THE SABC’s financial collapse has stalled the business future of TV’s hottest young writer just as she’s nominated for an International Emmy award. Yet Portia Gumede still sees the future of her industry in the export market, and has several more potential winners waiting for funding next year.
At 32, a graduate of the old KwaZulu-Natal Technikon, Gumede is used to kicking down barriers to get what she wants. “Our own stories are an untapped resource in the international market,” she says. “The Emmys are the gateway to the global buyers. By entering my first full series, Sokhulu & Partners, I was as much trying my luck as putting my work out there to the international judging panel. Their nomination is a bright light for me in a terrible year for our domestic industry.”
Remarkably, Sokhulu & Partners is only the second production she’s made with her own Johannesburg-based company, Paw Paw Films. She launched it in 2007 to capitalise on her early success as a writer and actress with Cape Town’s Penguin Films.
It made sense, she says, to go into business as a producer herself after working on a string of SABC hits like Stokvel, Generations, Going Up Again, Home Affairs and Hard Copy.
Gumede set out her company stall with a script that replicated the plot of Shakespeare’s King Lear in a family drama set in the coal-export terminal of Richard s Bay. Titled Izingane zoBaba (My Father’s Children), it was based on her own experience of growing up in a family running small businesses in that city.
“I am one of three daughters,” she says. “The concept of Izingane started with one sentence: what if? What if a man who has built a business empire from scratch, with no BEE assistance, suddenly finds his three daughters turn against him, wanting it all?”
A year later, while watching a production of King Lear at Johannesburg’s Civic Theatre, she realised her idea fitted the brief for the SABC’s Shakespeare in Mzansi season. “Women are on top in business now, but how far are they willing to go?”
The pitch was accepted. Gumede updated the Bard’s classic into a contemporary thriller, using six cameras for the first time in a local TV drama and replacing the Elizabethan narrator with a reporter who’s making a documentary about the business empire struggling to fill its leadership vacuum.
While waiting for Izingane zoBaba to be broadcast early last year, Gumede wrote Sokhulu & Partners. “I aimed from the start to brand Paw Paw Films with the kind of material no one else is making,” she says.
“I’m widely known as an actress who usually plays the friendly, smart-talking secretary in comedies. That has a limited career shelf life. As a producer, I could create challenging scripts for many excellent actors I knew who were being overlooked for lead roles on television.”
Her first International Emmy nomination, against contenders in the drama category like the BBC’s espionage hit Spooks, is no accident. Sokhulu & Partners is about two brothers running a Johannesburg law firm specialising in cases drawn from the files of the Constitutional Court. It took months of research, backed by the Wits University Centre of Applied Legal Studies, to ensure the authenticity of the scripts before they were packaged in Jozi-style character and dialogue.
“It’s great source material but we scripted it more on the style of American prime-time TV,” she says. “I’m a big fan of David Kelley and his Boston Legal series. Television audiences worldwide like a strong court case but it’s the human angles that grab their interest, not the technicalities. We have fascinating cases on file at Concourt which make for great drama; that may have been what struck a chord with the Emmy award judges.”
Also giving Sokhulu & Partners an edge in the global market, Gumede believes, is the freshness of the cases and the lawyers fighting them. “They are working in a society 15 years after its liberation.… T hese brothers are fired by the black man’s drive to succeed, given the opportunity. It’s what’s happening now.”
Shooting a 13-episode TV drama means running a production business on a shoestring, when cast, crew, location, equipment, editing and post-production costs are factored in. Like most start-up companies, a contractor can only achieve a workable profit margin when the overheads begin to amortise through the client ordering more episodes.
Gumede was so confident that she was meeting her client’s expectations when Sokhulu & Partners aired on the SABC last year that she outlined new episodes and decided to start a family. By the time her son was born, Paw Paw Films began 2009 without a single contract.
“What this year has taught me, in the light of the SABC’s financial crisis,” she says, “is that you can no longer afford, as an independent contractor, to put all your eggs in one basket. Your product must be developed for the whole market, here and internationally. It’s been a hard lesson to learn.
“At first I felt betrayed by the broadcaster that has mentored me, then I blamed myself for not thinking out of the box as soon as I became established. A business with one client is always walking a tightrope.”
On the upside, the entire TV industry is equally hard hit. The government has committed to restoring the SABC to normal operations next year. By forming her company as a joint venture with Penguin Films, Gumede expects to carry on working with the senior partner on big-budget contracts for local broadcasters, and carry on making her own scripts under the Paw Paw banner. “It’s been a learning curve for me and the entire industry,” she says. “It’s forced us all to regroup and become hardline, seeking out more viable markets. There are no comfort zones any longer.”
The International Emmy ceremony takes place at the New York Hilton tonight. Gumede will be there, on a rushed break from acting in a new drama series for e.tv. She plans to take advantage of any doors the event might open.
The export market is a prize target for South African producers, who up till now have had to live with the SABC owning the sole rights to every programme it commissions.
“We must be free to export our product as well as sell it to our own broadcasters,” Gumede says. “The global television market is increasing annually and the demand for fresh new is growing likewise.”
It’s her first opportunity to network with international buyers. A newcomer to the TV trade, Gumede wants to learn the commercial ropes by interning with a major production house in the US or Europe. Writing and producing hot-buzz material is one thing: selling it and setting up co- financing deals to keep the ball rolling is the next step she plans to grow her company.
“It is a leap,” she says, “but then again I was still a drama student at Natal Technikon a decade ago. I came to Jo’burg in 2001 and struggled to find work; I lived in a Hillbrow flat and rode taxis for three years. Then I lost out on a role in Stokvel because I don’t speak Sotho, but that’s when the door opened. I was invited to write for the series instead.”
While Gumede and Penguin Films associate Roberta Durrant have each scaled back their companies this year, they are ready to get back into full production as soon as the SABC gives the go-ahead. “It wasn’t our fault the SABC ran out of money this year but they are still the biggest client in this country,” she says. “It’s in everyone’s interest that they resume normal operations on a sounder business footing.”
She isn’t worried that Emmy recognition and a recovering global economy might just lead to Paw Paw Films doubling or even tripling its workload next year. “I thrive under pressure. I learned the business by acting all day and writing at night.
“Okay, now I have a baby at home too, which makes life even more demanding. But there’s nothing mystical about writing for a living — you just stay in front of the keyboard until it’s done. Producing is no different: you get a budget, hire a team, and deliver the best product you can make, on schedule.”