We’ve distribution problem in US – Sal Jide Thomas

How did all these business of marketing African  movies start? I’ve been in this business for 5 years. I have Africa Movie Place, which is both a wholesale and retail for African movies. I buy US marketing rights in Nigeria and reproduce here. I also have a website africanmovieplace.com. There are about seven marketers that […]

How did all these business of marketing African  movies start?

I’ve been in this business for 5 years. I have Africa Movie Place, which is both a wholesale and retail for African movies. I buy US marketing rights in Nigeria and reproduce here. I also have a website africanmovieplace.com. There are about seven marketers that buy African movie rights, and we pretty much have the same amount of clientele. These are retail outlets and wholesale outlets that carry original African movies. That’s the big distinction, because there are more of the bootleg type out there than there are original African movies. I have close to a couple hundred people in my database, all over the States. I have customers in Australia, Canada, a couple of customers in Europe. My biggest market outside of New York is maybe Florida and Maryland. Brooklyn, here, actually has more audience, but unfortunately 90per cent of what they buy is the bootleg.

When did you first start getting interested in Nollywood films and when did you start the business?

It’s funny how I got into Nollywood films. Six years ago, I didn’t know anything about it. By the time I left Nigeria in the early 90s, there was no Nollywood movie industry. I’ve been here for almost 20 years, and I worked in corporate America. I was IT for Bank of New York for ten years. I left the bank to go into business for myself. I started up a communication company, a calling card network mainly to the Caribbean and Africa. I wanted to be in Brooklyn because Brooklyn has more immigrants. When I was looking for stores, and any time the landlord found out I was Nigerian, the first thing they asked was “Do you sell African movies?” That was the first time I knew about the marketability of the product. That was five, six years ago. So when everybody kept asking, “do you sell African movies?” I was wondering, “what’s happening? These guys are crazy.” But that opened my eyes and I started to see. I noticed that every store I went to in Brooklyn, there was an African movie shelf. These are shops that are not Nigerian mainly, not Ghanaian, so that increased my interest. And since I was getting a shop anyway, and I was getting one in Brooklyn, I said maybe I’ll add African movies to it.

The copies they had around then were all bootleg copies. All they did was just make a photocopy. Back in those days, they would get a photocopy of the vcd from Nigeria, which came in the square carton box, and then blow that up to make it DVD size, so that the figures are all obscured. And then, the movie itself from vcd, when you convert vcd to dvd, it is blurry and grainy, bad quality, bad sound, because everything is converted in one file. And, I really didn’t want to sell that. At that time, a company named Sanga was already acquiring rights. So, I teamed up with Sanga, who sold his movies in Brooklyn.

I buy the North American rights, and once I pay the producer, if I’m lucky, I make a profit; if I’m unlucky, I don’t. Believe me, not all movies make a profit. So that’s why most people don’t take chances, except of course you’ve got a face that is popular, Genevieve, Omatola, Ini Edo. That’s the only way we can guarantee we make a profit. The movie could be not that good, but it has Omatola’s face in it. The customers find that out when they have already played it. But Omatola has sold it.

Our biggest challenge then was that not all movies are available in the original. So customers walk in, they ask for certain titles, and you say, “well, it’s not available in the original.” He walks out and gets it in bootleg. But between then and now, the business has grown to the stage that we have a lot more players. More people buy rights. Most movies that originate in Nigeria that are here have to come through a marketer. That means somebody pays the producers some money in Nigeria to get a master copy and then convert to dvd for distribution.

The limitations we have is the communication between the marketers and the producers in Nigeria. I have a couple of producers that I deal with. Teco Benson, for example. We met on facebook from being introduced through mutual friends. I wish I had access to a lot more producers. I’ve actually contacted a lot of producers and directors, and either they didn’t understand what I was talking about or they weren’t interested, and some that want so much money that the market cannot give them yet.

I feel you’d rather get into the market and work your way up than insisting on an exorbitant price that the market cannot give you yet. Regardless of whether you come in or not, your movie is going to be bootlegged here anyway. And the worst part is that if your movie is bootlegged here and you don’t have somebody that has a right here, you can’t do anything because the guy, who has bootlegged it, is not committing any crime because it’s not a U.S. copyright. The Brooklyn DA just did a raid last week. A couple of us now own copyright in the movies, and that gave them authority to clamp down on the guys who were bootlegging it. But it’s not going to work in the sense that you can go to the store and pick up all the movies that are copyrighted. There are still thousands that are not.

You can get the cops to arrest the bootleggers, but when you get in front of a judge, the judge is going to say “What is your offence?” You say, “violation of intellectual property.” “Whose intellectual property?”  Somebody has to stand and say “mine.” So, no matter how much you arrest them, if there’s nobody defending the copyright certificate, you can’t really do anything. So all those they raided are back in business. The copyright cannot help unless there is a partnership between the producers in Nigeria and us.

There’s a lot of money to be made that we the marketers are not making and the guys in Nigeria are not making. The industry has to be taken to a different height. And the only way we can take it is if we work in partnership with producers. What I’m trying to develop in Brooklyn, because Brooklyn is the biggest market for African movies, is set up a theatre system. I’m talking to them at the Billy Holiday theatre. Setting up a theatre is going to be a risky business and we might probably lose money a couple of times, but in my conversation with the customers, they want a place where they can come with their family and just watch African movies. You know, theatre and popcorn, and soda. The theatre is a whole revenue stream they are missing in Nigeria. It’s the new movies that move the industry. You make the new movie and you sit on it. And the only way you’re going to see this movie is to pay a couple of bucks to come in and see it in the theatre. Once you recoup your money, then you bring it out on vcd or dvd. If the theatre succeeds in Brooklyn, we can have one in Bronx. We can have one in Queens. We can move it out to Maryland.  And that’s the only way that extra income is going to come.

Although we pride ourselves in saying the third largest or second largest movie industry, there’s a different standard, a different level with Hollywood. I personally have access to cable networks. But I’m not going to put any movie there. If I drop a movie in front of some gatekeeper and he sees that it’s crap, I’m not going to have that chance anymore. So, I’m waiting for a movie that is right. That we can make that crossover with.

Have you seen the Figurine?

The first time I heard about that movie was a customer who walked in and said, hey, he had seen a movie review on BBC for The Figurine. I went on the internet and I saw the trailer. And I picked up a phone and called the number on the website. I was trying to speak to Kunle. I have a couple of friends who know him, but nobody has been able to connect him with me. I understand they brought the movie to the States, showed it, but the core audience, people who are looking for the kind of movies he makes, didn’t get to see it. If you bring that movie here and you go to show it somewhere in Manhattan that is not your core audience. They don’t realize it. They’re not going to make their money in Manhattan. You don’t make money from film festivals. If you want to go round to film festivals, you’re going to spend your money.  But if you already have a readymade audience waiting for the kind of product you make and you don’t want to connect with that audience? Come on! They’ve got to take it to the people that sell to their core market. If you have misgivings on, “oh, no, I don’t want to be ripped off,” then let’s sit down and talk. That’s the only way.

They say, “oh, you sell our movie for $5 but an American movie sells for $15-20. Come on. These are two different things. In fact, when I got into the industry, we were selling them for $8. But you are competing with a bootleg market that can copy out for forty cents and they sell for $1. Every African movie that is released here probably sells at least, at least, fifty thousand copies, some a hundred thousand copies. But guess how many we print? Nobody can do more than ten thousand copies. You know why? Because once you release your ten thousand copies, and you don’t sell them in 48 hours you’re going to have to warehouse it. The last movie I released was High Blood Pressure by Teco Benson. I printed ten thousand copies, and I still have about a thousand copies left. The movie is selling everywhere. But the thing is once it hits the market, you don’t control it anymore. The bootleggers have access to it. So that is why we are looking for a way to earn some money, show it around. When it is showing in theatres, you still have control over it. Then once we’ve been able to create theatres to show it and we have exhausted that avenue, you’ve been able to recoup some money. Once it goes to dvd, anything happens. Not everybody will see it in theatres, of course, but we give people the opportunity to see it—create a culture. We are ready to actually pay for a trip for the actor to come promote their movie. In the model they use in Nigeria, there is no relationship between the actors and the producers. You just pay them, shoot the movie, and they move on. But in order to change culture and create theatre atmosphere, I think we need the actors, which are the biggest asset to the industry, to come and promote their movies and meet their fans. Then, they are creating a market. It may not be making huge money right away, but at the tail end, it’s going to be beneficial to their career. What I’m trying to look into, if I sign a lead role, give me a week. I’ll give you your ticket, I’ll give you your hotel fee, come to New York, come to the premier and sell this thing. I want a movie I can bring to New York, blow it up, have it everywhere. We can fill a couple of theatres. It’s just that I haven’t tried it yet.

What they don’t realize in Nigeria, they think Africans in the US are the ones that are buying this industry. No, Africans in the US make about 5, 10 percent of our market. Our core market is Caribbean American. That’s where we do the most business: Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Grenadians, all of the other island people. They are the ones that actually gave it the popularity in the U.S.—it gave them a window to see Africa. For the first time, these are Africans telling African stories, regular stories, not what you see on Discovery Channel. These are just stories on the relationship between a man and wife and parents  and kids, and that’s what intrigued them.

The biggest sellers actually are the movies that have a core African theme. It doesn’t have to be a village setting. It could be set in Abuja. It could be set in Lagos, but you can tell when a story is African. You can tell when dialogue is African. And when the acting is good . There’s a lot of crappy acting in our movies. We know that. There are a few good actors there. They play lead roles. One of the best sellers is this movie called Blood Sister. That has converted more people to Nollywood than any other movie. There was another Ghanaian movie, Beyonce, with a real quality of production. People didn’t believe it was coming from Africa. There are two different directions African movies are moving into. There’s the Ghana wing. I think they are pretty much trying to make movies they think Americans like. These guys are showing a whole lot more skin in their movies, but I think overall people are not really truly after that. They’re looking for movies they can watch with their family.

When I talk to producers in Nigeria and they say, “oh, what kind of movie should we make?”  I say, “make an African movie.” They make something and send me, and I say, “Come on, stop trying to make American movies. You can’t make American movies as well as they do in Hollywood. Make Nigerian movies.” It doesn’t have to be in village settings, it could be in the city, but let the movie portray what it is to be a Nigerian. There was one movie I was watching with my wife one weekend. It was a Ghana movie. They were having a conversation in a living room in Accra and the references were about Jerry Sprinter. I looked at it and I looked at my wife and said “Oh God.” Who are you making movies for? How many people worry about Jerry Springer in Accra? It becomes an elitist thing.

I was interested in The Figurine because I saw the trailer. It has some cultural elements. Those are the kinds of movies I’d like to start my Brooklyn theatre with. But, like I said, in Nigeria, they are so used to the thought that their movies are being bootlegged in America, but then the guys that bootleg the movie initially are the guys that gave it the popularity. A producer didn’t make a movie in Nigeria and then say, ok, let me go try the market in the U.S. It didn’t happen like that. The hair braiders, the West African hair braiders, that when you’re braiding your hair, it takes sometimes six hours and you’re watching an African movie, and then their customers are forced to watch. That’s how it started.

They are lucky that they have a market that they didn’t create. Their product created it. So we can’t complain too much about bootlegging in the US anyway. As I tell my fellow marketers, they are responsible for the market that we have. What we can do is actually find a way of incorporating it, because first of all, they have the distribution channel. They still have more people than we do. So, if we can work with them, it’s a win-win situation. The reason that there are bootleggers is if you haven’t done your distribution properly. In the U.S., I don’t think we have a bootleg problem. We have a supply problem. And that’s because none of us is big enough to take the U.S. on the way it is supposed to be. This is the largest market in the world by value.

I need adventurous producers who will take chances, who will bring their movie and let’s try to make some money with it here. If we make money, we split it. If we lose money, we split it. I’m not asking them to come invest money. Invest your product here, and I’ll put in the money. Whatever we make, we’ll split it.

I’m passionate about this industry. When I got into the industry, I didn’t understand the market and I wanted to know why, why, why. I talked to these customers and I found out why. And they made me proud as a Nigerian. I don’t see any other product coming from Nigeria with that kind of impact on people’s lives as these movies. Nigeria is the most populous black country. If we create a product for that market, we can sell it anywhere. It’s a cultural thing. The black people who live outside Africa have more spending power. And they take to this product, so why are we not selling it?