editor HARRIET MEIER interviewer KYLE STEVENSON photographer CHANTAL DRUMMOND
ZEBRAS, BAKGAT,
& THE SAFTAs
An afternoon with the original series producer of The Wild, Richard H Nosworthy
In South Africa there is often little praise or mention of the producer in the media, unless something goes horribly wrong with a production. Granted, they sometimes draw a big pay-check, but some would say that this is a down-payment to ensure their silence when things don’ t go smoothly.
So when orders came down from my editor-in-chief to give Richard H Nosworthy a call, I thought it was going to be a timid profile piece on an experienced producer-writer-director. Oh, how wrong I was.
Richard studied Drama at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where he started doing small market research film jobs for various advertising agencies in his spare time for cash. From there he became a stage manager at the Market Theatre. The non-racial Market Theatre was known internationally as the“ Theatre of the
Struggle” and was one of the few places during apartheid where blacks and whites could mix on equal terms. It was a creative hotbed in the late 70’ s and a young impressionable Richard was able to work with and learn from“ everybody who was anybody” in South African theatre at the time.
After a compulsory stint in National Service, he opened Plum Productions with a friend in 1983. Since then he has written, shot, directed and produced more than 1 000 hours of programming for both South African and international broadcast television in a range of genres. The self-proclaimed‘ principled-radical’ sums up his career as being able to do‘ a lot with nothing’.“ I like to see the money up there, on the stage or screen,” he says.
After the obligatory chitchat, I dive straight into it with two words –‘ The Wild’.
editor HARRIET MEIER interviewer KYLE STEVENSON photographer CHANTAL DRUMMOND
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