Guardian

I HAVE read almost every encomium on Prof. Chinua Achebe, and I don’t think it can ever be enough to add another one. In fact, I feel I must add this one because none has mentioned the man’s desire to shoot his works in film, which was totally aborted by the debacle that was Things Fall Apart the film, variously called Bullfrog in the Sun. I also seize this opportunity to link it to the Nigerian film industry and the need for our writers to participate in it.

This story started at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) African Studies Center. I had had the privilege of watching the film before I met him. The film was produced by Samuel Goldwyn Jr. and Ed Mosk, starring John Seka and Princess Elizabeth Toro of Uganda.

The way I got to see the film needs the telling. And so also is my discussion with the Prof on the film, which initiated our future relationship.

I studied film at the graduate level at UCLA after I got my first degree in Theatre Arts in ABU Zaria. We used to sit at the UCLA North Campus Cafeteria for lunch and discussions on how we could solve all human problems and save the world! North Campus afforded us the opportunity to meet many distinguished scholars from all over the world who were visiting professors to UCLA, particularly African visiting professors on sabbatical at the African Studies Center, as well as the Center for Strategic Studies.

That afternoon most of us on the table were from the Film School. You know, UCLA Department of Film, TV and Drama boasts as the Best Film School in the world. I would not argue with that. It was and is very much favored by Hollywood. It was and is the abode of Hollywood Film and TV Archives.

All the films ever made in Hollywood are kept there. And UCLA took a heavy advantage of that in using the films to teach us how to make good films. Hollywood film stars come in and out at will for different kinds of Campus Programs. They even appear in student films, when they are not busy. And to sharpen their art.

The Film School is separated by Sunset Blvd from Bel Air, the abode of these uber rich and famous of Hollywood stars and movers and shakers. The implication is that their offspring, relatives, etc., attend UCLA just across the street. UCLA students in general have the opportunity to relate with them.

So that afternoon we were sitting with the son of Samuel Goldwyn Jr. [of the MGM – Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer fame] who was a student at the Film School. I told him I had won his father’s creative writing award, the Samuel Goldwyn Creative Writing Award for my screenplay, Broken Cells. The Award Ceremony was held in his father’s huge spread in Bel Air. He was quite pleased to hear that an African had won it for the first time and asked where in Africa I came from. I said Nigeria.

“Nigeria! Things Fall Apart!”

For a moment I didn’t know what to make of it. Was he talking about the Nigeria state or the famous novel?

He soon helped me out.

“The film! My father produced it! I can show you!”

“Wow!” I said. I heard it was produced and I had been longing for the opportunity to see it.

We quickly organized with now late Prof. Teshome Gabriel who taught the course ‘Film and Society’ at UCLA Film School, and secured the Film School’s state-of-the-art theater. [The UCLA Melnitz Hall Theater has to be state-of-the-art because Hollywood producers such as Francis Ford Coppola, an alumnus of UCLA [of “The Godfather’ series fame] loved to preview their films to us students there first before they premiered them to the public.].

Things Fall Apart the film was a special screening to all of the UCLA community, and, because the classic book was widely read in the university, it being part of the Literature courses, the theater was packed full to the brim for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as it came out to be.

After the film, I had never been so sad! Those who saw it were as stunned, totally stunned.

I had read all the Prof’s works up to that time. The film I saw was not the Things Fall Apart that I and all who had read the eponymous book came to see. The film had combined the trilogy — Things Fall Apart, No Longer At Ease and A Man Of The People —  in one fell swoop, and made such a monumental mess of it. It was not the acting. Seka and Toro did their best. It was the storytelling on celluloid.

It was in this state of mind I was when Prof. Chinua Achebe came to visit UCLA. I believe he was being canvassed to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature. He did several readings of excerpts from his works, both novels and poems at UCLA and around town in Los Angeles to full houses. I made sure I did not miss a single reading. Los Angeles being the world capital of hero worshippers, at least this was a real star, an intellectual who was a genuine star. Many dusted up their old and new copies of his works and brought them for his autograph. And he diligently, humbly, patiently obliged them all, even thanked them for reading his works.

Then I got the opportunity to sit one-on-one with him at UCLA Center for Strategic Studies. Just the two of us. I was accorded the opportunity by the African Studies Centre to sit with the literary giant because I was supposed to be this hot shot Nigerian film student who had won a couple of prestigious creative writing awards for two of his screenplays. And, ever willing to lend a hand to a budding young writer, he readjusted his very busy schedule to accommodate me.

Needless to say I was star-struck! Hollywood hero worship had rubbed on me, some. But this was not just a Hollywood hero. This was a literary hero who always attracted a huge crowd anywhere he went. It is therefore not every day you get to sit with such a world renowned literary star!

In fact there are not many people who can claim that opportunity. Mine is especially unique – I had met Kongi himself, Prof. Wole Soyinka at UCLA several times, when he was in exile, and at a King Sunny Ade concert in town in Los Angeles. I also got a glimpse of him recently in the University of Ibadan when he gave the inaugural Geoffrey Axworthy Memorial Lecture. Prof. Axworthy was the first Director of the School of Drama at the University College, now UI Ibadan.

It was on my way to Ile-Ife for the First Nigerian Dramatists Convention, organised by Prof. Osofisan, where I met Prof. Pepper Clark. I had gone as the MD of Abuja Film Village International Ltd to plead with Nigeria’s best and experienced creative brains to participate in the Nigerian film industry, and help raise the standard of the industry to the next level. Nigeria remains the only film nation in the world where her published and world renowned authors are not participating in her film industry. It is a travesty and it is part of the goals of FCTA-owned Abuja Film Village International to help correct that.

Seeing Prof. Clark and chatting with him completed my meeting with the living tripartite of the four doyens of Nigerian writers – Prof. Wole Soyinka, Prof. Chinua Achebe, and Prof. Clark. I never met the fourth, Christopher Okigbo whom the Nigerian literary community lost to the civil war. If you say I was fortunate and rooted, having shared these creative giants’ company, besides knowing them through their works, you are absolutely right. You cannot underrate a word or two of encouragement from those who have achieved, particularly in your field. It is forever imprinted in the mind of a youth who aspires to be like them.

So I sat one-on-one with Prof. Chinua Achebe.

His humility floored me. How can somebody so great, the “Oga at the very literary top”, be so humble! I studied, worked and lived in “La La Land” [Los Angeles] for so many years and saw firsthand “Stardom” Hollywood style! Hollywood has Grades – A, B, C, even D Star Lists. In my book, Prof. Chinua Achebe belonged to the A+ List, if there ever was such a List.

In no time, he untied my tongue by starting the conversation, and I quickly raised Things Fall Apart, the film.

“Sir, I recently had the privilege to see what they call Things Fall Apart the film, have you seen it?”

I almost felt I should never have raised the film or asked the question. There was a moment of silence that lasted an eternity.

The passionate but quiet emotionalism, the bond that existed between the author and his best work, or may be not his best work [Arrow of God is, in my humble opinion], but the work that will forever define him, quickly swelled to the surface. Suddenly tears welled down his two eyes, creating two canal paths down his cheeks and dropping down on his clothe. Yes, this great man actually cried. He didn’t clean the tears. There was no Kleenex tissue around. No one was expecting that there would be the need to wipe out any tears from the teacher or the pupil’s eyes.

I didn’t know how to respond.

Then I remember President Bush, the two of them crying on different occasions. Yes great men do cry! If a luminary such as Prof Achebe, who had proved all his life that there was not an ounce of pretence in his blood could cry, the lesson among other lessons I took from this first encounter is to have enduring passion, even to the point of crying on what one believes in.

At one breath I was relieved that he felt the same way I felt about the film to the point that it made him cry. On the other hand, as a film student, I wanted to know more about what went wrong, especially at what point things went wrong in the making of the film.

“They stole my works,” he said.

Oh yes, that sounds familiar. Hollywood will “steal” your work when it feels it can get away with it. If you ever wonder why there are so many IP [Intellectual Property, i.e., screenplays, synopsis, treatments] infringement law suits in Hollywood, it is because it is common for them to infringe on someone else’s property. How many times have scripts, especially what they call “unsolicited material”, i.e., creative material submitted not through an agent, they purportedly throw in the dust bin, how many times have they ended up on the screen with a different title, making millions of dollars, until the owners identify them, and told them, “They have taken too much for the owner to see” [Chinua Achebe], and there begins the rigmarole of lawsuits. Most often, they know they are going to be sued, and they are willing to risk it because they know they will make more money, much more than what they will be compelled by arbitration, or the courts if it ever reaches there, to pay the owner. Of course, it was not different with Things Fall Apart. The Prof let them know they not only have taken too much for the owner to open wide his eyes and mouth in amazement at their brazen and audacious robbery, they have actually emptied the barn. He sued.

The lawsuit has prevented the film from being seen beyond one or two special screenings in Los Angeles and Atlanta. As far as I know, it has never been publicly released, up till today.

There were other elements to our encounter and conversation. It dawned on me that I was being mentored in his most gentle way. I was encouraged to continue writing, even though I had “switched” from Drama, as it were, to filmmaking. He even proposed that I should write the screenplay to Things Fall Apart, which would have been the crowning achievement of my embryonic film career.  What an epic film it would have been. But I could not because of the lawsuits that surrounded, probably still surrounds Things Fall Aparttill today.

To be continued