Hollywood on the Veld

In 1913 — near the height of Johannesburg’s rich, violent and intoxicating golden age — an American millionaire living in a penthouse at the top of the Carlton Hotel suddenly had a mad idea. He would go into competition with a brand-new industry that had the entire world entranced — the movies. His name was Isidore William Schlesinger, better known by his initials, IW.

More than 110 years later, it’s hard to believe any of this ever happened. The dusty mining town was booming, to be sure, but it was thousands of miles away from the major movie centres, London, Paris, Berlin, New York and especially Los Angeles, where a dirt-tracked piece of farmland was still to become famous around the world as ‘Hollywood’.

Movies were in their infancy. Countless small companies were manoeuvring their way through a jungle of constantly changing technology and public tastes, and in global terms South Africa was just a blip on the screen. Yet within several years IW Schlesinger had not only joined the international melee but triggered some of the most important events in early motion pictures.

With no experience in entertainment, he started buying theatres, and then produced movies to show in them. He sent his crews on location, to film in the bushveld and at historic battle sites, at Victoria Falls, and in Zululand and the forests of Portuguese East Africa, when the norm almost everywhere else in the world was to shoot close to home on confined stages, often inside buildings, with painted canvases serving as backdrops. He employed extras in record-breaking numbers — up to 25 000, by some accounts — and was one of the first moviemakers to use African actors in leading roles. In 1916, he started shooting the first of two huge, very costly and unprecedented historical spectacles, which themselves would make news at home and abroad.

All of this happened at a time of turbulence and upheaval in Johannesburg. IW started his movie company the very same month that the devastating miners’ strike of 1913 erupted, and he ended production just after the 1922 Red Revolt. His cameramen captured both disastrous events on film. By 1919, the American had produced some of the biggest, most expensive and most innovative feature movies the world had ever seen, not only the two historical spectacles but also the adventure stories King Solomon’s Mines and Allan Quatermain.

After these came a romance between two teenage castaways on a tropical island, The Blue Lagoon.Few people today realise that IW made the first versions of these now famous and often remade movies, or that he built a studio in the shadow of the Parktown ridge. Indeed, little physical evidence remains that any of his empire ever existed. His vision for his movies was breathtaking, not only in scale but also in the array of people from around the world who were associated with his empire. Through his doors, over two decades, came Englishmen and Russians, Americans and Germans, Australians and Indians, dancers, novelists, inventors, broadcasters, politicians, talent agents, actors, directors.

From a little-known new filmmaker in London named Alfred Hitchcock to the novelist Olive Schreiner; from Hollywood producers like Carl Laemmle and Adolph Zukor to the Russian dancer George Balanchine; from the statesman Jan Smuts to the novelist Sir Henry Rider Haggard; from Mahatma Gandhi to George Bernard Shaw; from PL Travers, the author of Mary Poppins, to Sir Percy Fitzpatrick; from Sol Plaatje, the African nationalist and himself a movie lover, to the Russo-German actress Olga Tschechowa, who was later wooed by Adolf Hitler — the list goes on.

In both physical appearance and work ethic, IW bore an uncanny resemblance to the titans of Hollywood, and he followed much the same path that they did. Sometimes, quite remarkably, he was also far ahead of them.

In the turbulent 1920s, when the American studios were floundering around in the uncertain new age of sound movies, IW had already bought an American company that would help him become one of the first to make a ‘talkie’ picture. Like the US media tycoon William Randolph Hearst, IW married a movie starlet (Hearst wed Marion Davies; IW a young British actress named Mabel May) and each one built a mansion for himself. Hearst had a castle overlooking San Simeon in central California, which he started building in 1919; four years later, IW dug the foundations for Whitehall Court, his architectural confection that was a strange amalgam of an apartment block and a mansion, between the Parktown and Houghton ridges.

When IW died, in 1949, a story in The New York Times suggested that if he had lived in his home country, the US, ‘he would be a world figure like Henry Ford or JP Morgan.’ Even though he never gave up his American passport, and he often travelled back there, home remained Johannesburg, and IW’s passion for South Africa, both its landscape and its potential, was almost fanatical. ... His demise in the world of movies came in the early 1930s during a perfect storm: the Great Depression; a devastating fire at the new studio he had built in London; and a protracted legal battle with the major American studios over several important patents for talking pictures. In the end, he was brought to his knees by the very entertainment Mecca that he had meticulously tried to copy — Hollywood.

Much of the story of those early movie-making days in Johannesburg — like the rest of IW’s life — died with him. His studio under the Parktown ridge eventually made way for a shopping mall, the apartment buildings of Killarney and a golf course, his own name all but forgotten. Secretive in the extreme, IW never granted interviews, kept his affairs private, almost obsessively so, and always had a small coterie of front men to do his bidding for him. In an industry as public as entertainment, he was a master at staying almost entirely out of the spotlight.

Even the burial place that he chose for himself — in the middle of some nondescript veld and thorn trees on the farm Zebediela — ensured that he carried his desire for privacy to the grave. The journey to unearth IW’s story has been as long and frustrating as it has been fascinating….

But by connecting the all the dots, a line here, a paragraph there, a mention in someone’s biography, comments by people who had worked with him, errant reports that had slipped through the cracks, court cases that, much to IW’s chagrin, had mentioned his name, an image of the man has gradually emerged. This is the strange, never-told-before story of how Hollywood on the Veld began and, quite magnificently, reached for the stars.”

* Extract courtesy of Jonathan Ball Publishers