Author Ted Botha reveals Johannesburg’s incredible history as one-time centre of world filmmaking in Hollywood On The Veld
Filmmaking is such a massive enterprise, involving huge infrastructure – and yet, it’s likely that only film and history buffs will be familiar with Isidore Schlesinger, the man who more or less created a movie industry in South Africa in the early 1900s. Why did his legacy fade so fast?
Ted Botha It’s a fascinating thing. I wrote about the South African murderer Daisy De Melker and that was easy to sell. Schlesinger was not as simple to convince people about. He kept a tight rein on information about himself and might have ended up doing a number on himself as a result – that might not necessarily have been what he wanted.
His contemporaries, like Ernest Oppenheimer, left materials behind, but there was nothing written about Schlesinger, which takes some covering up – was there something shady there?
How did his story stick out for you?
I’ve loved movies since childhood. I was born in the US and came to South Africa. Around the age of eight or nine, I found some postcards of the movie about the Voortrekkers that Schlesinger made and they stayed in my mind, even though I didn’t know he was involved then. Over the years, mentions of his name accumulated. I first mentioned the idea of a book about him to a publisher in 2004 and worked on it as a side project while working on other stuff. I wasn’t frustrated by slow progress on it until 2017, when it became difficult to find more information than I had.
Achieving readability in a non-fiction book: was that a goal or was it a chore in some ways? Is there an ideal enthusiasm to academic ratio?
Readability is so important and incredibly tough – especially when there is limited information. This is not a biography. It’s more like an adventure story about one man and what he achieved. Many of his movies were disasters, but he had such an intense focus and obsession.
It’s difficult to place him in a South African context. He was as good as or better than many of Hollywood’s titans. And people don’t know about Hollywood. They think it’s been going forever, but it was still farmland in 1913!
There’s zero academia involved – I fear the historians of Johannesburg killing me! I was concerned about urban legends coming through, but I found no evidence for the nasty stories about Schlesinger. Journalistic integrity is so important but, while not forsaking the truth, it can’t be too dry.
There are wonderful, larger-than-life characters in this story, who didn’t let little things like world wars get in their way.
Was it a matter of circumstances working in their favour?
The opportunities were greater. For Schlesinger, South Africa was like the US, but not as far advanced in some ways. Entertainment was only one area he got into – he also worked in agriculture and made a lot of money there. What would have happened to him in the US? He probably would have been as successful, but possibly would have stood out less. He took industries by the horns and made business happen and he spent weeks on ships every year going to meetings in the UK and US.
Filmmaking, or any kind of major cultural endeavour, generally involves buy-in from the community in which it happens. The Johannesburg you describe in the book feels like a very different place to what it is now…
For the first movie he made in South Africa, Schlesinger had Louis Botha and Jan Smuts on his side. He had an affinity with Afrikaners and perhaps some of the politicians in on the way that Schlesinger was leaning could make money out of his projects, but that’s all conjecture.
To begin with, Schlesinger had no knowledge of how to make movies. He brought in people from the UK, the US and Germany, threw them together and tried to make it work. He didn’t seem to think twice – he just wanted it done! This was a new industry at the time. Hollywood was also trying to figure it out, but with more structure.
Your research is outstanding. What were your favourite or most interesting experiences in getting everything together?
Trying to find the authorised biography of Schlesinger – it was never published – was really tough. There were supposed to be copies in Johannesburg and Cape Town, but they’ve been lost. I gave up for a while, until I discovered that the author’s son lived next door to my dad! I eventually tracked the manuscript to Cambridge, but when I arrived, they could only find half of it and I wasn’t allowed to remove it from the archive; I had to sit and type it out… At that point, I realised I’d found most of it out already. Some new first-person interviews were the only things that helped.
There’s no recognition for Schlesinger in South Africa’s national film archive. Hopefully, this book will help plant some seeds to get that changed.
Text | Bruce Dennill
Photography | Supplied
Hollywood On The Veld by Ted Botha, published by Jonathan Ball, is available now. For more information, go to jonathanball.co.za.
