Sometimes I get involved in advertising film shoots. The first advertising film shoot that I attended was in the 1980s. It was held in a large open concrete yard owned by Eskom.
The storyline was: a pretty woman is walking along a sidewalk, next to a tree-lined road. We cut to a man who is getting into an entry-level car. He is very nerd-like in manner and dress. He drives with great caution, looks left and right all the time, changes gear cautiously. The vehicle travels down the road and passes the pretty woman. The man in the car sees her and accelerates rapidly. He tears his tie off, ruffles his hair and, with a swift handbrake turn, spins the car 180º. He accelerates until the car is opposite the walking woman and stops rapidly. He pops the passenger door and beckons to her. She gets in and smiles. They race off. The voiceover says: “The new fast car . . . it will change you.”
The part of the shoot I was at was the handbrake turn bit. So, there was the car, the stuntman (you did not have to guess – he told you he was the stuntman within seconds of being introduced), the film crew and the directing staff.
All was set, the stuntman got in the car and put on his helmet, backed up, accelerated and came zooming towards us. At a signal, he spun the car. But it only spun halfway. He tried again. And again. And then the car axle broke. So, the crew sprinkled sand onto the concrete and the stuntman tried again. This time, he spun the car in a full circle instead of a half circle. A few times.
There was a short conference and, astonishingly, the production secretary relieved the stuntman of his helmet (way too big) and got into the vehicle. She reversed at high speed, raced forward and spun the car, perfectly 180º. She repeated this three times and the film people were happy. At the lunch break, I spoke to her. She told me her name was Sparklepop – Sparkle, for short. How could she do handbrake turns so effectively? “Oh,” she said casually, “it’s from when my boyfriend and I used to grow and sell dagga. In Natal.”
She explained that she had lost her parents and had been brought up by a aunt, who had also died. She wanted to study filmmaking and had no money. So, during film school, she and her boyfriend had grown and sold dagga. They would go to a sugar cane farm in the Natal Midlands and, with workers, clear a 20 m2 area of cane. They would plant the dagga and harvest it at night a few months later. She smiled: “The farmer even irrigated it for us – but he didn’t know that.”
The handbrake turns? They had removed the back seat of a Ford Escort and welded the doors and opened the boot to make a load bed. They would load the dagga into the load bed and transport it to Durban. They would load a cover of sugar cane to conceal the dagga – the story being that Sparkle was collecting it for her horse and that she did it at night so the farmer would not know. “But,” she said, “some- times we got chased by the farmers or the cops”.
I was surprised they did not catch her, in a Ford Escort – 1600 cc engine. Oh, she said, no. Her boyfriend had modified that – they had put in a 2 000 cc Cortina engine. “Went like smoke,” she said. But sometimes, she explained, they had to resort to desperate measures. In the US, the 180º handbrake turn is called the ‘bootlegger’s turn’ used by illegal alcohol makers to throw off any chasing state trooper.
“In the Natal Midlands, it’s called ‘a magic dragon’,” because, she explained, “you fling the car around and disappear: puff, sparkle . . . pop!”
I saw her the other day in the super- market. She is married, with three children, and owns and runs a creche. She’s married and not called Sparklepop any more.