Cape Town Relishes Its Role as a Stand-In

In the commercial, a man in Toronto wins free tickets to a Canadian sporting event. He drives along urban avenues, smiling at his good fortune. Next he goes to a nightclub packed with the kind of party crowd that only inhabits beer ads. Finally, he’s cheering alongside his countrymen in a Canadian arena.

None of this, however, was shot anywhere near the land of moose and Mounties.

This message was brought to you by the good people of Cape Town -- Africa’s most European city and one of the world’s most popular television commercial filming locations.

Recent figures released by the Entertainment Industry Development Corp. in Los Angeles show that although filming of theatrical features and television shows has rebounded, the number of local TV commercial productions has declined dramatically since January 2001.

Meanwhile, Cape Town’s commercials trade is booming.

“There’s no doubt that South Africa has emerged as one of the largest non-U.S. foreign production centers for commercials, and that’s happened fairly rapidly,” said Steve Caplan, a spokesman for the Assn. of Independent Commercial Producers.

South Africa’s currency, the rand, is so depressed that even advertising firms from bargain-basement locations such as Canada, Spain and Australia are flying to this resort town on Africa’s chin. Molson’s Beer, Nestle, MasterCard, Microsoft and other companies film more than 1,000 television commercials a year in South Africa, pumping $187 million annually into the local economy.

“This is just another example of producers seeking cost savings at the expense of crews in the U.S.,” said Bruce Doering of the L.A.-based Cinematographers Guild. The globalization of advertisement production spiked in 2000 after a six-month actors strike. Still intent on hawking goods, advertisers found thrifty fields abroad. Some never came back.

Caplan said the number of television ads filmed locally in October was 40% below the five-year average.

“It’s not just that the commercial business is slow in Los Angeles right now,” he said. “This is happening because it’s a global business now, and if L.A. wants its share, it has to be competitive with places like South Africa, New Zealand and Prague.”

Hard to Compete

But how does Los Angeles compete with a place like South Africa, where industry studies show that filming is 30% to 40% cheaper than in Europe or the U.S. and 20% cheaper than in Australia? Actors’ wages here are frequently less than half the U.S. rate, and South Africans aren’t entitled to royalty checks. A film technician who earns $550 a day in Santa Monica and $290 in Vancouver would be paid $165 in Cape Town.

Even Canadian producers such as Julie Gervais, who filmed the beer commercial, found South Africa a less expensive location than her home country. Her client authorized her to film here, at the risk of breaking Canadian film union agreements to stem runaway production. Gervais agreed to discuss her recent commercial shoot on the condition that the client company not be identified.

But South Africa’s economy isn’t the only reason for the burgeoning production business.

“I started coming here a year and half ago, when we were looking for vineyards in winter,” Gervais said. As she shot her beer commercial in balmy Cape Town, her native Montreal shivered in the snow. This region’s climate is comparable to that of Los Angeles, and rainfall is nearly as infrequent, making it ideal for companies looking to bathe their products in sunshine.

It is unclear whether South Africa is the cause, but Doering said film and television unions have noticed a drop this year in the number of productions in Miami, the traditional winter retreat for U.S. commercial productions.

Philip Key, founder of Moonlighting Films, South Africa’s busiest film company, said that beyond weather, the nation has other inherent advantages. Only a short distance from his Cape Town headquarters, “we have deserts, we have mountains, we have the sea, we have cities and parks -- and then there’s the rest of South Africa.”

Moonlighting’s offices, located in a converted downtown warehouse, are strewn with as many storyboards, Ethernet connections and goateed power-lunchers as any Westside production house. The firm is another example of why South Africa is attracting advertisers. In comparison to other cheap locations such as Argentina or Portugal, South Africa is well-stocked with talent.

Earl McDaniel, head of production at Partizan Entertainment, a Hollywood-based commercial producer, said South African firms are competitive internationally.

“Everybody has bid them at one point or another,” he said. “A lot of times, when you go outside of L.A. or New York, you have to worry about how they work -- you go to Spain and they go on siesta at 4 o’clock, everything shuts down. They’re much more cosmopolitan in Cape Town; you don’t have to worry.”

An increasing number of South African companies are becoming advertising houses in their own right. Cape Town companies such as Velocity Africa Film Production Services, Egg Film Service and Giant Films regularly compete with European, Hollywood and New York producers.

Most Cape Town firms, however, have emulated Moonlighting’s focus on logistics -- a crucial niche in Africa. Once a foreign studio or advertising firm has worked up a script and hired a director, it can call one of more than 60 production service companies in South Africa to scout locations, provide equipment, cast actors and extras, hire catering services and solve other problems a commercial shoot might encounter.

Increasingly, Hollywood studios are hiring South African production service companies on big-budget feature projects. When Columbia TriStar shot the 2000 film “I Dreamed of Africa,” the studio hired Moonlighting to handle logistics in South Africa’s Kwazulu-Natal province, which stood in for Kenya. Moonlighting also facilitates filming in other parts of Africa -- using Mozambique and Ghana, for example, to double for Zaire in the 2001 boxing biopic “Ali,” starring Will Smith.

Key’s business partner, Genevieve Hofmeyr, said fear of crime remained one of the biggest challenges for film companies. South Africa’s high crime rate is as well known as its apartheid legacy. According to Interpol statistics, the nation’s murder rate is 122 per 100,000 people, compared with 5 per 100,000 in the United States. Rape is so common here that some families have installed accordion gates inside their homes to protect their bedrooms at night.

But Hofmeyr said most of the trepidation of her country fades once people arrive.

“People don’t realize that when you’re walking the streets of Cape Town, you could be in San Francisco or L.A.,” she said.

Some advertising producers have even asked Hofmeyr whether they would be able to find enough white extras to make commercials look as if they were set in American or European settings.

Actually, most of the television locations here resemble other places. German luxury cars flash past vineyards that could just as easily be in Napa Valley or the south of France. Beautiful women enjoy soft drinks on beaches that could be Greek or Antiguan.

In fact, looking at these commercials and at local industry literature such as “The Filmmakers Guide to South Africa,” it is easy to forget that South Africa is a predominately black nation. Many industry watchers say the nation’s film trade has not shirked the legacy of racial apartheid.

“Cape Town is a beautiful city. But in order to shoot here, you have drive from the airport and pass by all the squatter camps,” said Gersh Kgamedi, one of South Africa’s few black film directors. “The only reason foreign crews can use us as a backdrop to replace America or Europe is because all the black people are hidden behind the mountain.”

An Old World Order

The South African parliament held hearings last month on the dearth of black film industry workers and the lack of advertising targeting the black middle class. Lawmaker Nke Kekana, who chaired those hearings, said South Africa’s “advertising and marketing industry is still stuck in an old-order world where white audiences matter more than black audiences.”

The economic damage that the white-dominated apartheid system wrought on the black majority of South Africa also has stymied efforts to graduate from logistical services and television advertising to feature films, said Eddie Mbalo, head of the government-funded National Film and Video Foundation. Kekana counted only three theaters in the township of Soweto, where 3 million blacks live just outside of Johannesburg. And even if there were more theaters, it’s unlikely many people here would be able to finance local productions or pay for movie tickets.

“People don’t have food on the table and roofs over their heads,” said Kathy English-Brower, a film industry consultant in South Africa.

English-Brower said the only way South Africa’s commercial production companies could evolve into bona fide studios is by diversifying the ranks of directors and investors and creating “local content” that could be marketed internationally.

A team of British, Canadian and South African filmmakers just wrapped “Stander,” a $15-million movie based on the true story of an apartheid-era South African police captain who became a bank robber.

Suzanne Kay and Mark Bamford, an American wife-and-husband filmmaking team, will shoot a movie next year about post-apartheid race relations called “Cape of Good Hope.”

They plan to use mostly local talent and an interracial ensemble cast that will include Djimon Hounsou of “Amistad” and “Gladiator.”

“It was hard to do this as outsiders,” said Bamford, who worked as a Hollywood screenwriter before moving to Cape Town a year ago. “But I think we have a good understanding of what international audiences want to know about this place. And we hope this will open doors for others by making a commercially successful South African film.”

The movie will be the couple’s first feature. They are financing it themselves -- something they say they never would have been able to afford to do in the U.S.