Vanilla Gorilla

Johannesburg – The movie Vanilla Gorilla, to be filmed here and to star the Australian songstress and actress Nikki Webster is sure to put South Africa on the map.

Variety reported Oz Moppet Webster Goes Ape For Kleiser while The Hollywood Reporter reported, more sedately, that Webster Carries Torch For Kleiser On Indie Vanilla. So let’s get all the credits correct.

The movie’s to be directed by Randal Kleiser who, in Variety’s parlance, “helmed” Grease, Honey I Blew Up The Kid, White Fang, The Blue Lagoon among others. The producers are Normandi Brown, Tony Sloman and Craig Gardner. The executive director is Sam Kute, and co-producers are T.J Mancini and Erika Brannan. Myron Nash will line produce. Anyone missing? No. Right. The South African connection is Gardner, who also wrote the script.

Since he happens to live just up the road, one had to dash off to his house rightaway to find out more about the movie. Yep, he’s excited. But first something about Gardner. From Los Angeles, he came to South Africa some twenty years ago and starred in a stage play about outer space beings that he’d rather forget, I’m sure.

There was a happy ending. He stayed, married, had kids, and become a local sitcom creator and writer to be reckoned with, doing a long-running multi-award winning series Suburban Bliss that he wrote almost single-handedly, and that ran so long it nearly frazzled his brain. Luckily it didn’t, so he did another award winning series called Joburg Blues, also for the SABC.

Now he has various projects on the go, including a screenplay for Peakviewing, a British company who make a lot of films out here, another script that could turn into a co-production with a German company, as well as pilot scripts for sitcoms overseas. He’s been to Los Angeles fourteen times in the last four years.

He wrote Vanilla Gorilla partly because he was tired of violence in movies, of going to the video shop and not finding something for his twelve year old. He also felt there were a lot of parents all over the world who felt the same way – “and I’ve been vindicated. It is so.”

He also wanted to do a script that could be shot in South Africa without pretending this country was the Bahamas or Vietnam. “The one thing about the film industry that’s driven me nuts is that we pretend we’re somewhere else.” That’s a long story of exploitation at different times, but suffice it to say that South Africa seldom gets a chance to be itself on film. Even in the dreadful I Dreamed Of Africa, we stand in for elsewhere on the continent.

He read a lot about a sign language-understanding gorilla named Koko who lives in Hawaii and thought, “what if we took a gorilla like Koko, and put it in a zoo here as part of an interspecies communication research project?” We also have a famous gorilla here, Max, that got shot by an escaping criminal who jumped into his cage while fleeing the police.

This inspired Craig to incorporate a shooting incident into his script. “I felt sorry for poor Max, but it was great from a writing perspective.” Craig jokingly refers to Vanilla Gorilla as “Free Willy meets ET. It’s first and foremost a story about a relationship between a gorilla and a young girl and the impact each of them has on the other.

I loved the whole element of ET in which Eliot tries to get his alien friend home again.” That’s an apt description: the film’s about a child, played by Nikki Webster, who helps a gorilla kept in a Cape Town zoo to get back to its original home in Rwanda.

When describing the story, Gardner mentions that the film was about a boy and a gorilla, that is until last week when Nikki Webster captured the hearts of billions of people on the planet. Gardner effusively sings the praises of Hollywood producer Normandi Brown who watched the opening ceremony, flipped over Nikki and decided she would be perfect for the role.

He used an incredible amount of wherewithal to track her down, get a synopsis and a gender-corrected script to her and sign Nikki to her first film in which she will star. The rest will be history. Shooting should start here and in Zimbabwe in February next year, and, says Gardner, “there will be plenty of work for local actors and crew although the leads will be imported”.

Gardner wrote the script three years ago and spent a lot of time looking for partners on it. Over the last year he even negotiated contracts with a couple of interested parties but “I always pulled out at the last second because it didn’t feel right”. Then the actor Stephen Furst of the TV series St Elsewhere introduced him to Brown who was looking to do a film in South Africa.

Brown was here a year ago at the film market in Cape Town, but couldn’t find a script he liked. He fell in love with Vanilla Gorilla and, according to Gardner, “Normandi and I immediately shared a creative vision on the kind of film we both wanted to make.” And that was it.

Gardner will be involved creatively in the making of the film, taking on the role of one of the producers. However it’s still early days. The other leading roles still need to be cast but the first giant step has been taken towards filming. “We’re all thrilled that Nikki will be starring and that Randal Kleiser is directing. The Olympics may be over, but we’re building our own Vanilla Gorilla dream team.”

Why Vanilla Gorilla I ask. “The inspiration to make Gogo, that’s his name, a white gorilla comes from Snowflake, the famous albino gorilla in the Barcelona zoo.” Are you going to hire Snowflake for the movie? Nope. There’s a wonderful technique called animatronics – “it costs a lot of money but saves cleaning out the cage everyday!” Then he says to keep in contact if I want more information on the film as it progresses. I’ll take him up on that – so you’ll have to keep watching this space.

The top ten films according to box office this week are:

1. Shanghai Noon
2. X-Men
3. Urban Legends: The Final Cut
4. The Flintstones In Viva Rock Vegas
5. Big Momma’s House
6. Keeping The Faith
7. Hollow Man
8. The Tigger Movie
9. Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps
10. U-571.

The following are the top five movies according to the art house Cinema Noveau circuit:

1. Under The Sun
2. Himalaya
3. Nora
4. Jesus’ Son
5. Romance

Source: News24

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