‘That’s the figurine,’ Afolayan said one day at his office, pointing to a carved wooden prop on his shelf. By this point, I was starting to wonder about the fortune it had brought Afolayan. His follow-up film, ‘Phone Swap,’ was supposed to be shooting. But just a few days before, one of its stars, a beloved character actor named Sam Loco Efe, dropped dead while shooting another movie. The newspapers were filled with condolences, as well as speculation that the veteran actor might have been killed by overwork.
‘Phone Swap’ was supposed to be a humorous and commercially appealing diversion. Instead it was threatening to become a debacle. As usual, Afolayan had to contend with the absence of vital equipment, decent roads, reliable electricity. He had abruptly dropped his leading man for cantankerous behaviour. Now came the untimely death of Sam Loco. ‘I was just so devastated,‘ Afolayan said, telling me that the day before he had quit work early to curl up and watch romantic comedies.
Afolayan also handles the financial side of his productions, and ‘Phone Swap’ was conceived with an eye toward product placement, though the cellphone company originally involved had backed out. The story involves a pair of opposites, a free-spirited single girl from the country and a serious Lagos businessman who end up enmeshed in each other’s lives after they mix up their phones. The plot was made to appeal to Nigeria’s new elite, for whom the BlackBerry is a totem as powerful as any figurine. Sam Loco was supposed to play the female lead’s father, an Igbo farmer.
One morning, while he considered replacements for Sam Loco, Afolayan assembled his key crew members to scout locations in the town of Badagry, near the Benin border. We left before dawn to avoid Lagos’s paralyzing traffic jams. Badagry sits along a route often used by smugglers, and there were police roadblocks along the way. But Afolayan blew right through them in his big truck, shouting, ‘Are you crazy?’ at one cop who tried to step in front. The town, an old slaving port, was meant to stand in for an Igbo village. From the back seat, the art director Pat Nebo, an Igbo, gave a lecture on the group’s customs and agricultural practices, lots of painstaking talk about palm oil and kola nuts. ‘Don’t forget this is a comedy film,’ Afolayan gently reminded him.
We came to the small concrete house that would serve as the set of the farm. ‘It’s so dirty,’ Afolayan said happily. Everyone walked through its dank main hallway, which smelled of smoke and fish, into a sandy backyard where laundry flapped in the wind. ‘Fantastic, this is brilliant,’ said the cinematographer Yinka Edward, as he began conceptualizing an ambitious crane shot.
‘The house becomes a major character of the film,’ Nebo pronounced, before heading off to scout for appropriate livestock.
Afolayan’s budget for ‘Phone Swap,’ around $500,000, was tiny by Hollywood standards but Spielberg-size for Nigeria. Before embarking on the project, Afolayan went to potential investors with a 29-page business plan, discussing everything from plot details to the fees for equipment rentals and actors. He managed to entice an investor to pledge $1.5 million, enough to finance his next three films. But as deadlines neared, the money still had not appeared. He handed over his BlackBerry so I could read a series of progressively more frustrated e-mail messages. ‘Most of these investors, they just think business,’ Afolayan said. ‘They don’t really understand the ethic of production.’
Of course, profit motives drove the development of the medium long before pretensions of artistry. The first American movies were disdained by respectable society, but the price of admission — 5 cents, hence the term ‘nickelodeon’ — made them popular with working-class audiences. One day in 1906, an unemployed clothing merchant named Carl Laemmle, who was thinking about starting a five-and-dime, happened to walk into a packed Chicago nickelodeon. ‘It was evident that the basic idea of motion pictures and Mr. Woolworth’s innovation were identical,’ Laemmle later wrote, ‘small-price commodity in tremendous quantities.’ Laemmle started his own theater, and eventually expanded into producing content, founding Universal Pictures.
The businessmen behind Nollywood have followed a similar path from upstart to mogul. In the absence of strong legal institutions, Nigeria’s movie marketers formed a guild to govern their industry, colluding to regulate supply and production costs. The guild has resisted all attempts by actors and producers to push for a larger share of revenue.
‘We created the industry,’ Gab Okoye, a marketer who goes by the name Gabosky, proudly said one afternoon. We were standing near the red carpet outside a Lagos banquet hall, where the local chapter of the guild was about to inaugurate new officers. To celebrate and pay homage, all of old Nollywood had turned out in its flashiest finery, lots of bright ankara cloth and dark sunglasses. Gabosky, who was wearing a hip-hop-inspired ensemble, told me he felt disrespected by the new filmmakers like Afolayan. He called them ‘houseboys’ who had forgotten their place. ‘He’s started complaining about his master,’ he said, ‘who was giving him a job yesterday.’
Inside, the powerful guild president, Emmanuel Isikaku, took the stage. ‘Nollywood is still alive,’ he told the audience. ‘Nollywood is still great.’ The defensive tenor of his declaration was indicative of the marketers’ mood. They had built an entertainment enterprise without precedent in Africa, and yet they felt unappreciated and besieged. The government was trying to crack down with increased fees and oversight. The event’s written program warned of the calamity of regulation and maligned Nigerian actors as ‘lazy.’ When stars become too demanding, marketers deal with them ruthlessly. A few years ago, they put several prominent actors on a blacklist, and none were allowed to work, according to a guild official, until they begged forgiveness.
The marketers say they can’t afford the extravagances of talent. The production budget for a typical Nollywood movie ranges between $25,000 and $50,000, less than a tenth of what Afolayan was proposing for ‘Phone Swap.’ The marketers contend that spending more would be foolish, because the low price of Nollywood movies is part of their appeal. ‘You must first identify who your primary market is,’ Isikaku, a shrewd and sinewy operator, told me. ‘If your primary audience is the elites and the middle class, the people that can go to the cinema, fine, well and good. But there are some programs that are meant for the people on the street.’
Richmond Ezihe, the guild boss at Alaba market, tried to explain Nollywood economics to me. We met one afternoon in front of the stall that serves as the base for his company. Pasted to its metal door was a poster for a recent feature, ‘Palace of Blood.’ When Ezihe, who is the financier and executive producer, comes up with the concept for a movie, he gives it to a couple of screenwriters he keeps on retainer and then hires a director to hurriedly shoot, having the film ready for sale on the Alaba market within a month or two.
Ezihe has a number of ways to monetize his product: there’s a satellite television station, an overseas DVD market catering to the African diaspora and even a Netflix-inspired Web site called Nollywood Love. But most revenues still come from physical sales. It costs less than 20 cents to burn a blank VCD and package it, but the wholesale price for movies is so cheap that a marketer might need to sell 100,000 copies just to make a decent return. The average Nollywood movie has a shelf life of about two weeks before the pirates get hold of it. In Nigeria, an estimated 5 to 10 illegal VCDs are sold for every legitimate one, and the police make no serious effort to deter the trade.
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