Copyright
2003 William D. Snyder
All
Rights Reserved
With
Oboler we bounced first around the Kenya area. We went to the Indian Ocean
beach for a couple days, and while there we filmed and recorded in a cashew nut
farm where they had about a hundred natives wielding hammers. They were using
them to get the nuts out of a shell. It was quite a sound to hear all those
hammers clonking away at the same time, especially while Arch was interviewing
the farmer. Oboler wanted all recordings done from the true location, so we
went everywhere to get the recordings on site.
You can
see from these maps on the back of the record album, that we didn't cover the
eastern African area too well on the disk; it is a big place; but Oboler chose
the various ngoma recordings that were on the long-play record.. We made many
that didn't make it into the album, and we recorded interviews at many, many
places that don't show on the maps. The audio tape was really rolling through
the recorders in those days.
We went
from place to place with the help of Geoff Hutchinson and missionary Father
Fornier, and we taped a broad range of East African music for the album, and
also we got representative bits of African life for the Ziv shows.
We went
north to the Acholi tribe and did filming and recording sound of their ngoma
dancing. (I came home to Fargo with an Acholi shield that still graces my
basement rumpus room (which is now filled with furniture and stuff from my
wife's sister's and my mother's estates.)
While
in Africa, Oboler was having all kinds of souvenirs crated to ship back to the
states for his Frank Lloyd Wright designed home. I did only a few pieces that
really told a story to me.
What a
difference Arch Oboler made in my life. When I was with Gatti, I was a slave to
his whims, so to speak; however, with Arch we were doing things that were very
interesting, and I was part of the creative work without a blizzard of
Gatti-grams eating me out.. For example: we climbed up on Mount Kenya with two
male Swedish university scientists who were investigating the ancestry and
lives of a little animal called the rock hyrax. They were collecting specimens
of the little rat-like creatures on all the high mountains in the East Africa.
Oboler
made a number of recordings of the Swedes at various locations on the mountain.
The thing that got me, was the fact that while were there, it drizzled when it
wasn't raining, and raining when it wasn't drizzling. The rain fell on and off
every day we were on the mountain, and fog and clouds obscured the peak of Mt.
Kenya most of the time.
With
the weather against us, we only saw the peak of the mountain about a total of
20 minutes and each view was slightly foggy. I didn't get any film that
amounted to anything due to the moisture in the air all the time. My boots were
soaking wet for five days. I think we climbed up to about the 12,000 foot level
of the majestic 15K peak. I know I was cold, wet and tired from the climbing.
One of
the Swedes spoke very good English, the other none, so when we got back to the
famous Outspan Hotel we had an impromptu party. Steeg, the non-English speaker
opened a bottle of Norwegian Aquavit that he had saved for a special occasion.
After a couple of drinks from his bottle, Steeg was talking English with a
Swedish accent. Great stuff, that aquavit.
At the
western edge of our four months of travel, we filmed the nearly seven foot tall
Watussi dancers performing the same thing they later did for the African movie,
King Solomon's Mines. The king of the Watussi was a French speaking native, and
we had a good time with him. He furnished the beer...
Another
great muscle-busting adventure happened in the Impenetrable Forest near Kabale,
Uganda after Arch met a gold miner named Peter Mathews in the Kampala, Uganda
Imperial hotel. "I've got to go to Peter Mathews' gold mine and record the
big ngoma he is going to have one of these days," said Oboler, and so we
went. It was some trip, believe me.
Like
most of our travels, we never did do things on time, Peter Mathews gave Arch
the instructions on how to get to his mine. "It's a long trip through
gorilla country," he said to begin with, "and I suggest you get a
real early start because it measures about 17 miles you have to walk after you
cross Lake Mutanda in the dugout canoes I will have waiting for you. And all
that hike is over a series of mountainous ridges, one right after another and
some are steep climbs.. You'll sweat every one of those ridges to be sure. I'll
have some native carriers for the lady, if you want to bring her."
Peter
was a wiry sort of person, no fat or excess poundage to haul around. So on the
day appointed by Peter, we drove to the edge of the lake Peter had named, got
into the long native dugout canoes paddled by dozen or so husky natives who met
us there. The native oarsmen paddled us, along with rhythmic vocal singing, for
what I estimated three miles to the other side of the lake. It was a nice ride
and it reminded me of the canoes I had seen on Lake Sentani in Dutch New Guinea
during WW-II.
When we
beached the canoes, there were porters waiting to carry our camera and battery
boxes, and the recorder and allied equipment, plus Eleanor Oboler. We had a
number of extra porters whom our guide said were to carry us, if we had any
hiking problems. Peter Mathews had thought of everything.
This
was in mountain gorilla country and the porters were a noisy bunch. Every now
and then they would emit a string of wild yells. "That's to keep the
animals away from our safari," said our native guide.
As we
progressed towards the mine, we kept picking up other native groups who had
been waiting for us to arrive. Our guide kept us posted on the new members of
the trek, who they were, and why they were joining us. Peter Mathews had a good
group of native followers that were going to the party.
The day
went by slowly; it was a grueling hike. I lost count of the ridges we crossed,
but someone said there would be one a mile before we got to the Mathews' mine.
Eleanor was riding to the ngoma on the shoulders of husky natives who never
seemed to tire of hauling her along. We hikers were slipping and sliding on
some of the trail to the mine. Then daylight left us in a hurry as it does in the
tropics, and we began traveling in the dark.
Imagine
this scene, Oboler had only one little one-cell flashlight to light our way.
But some of our native traveling companions had made torches which they lit in
order to see.
The
jungle we were now in was hard to get lost in, because the trail had been
literally hewn out of the green vegetation we were walking through. As we
crossed one ridge close to midnight, we could see lights being carried by
another group of natives coming toward us. They were on the last ridge, and the
torches were being carried by a native group that Peter had sent out to find us
and guide us to the mine. By now, we had a big crowd of dancers and drummers,
some who were occasionally beating time on the drums they were taking to play
at the ngoma.
I was
really glad to see the torches coming down into a valley as we came down off
our ridge to meet them.
Peter
was a great host. He had a shot of whiskey, Scotch that is, for us when we
hiked into his camp about 2 a.m. The Ngoma got its start right then and there.
And the dancing continued for the next whole day and night. We only recorded
some of the dancing, but it was fun to watch all the natives having fun at the
party. And they did have fun!
A few
years later, back in the states, I got a Christmas card from Peter who
remembered that night:
"I shall never forget the skilled technician who although able to rectify an intricate recording machine by improvisation and genius strange to the center of the Impenetrable Forest, yet had eternal youth in his eyes when he plodded up the last steep hill having canoed Lake Mutanda and climbed many weary rocky miles to arrive in the black of night with his pigmy and Wakiga escort. I feel that you'd be a real good side partner to have in a scrap and fine to relax with. In fact, think of you as of the forward line of the USA and to me you make me sure that America is a real country to live in. May you have all good fortune and the best of luck as you go ahead. Was glad to get your address and sincerely hope we may again meet."
I can't
remember what I had to fix so the recorder would work after that trek, but I
must have done something to cause Peter to write that line.
I'll
never forget the Impenetrable Forest, believe me. Today, part of the forest is
a National Park with tourists taken to see the gorilla family groups. In our
day it was just what the name implies, impenetrable forest.
I spoke
of the Imperial Hotel in Kampala, Uganda earlier. Another time we arrived in
Kampala and wanted to make future reservations for a few day stay, as was our
custom while traveling. I said to the white lady at the desk, "I'd like to
reserve our rooms again for the 15th and will be staying three days."
"I
can give you rooms for the 15th, but not longer," she said, "You see
the Aga Kahn is coming and he reserves all the rooms on the second floor, and
all the rooms on the floors above that, too. He can't have anyone staying above
him in the hotel."
"How
does he get away with that?" I asked.
"It's
very simple," the lady smiled at me, "He owns the hotel."
So we
stayed at another hotel after the 15th.
Oboler
was fascinated by a book about building the railway in East Africa..." I'd
like to get the rights to that book and make a movie of it." he said to me
one day. By then I had told him of my days at Technicolor in Hollywood. I
explained the imbibition method of putting color on the movie film, and how it
had lasted so well.
The
book that fascinated Arch was by an engineer named Patterson who, when the
railway was being built, had to kill man-eating lions that tied up the progress
of building the railway. It was a really dramatic story... The lion were old
and hungry, and they would invade the construction efforts and dine on Indian
workers imported to build the line.
"I
was thinking, Arch," I said to him as we drove to a new location, "If
you were to make a movie of that book, you should do it in three dimension
film. The lions cold jump right out of the screen at the audience."
"I
never thought of that," he said, as he slowed down for a herd of wild
elephants crossing the roadway.
"The
reason why I thought of that, Arch, is because when I worked at Technicolor we
made a bunch of Pete Smith one-reel shorts in 3D. They put a mouse on a stick
and poked it at the audience. And they dropped a heavy safe out of high
building right at the audience. I guess people jumped almost out of their seats
at the realistic view."
"You
know, Bill, I remember those shorts," Oboler said as we waited for the
elephants to clear the road.
From
then on, we talked again and again about what later came to the screen as
" Bwana Devil." I explained how the Technicolor IB process worked
using a red image for one eye and a green for the other, and then projecting
them both at the same time so an audience wearing glasses that filtered the two
colors saw the realistic film.
I also
told him about seeing a polarized 3D film at the San Francisco World's Fair in
1941. "That is way to go," I said, "but it still takes two
cameras synchronized together to do the job."
One of
the great African friendships we made was that of Carr Hartley, the African
game exporter of Rumuruti, Kenya. In the map that Gatti has in his website
story, I see that he admits he stopped at the Hartley ranch after we were
there. So, you can be sure the pictures of rhino, the albino zebra, and other
"wild "animals that Gatti shows in his books were probably taken in
Hartley's many pens. So here are a few of the pictures we got from Carr after
we had been there. Hartley had two white rhino that the kids could ride. And he
had a big pen of giraffe that could pose for close shots, and a flock of 26
ostriches that I recognize as being shot at the ranch.
The photos of cheetah
posing on top of the International Station Wagon are certainly taken at the
Hartley ranch. He had four that were petting quality, and I heard it took a lot
of Gatti's coaxing to get one of them to stand on the top of an International
station wagon for a still picture. .
In a
Gatti movie originally called "African Adventure" for the
International Harvester Company, of which I have a worn out and damaged print,
there is a sequence of Hartley's cheetah climbing all over an IH station wagon.
Those were Carr's barnyard animals posing for the pictures. I got the damaged
film print from a local IH dealer and had it transferred, after patching, to
DVD in the year 2003.
Oboler's
recordings were about Hartley's game farm, and how he collected wild animals
for circus and zoo use. We filmed capturing a giraffe, but the young animal
died from the chase. .
Another
one of our adventures was in a Pygmy village in the Ituri forest. It cost us a
cow that one of our negotiators found for sale. On the cover of the Decca
photograph record is a drawing of one of the Pygmy drummers, the one with the
hole in his drum head, which was taken from a photo that we snapped there.
The
little people, many less than 48 inches high, showed us how they made a village
in a hurry as they were nomadic in nature. With their machetes they chopped
bushes down and made the beehive-shaped frames first, then they covered their
little huts with long leaves from some local trees. It was in no time at all
that their village was up and ready for occupancy. I often wondered if the same
group we had demonstrating for us, were the ones that Gatti used when he was
there before the war and was featured in his "Jungle Yachts in the
Congo" booklet that he gave to Bob and me when we were interviewed in
Derby Line, Vermont.
At a
luncheon in the nearby Parc Albert headquarters, the park superintendent made
his famous statement about keeping Gatti out of the park he controlled. I'll
never forget those words.
Where
Gatti was pretending that East Africa was in need of exploration, and he was
the man to do it, Arch Oboler was trying to tell of how life in both the native
and European villages was going on. And he wanted to paint the picture that it
was a modern country, because there were railways with dining cars and
steamships carrying passengers in comfort on the inland waterways.
One of
the wonderful water trips we had was on the SS Murchison on the Nile river from
Lake Albert to Murchison Falls. This river voyage started the night before and
we anchored during the night just a short ways from the falls. The
accommodations were small but very comfortable, and the food service was
excellent. The next morning the boat was surrounded with hundreds of Hippos,
called river horses in the local jargon, while on the river banks, there were
many crocodiles of giant size basking in the sunshine.
So the
skipper of the Murchison started to take us up the river to the falls landing.
As we journeyed, he kept swinging the boat toward one shore and then the other
to let me get shots of the animals, including rhino and elephants, which also
populated the Nile river area. It was great!
The
boat docked near the falls and all the passengers hiked up to the top of the
falls to cap the greatest boat trip I have ever been on for seeing wild life.
The Oboler's liked it very much, too. We made a lot of recordings on the voyage
also. It was something!
I seem
to remember that Ernest Hemingway, many years later, was injured in an airplane
accident near Murchison Falls. It made big headlines in the newspapers.
I also
remember the day we were at Jinja, Uganda where the second largest lake in the
world, Lake Victoria, dumped water over Ripon Falls and started the Nile river
flowing to the Mediterranean Sea. This was just before the British built a huge
dam there, knocking out the falls. However, the dam harnessed the power of
falling water and changed it to electricity in the Owen Falls scheme.
Nearby
was a Jinja golf course, where I saw a sign which said, "Balls hitting
hippo may played again without penalty." I always wanted to play that
course and hit a hippo.
Oh
there were other things that now dot my memory in this 21st century. Every now
and then I have a mental picture of Africa and things like filming in a leper
colony or the one day we went to record and film a volcano in the Belgian
Congo. That was a terrible experience for Eleanor.
Oboler
and Father Fornier wanted to hike to the volcano where lava had been pouring
out and running over the ground. So we hired a bunch of porters and a native
guide to haul our equipment for us. I did part of the negotiations but it was
our first few days in the Congo, and over in that country everyone spoke French
at the time.
So when
we were hiring our native help, I asked the guide who spoke very little
English, "How far is the volcano?" in Swahili. Now the Congo Swahili
had a French accent and I did not know that so when the native said, "Kido
kidogo," which to me translated "very small," We left Eleanor
sitting in the Jeep Father Fornier was driving and started out walking to the
volano. We walked and walked and nobody thought of the poor gal sitting along
the road in that open Jeep.
Oboler
wanted to keep going, so we kept asking the guide and getting the same answers
each time. We kept going and going and going. At about 4.p.m. we arrived at the
volcano and did our thing for the record. Then we started back. Now keep in
mind we did have a sandwiches for lunch, but no water bottle of any size, and
we were tired from the hiking. But we kept going and Arch started to worry
about his wife when it grew dark. We didn't hire enough porters so when one of
them carrying a 40 pound battery stepped in a hole and turned his ankle, we didn't
have anyone to take his load. I finally talked the guide into taking it for
more money.
The
natives did not have any trouble with water, when they were thirsty they would
find an elephant track that had rain water in it, break off a hollow reed and
poke it into the water and drink like a straw. We ran out of our water. And
boy, was I thirsty. So were every other European on the hike.
It was
2:30 a.m when we reached Eleanor in the Jeep, and she was really a mental
wreck. The stories she told us of her fright caused by the natives passing her
spot on the road. They kept stopping and looking into the Jeep at her, and that
was multiplied by her worry about Arch being gone so long. That was enough to
send anyone to the looney bin.
And so
we slowly kept moving toward South Africa by auto. We stayed at many of the
White Fathers Missions in the various countries we traveled through. Beside the
Congo, Ruanda, Urindi, North and South Rhodesia we arrived in South Africa by
railway. It was a pleasant trip from Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia to Capetown.
My room
mate on the train was a local man going to Capetown on business.
"What
do you do for a living?" I asked him.
"I
have a small company that makes farm machinery." He said quietly.
"What
kind of farm machinery, tractors and the like?"
"No,
I make hoes and rakes for natives to use." was the answer. Africa was a
different world!
We had
to wait in Capetown for a ship on the Farrell Lines, so we did a lot of
visiting. Oboler had a diamond merchant relative there, and I found that I
owned a case of amoebic dysentery which had been with me since Kenya. The
doctor gave me a prescription to take on the voyage home. When I finally got
back to Fargo, I had the local doctor there finish the treatment.
After a
short time at my parent's home, I went to California where I worked for Arch
Oboler Productions. Working with Harry Komer, an old time MGM film editor, I
finished the short film we made for The White Fathers missionary group in
payment for all those many nights we ate and slept in their guest rooms. They
were fine hosts.
I have
some good memories of the African traveling. We took the SS Coryndon for an overnight voyage from
Usumbura, Ruanda-Urundi at the northern tip of Lake Tanganyika to Albertville
on the west shore. It was there we left Father Fournier and his jeep.
He was a great friend. From there we took the train to Capetown
I also
recall vividly crossing Victoria Falls on a train just at sundown. It was quite
a sight. I stood out in the vestibule of the sleeping car and watched the train
carefully chug across a big bridge so we could see the falls.
And so
my African Adventure came to an end in Capetown. Instead of the six months with
Gatti I had applied for the year before, I had been there nearly a year. There
were many other places we we visited, it was a great trip.
We took
the Farrell lines ship, "Morgantown Victory," back to the states,
arriving in New York city And, I"m sorry to say, not one other empty booze
bottle of the Hallicrafters' bon voyage present of 48 jugs of bourbon that we
tossed into the various oceans with fake notes inside, ever showed up to haunt
us. Darn it!
And as
a couple of afterthoughts: Years later in the 1960-70s, I used to fly to Los
Angeles quite often in my own Cessna airplane, and I usually took one of my
employees along, Arch Oboler would always take us out for a dinner while we
were there. He always gave me a verbal chewing out for flying my own airplane
over the mountains, so I never invited him to ride with me anywhere.
On one
trip Arch invited me and one of my film editors, Jerry Fiskum, to a local
Hollywood theater after midnight to see part of a Japanese movie that he was
making. It was in 3-D and beautiful! I never did find out what he did with it
later. Any way, I outlived him by many years, and I sold my plane when I
retired and sold Bill Snyder Films, Inc.
And
about this long story, I really wrote most of this years ago, I didn't date the
copy I dashed off in the early days after I returned to Fargo. My memory was a
lot better in those days, and much of the dialog was well stamped into my
brain, although I can hear some of the lines to this day, especially the bon
mots from Gatti.
I can hear him now saying, "...keeping in mind the resale
value!" I'll never forget that one, and I don't think Bob has forgotten it
either.