the
rise of video, which had given Afolayan the ability to practice his father’s
craft, had also robbed it of its value. His career represents a possibly rash
wager: that even in the most lawless marketplace, talent is still worth a
premium. When he started to make “The Figurine,” announcing on Facebook that he planned to spend 50 million naira,
roughly $350,000, the universal reaction was incredulity. Afolayan told me:
“Everybody started writing, saying, ‘How will you make your money? You want to
commit suicide?’ ” To pay for “The Figurine,” Afolayan took out a bank loan for half the budget, pledging his house as
collateral, and subsidized another third of the movie through product
placement.
“Kunle was out to
make a statement, that it was possible to make a good film in this country
using local hands,” Yinka Edward said. When he ran out of money at one point,
stalling production, Afolayan borrowed from family and friends and asked his
cast and crew to keep working on good faith.
His efforts
appeared to receive vindication in the box-office performance of “The
Figurine.” But the triumphal narrative breaks down when you examine the
financials. For all its acclaim, Afolayan said that “The Figurine” had yet to
turn a substantial profit. The movie showed to packed houses, but there are
just seven major theaters in Nigeria, and it grossed only around $200,000 in
its initial release, not enough to cover Afolayan’s investment.
To maximize
revenues, Afolayan made a deal with an independent entertainment company that
was having encrypted DVDs of “The Figurine” shipped in from China for mass distribution. The executive handling
the project told me that his plan was to simultaneously release a huge number
of copies across the country, so as not to create scarcity, which encourages
piracy. Then he drew a diagram of his network, each strand of which ended with
some regional marketer. There was just no way to circumvent the unyielding
force of the cartel. Emeka Mba, the government regulator, told me that he saw
Afolayan’s efforts to devise a new distribution system as an inspirational
experiment. “Here’s a guy who wants to do things differently,” he said. “Here
is a guy who is brave.” …
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