Tuesday, 27 March 2018

" So I'll Just Have To Play My Position As Mrs Njoku's Husband "

Everyone who knows me knows I am pretty much wrapped up in myself and I rarely bother about anyone else. So it pretty much went in one ear and out the next. Even though she had been in arguably the biggest hit of 2011, Blackberry Babes, the year was a dry period for movie making for Miss Remmy. For whatever reason, she just wasn’t getting scripts or roles. With the way Nollywood churns out starlets, it was super worrying. She implored me to lobby producers, after-all I was spending millions of dollars acquiring content from them. I asked a couple of dozen. Only two agreed. The rest, in someway or form, told me I should not spoil their job or that they required me to pay for the entire film budget for her to feature in. See I believe in meritocracy so that wasn’t even an option. Not to mention those who point blank told me to mind my own business. So I let it be. Miss Remmy wasn’t satisfied and I remember we argued when I told her I ‘was too busy’ to run around, too busy to be making these phone calls and jeopardising the relationship with my producers. Jeez, sometimes I wonder why she married me. I could be pretty brutal in those days. The frustrations of wealth creation. See, Miss Remmy was considered a wakapass. So she was always given random supporting or very small roles. And if you think Harvey in Hollywood is bad. What happens in Nollywood? Blood of Jesus. But we will come to that another time.
It actually had gotten worse post our wedding. Being pregnant and all. Every single marketer / producer / fellow actor etc. advised her to stop working. They literally couldn’t understand why she still wanted to work. What was she chasing? Abi her journey had ended. She had married a rich man (when we married everyone called her a gold digger). If you look very carefully across Nollywood, most actresses who marry, the first thing their new husband does is attempt to stop them from acting. Well, if they can afford to. For the life of me, I don’t understand this. Miss Remmy had me promise a thousand different ways that I wouldn’t force her to stop. But because ‘she had married a rich man and gave him a son,’ producers literally didn’t think of her as a candidate for acting. She was out of the industry. No matter how many times she or I told them to the contrary. They assumed she was gone.
Fast forward late 2013. We were in the fight of our lives. The venture financing had not gone unnoticed, the use of capital to realign the entire Nollywood windowing had not gone unnoticed. We had awoken the bear, AfricaMagic (MNET) began waging a content war to price (read force) us out of the market. The price of content had, for no other reason than some distant strategy change somewhere in Randburg, exploded from $2.5k/movie license to $25k, within the space of six months. It was stupid. I was stupid and desperate so just kept on increasing the pricing until someone folded. Mrs Njoku had just returned from London with our first child, O. So she was surprised to walk into my office to see one of the biggest female Nollywood producers shouting. Not necessarily at me, but in disgust at the $25k we were paying her for a movie. A hit. A blockbuster blah blah bloody blah. And the fact that we structured it that she was still able to also sell to AfricaMagic. Mrs Njoku looked at her. Looked at who was in the movie. Did some quick mental arithmetic and decided the movie couldn’t have been made for more than $20k. No way. See, Mrs Njoku knew the talent. Being in front of the camera and around marketers, she kinda knew the prices. She called the BS.
2017 Non-Sports Programming Spend
The meritocracy she introduced will be amplified x10, as a new breed of actors are created and more and more dreams can come true. When we first started dating, this was like February 2011, I told her I was going to be the most important person in Nollywood (leave me jor, I was young(ish), broke and boasting with sweet big words), she didn’t care. I was wrong. Mrs. Njoku is arguably the most influential person in Nollywood today. I am biased of course. But I can’t think of anyone who shapes the creation (writers / producers / directors etc.) of so much content (1,000+ hours per year) and also whose content has the fans / distribution reach globally, whether it’s via IROKOtv or DStv or GOtv or SKY. No one to mind comes even close to that. She is increasingly becoming the prism through which the masses who watch Nollywood around the world, are experiencing it. It’s happened.

Jason Njoku

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