Digby C. Young dropped out of Pretoria University and the Pretoria Onderwyskollege in 1973 to hop on the shiny new SABC TV bus. Although nearly fired as a ‘kommunis’, he eventually became Principal Film Cameraman. The prospect of a desk job scared him away to Helsinki, Finland, where he freelanced as a DOP on commercials for two years while writing his first film script. A short trip back to South Africa in 1981 to shoot the film became permanent when the project collapsed and local TV Drama contracts piled up six months in advance.
  He then co-wrote several TV series for the then separate and not at all equal ‘black’ TV channels while directing hundreds of TV commercials. Taking yourself seriously while selling frozen chicken is a mental-health hazard, so he escaped by helping his casting director wife, Christa Schamberger-Young set up her studio. Between castings, Digby tends the fires of guerrilla filmmaking with keen young actors and directors, or holes up in his lair to write at ‘the clunker’.

This is Digby's first story for Something Wicked.

On The Road

‘Klippies’ Oosthuizen was one of the two best Gaffers I have ever had on my team. Joe Makubane was the other, but that’s another story for another time…
  The most creative Cinematographer is helpless without his Gaffer. The SABC, taking its first steps in TV during the mid seventies, preferred the term Electrician which doesn’t begin to describe the toughest job on a film set. Getting several tons of lights, cables, distribution boxes and other ironmongery set up efficiently and reset more than twenty times a day is not a job for sissies, as Klippies himself often said. This no-nonsense pint-sized man had no time for ‘airy-fairy nonsense’ as he called it, yet he appreciated the nuances of film lighting and was passionately dedicated to achieving the subtlest lighting effect demanded by his DOP. I once remarked that the ideal place for a large light would be outside the window, but…
  “OK Guv’nor,” said this Boertjie from Krugersdorp, observing a very English tradition of addressing the director of photography. “You’re not serious!” I objected.
  “Of course I’m serious, yes!” barked Klippies in his surprisingly gruff voice. “Now vokoff and have some coffee! Oops! Sorry, sorry, sorry! Vokoff and have some coffee, Guv’nor!”
  Fifteen minutes later we were ready to shoot and the light was up - 20kgs of it - hanging three floors above a busy Johannesburg street! Klippies rewarded himself with a cup of coffee - under protest - since his preferred refreshment was prodigious amounts of Klipdrift Brandy and Coke.
  We were about halfway through a six-month shoot on an early TV series scintillatingly titled Guests At The Villa Victoria on location in a grand old Parktown house when Klippies asked for leave. Salaries in TV were stingy, so an opportunity to work on a feature film at freelance rates was difficult to pass up. A week to drive a generator up to Swakopmund in South West Africa (now Namibia) and work on a Hollywood schlock movie would earn Klippies the equivalent of a month’s SABC pay. How could I deny him that? So off he went, leaving me to the un-tender mercies of an Electrician and, thankfully, a Klippies-trained assistant.

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