Book Excerpt: The Making of Spud the Movie by John van de Ruit and Ross Garland
It’s a case of “when Jonny met Ross” – and the rest would be SA film history.
Let’s go back to the beginnings, when to-be bestselling author John van de Ruit and to-be film producer Ross Garland first encountered each other – on a childhood cricket wicket, naturally – and got the ball rolling, as it were.
The two are, jointly, the authors of the just-released The Making of Spud the Movie and How a (Wickedly Splendid) Plan Came Together. They describe their respective first-impressions:
* * * * * * * *
And so it began…
Ross
For me, the making of Spud the movie is about serendipity. Coincidence. Fate. And a bit of choice thrown in, too. Much like Spud’s own story, in fact.
The course of John van de Ruit’s and my own journey has intersected over and over again, from when we first met as teenagers through to this point in time, May 2010, just after the shooting of the film, as I sit back and reflect on how it all began.
It was the game of cricket that threw us together . . .
Steve Mylrea aka Ham Dog, starts his run-up by pushing off from the neighbour’s grey concrete wall with his white Dunlop tackies and propelling his seventeen-year-old body at high speed towards me, ready and waiting in my navy blue King Sports cricket helmet. Nobody knows if the homemade cricket net in the Mylreas’ Durban North back garden has an intentional design flaw or not. The slightly too short, sharp-edged concrete surface offers the bowler a neat target, which any rock-hard, red leather cricket ball is guaranteed to zip off at an angle and velocity that has a high chance of hitting the awaiting batsman in the head. Which means that Steve and his younger brother Rich aim every ball at that edge. Which causes me to storm out of the net, heart rate quickening and mad as a snake.
Next up to bat is one John van de Ruit, aka Johnny, aka Johnny boy, fifteen years of age but occupying the body of a ten-year-old. Ham Dog hurtles in once more, letting fly with a speedy delivery that nicks the concrete edge and whizzes past little Johnny’s under-sized head. Johnny unleashes a torrent of abuse in a high-pitched choirboy’s voice.
We break for red juice and Marie biscuits. The atmosphere is heated. Where Johnny and I may be lacking in fast bowling skills, our juvenile vocabulary is our best weapon and we use it colourfully and liberally.
The cricketing face-off is resumed on the patch of finely mown grass beside the swimming pool. Johnny, spazzy tongue lolling out of one side of his mouth, bowls his looping leg spin at the washing basket wickets, the taped up tennis ball fizzing off the Bermuda lawn. The ball sneaks behind Ham Dog’s legs for a dramatic match-winning stumping.
We savour our revenge over Creme Soda and tennis biscuits.
John
My first impression of Ross Garland one summer afternoon in 1990 in the Mylreas’ back garden was of a tall, gangly fellow with blue eyes, sharp humour, and a weakness outside off stump. He hardly looked like someone who would call me fifteen years later to enquire about the film rights for a book I had written. As the spindly little lad running in to bowl yet another disrespected leg spinner, I had recently been ordered into remedial writing lessons due to my scrawl having developed the appearance of the death dance of an ink-soaked flying ant, would hardly have looked like someone with the cranial capacity to write a legible sentence, let alone a book.
Ross
When I read Spud for the first time, fifteen years and not a few leg spins later, for some reason it’s the Mylreas’ house I always pictured as Spud Milton’s home. It was their pool that Mermaid dived into and started a young boy’s pulse racing. Rich’s bedroom was Spud’s room, lacking only the Good Knight duvet. The Mylreas’ was the classic Durban North home of the 1980s. I could see it all unfolding.
Johnny van de Ruit was known in these halcyon teenage years not for his writing but for his singing talents, and especially for being chosen to play the lead role in the Michaelhouse school production of Oliver! While he was practising his scales in the Midlands, I was slumming it at Durban High School in our own annual school play, to which a few of us self-appointed entertainment maestros had added a selection of Monty Python sketches to warm up the crowd. I volunteered for the famous Albatross sketch, taking the John Cleese role. It seemed a natural progression to me from my breakthrough role in the house play, where I had received cheap laughs for wearing a woollen tea cosy on my head in a non-speaking role. In both cases the entertainment bug bit with every stolen chuckle and when I shrugged off my school blazer for the last time I headed off to study drama at Natal University.
There I threw myself into the theatre scene with abandon and, in 1994, my final year as an undergraduate, who should pitch up on campus out of the blue but Johnny van de Ruit. He, too, had felt the calling. Now eighteen, with the face and body of a thirteen-year-old, he was everyone’s favourite newcomer in no time at all, and was set upon by thespians of all persuasions and genders.
John
The second memorable encounter was discovering Ross in the drama department at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban almost ten years later. I was fresh out of school at Michaelhouse and armed with frivolous dreams of stardom and greatness. Ross’s was just about the only face I knew on campus. He was already well established as a front line leading man and a heavy of the infamous drama pit.
Ross
John’s acting talents quickly put him at the forefront of the buzzing university theatre scene and he and I found ourselves cast together in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Overall it wasn’t a memorable production and one acerbic reviewer ripped the entire thing apart except for noting ‘that boy with the golden voice’, namely Johnny the Wunderkind, which made the rest of us spit with envy.
John
Fortuitously, later on we were cast in a one-act play called A Crowd of Twisted Things, written by Mark Compton James. Ironically, Compton James was a rather legendary Michaelhouse old boy and the play was set in a dorm in a school very much like my alma mater.
As I recall, I played the insecure and sensitive victim who is deeply unsure of his sexuality, while Garland was typically cast as the sneering villain. The play caused quite a stir at the university and was entered at the annual Grahamstown Arts Festival in July 1994. It was my first theatre tour and I was beside myself with emotion. I remember being paid the princely sum of R200 for my week at the festival which, back then, was still not a lot of money.
More good news was to follow when The Playhouse Company invited the play onto an experimental double bill at the Loft theatre in Durban. This was our first professional acting experience and Ross, as our resident drama and law student, represented us in discussions with The Playhouse drama director, Murray McGibbon. Already Garland was shaping up as a wheeler and dealer of some talent.
Ross
The one-week run at the Loft probably sounds more impressive than it actually was, as we had only secured this gig on condition we endured being put on a double bill with a one-man show in which a middle-aged man appears naked throughout his play, for much of that time with an erection. It wasn’t exactly high end, but for us at that point performing at the Playhouse was of similar weight to an Oscar nomination.
And it was my first producing credit.
John
As is more often the case than not in stories like these, our paths soon diverged. I was a couple of years behind Ross and still had some years of study ahead of me. Ross completed his law degree while I continued through the drama department, still harbouring fantastical ideas about being a great actor and writer. I knew it had been a tough decision for Ross to leave the world of theatre for the courtroom. By then I had little doubt that creativity and performance were in his blood-stream and would bubble their way back to the surface before too long.
Months later I remember hearing the news that Ross had been awarded a Rhodes scholarship to study international law at Oxford University, and the denizens of the drama department were deeply impressed. It was clear that there was something special about this guy, some quality of intelligence and drive that set him apart from the rest of us.
* * * * * * * *
- The Making of Spud the Movie and How a (Wickedly Splendid) Plan Came Together is published by Penguin
- Penguin home
- Penguin @ BOOK SA
Book details
- The Making of Spud the Movie (How a Wickedly Splendid Plan Came Together) by John van de Ruit, Ross Garland
Book homepage
EAN: 9780143026839
Find this book with BOOK Finder!
- Spud by John van de Ruit (film tie-in)
Book homepage
EAN: 9780143527329
Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Apr
Please register or log in to comment