An African Movie

Actually, to be fair, I have to be accurate in specifying that this is a Ghanaian/Nigerian movie because I’ve seen movies from our French (Mali and Senegal), South African, Egyptian and Ethiopian cousins that are leagues ahead of the stuff we put out. So you want to make one of our movies? Here’s what you do:

1. Write your screenplay. It shouldn’t take up more than two pages. Everything else will be ad-libs. Boy meets girl, boy likes girl, two-timing hussies, deranged exes, and then plug in nosey and unappealing friends and family. Next, find the neurotic and disapproving parents, and find a happy ending sprinkled with some proverbial life lesson. Now stretch out your runtime with useless and nonsensical segways to scenes and characters that have nothing to do with your storyline. Keep script and rework several permutations of the characters (and actual actors) and stories. We’ll use those for the next 10 movies we’ll be making. Finally, cut your movies into six segments. Each segment will be one of a six-part movie! Not a bad start, eh?
2. Casting. Make sure you find that light skinned female lead. Those are a must! The lighter the better. They do well with the princess, virginal, damsel-in-distress roles, and all around, you can’t say no to light skin, even if his/her acting range equals that of a mannequin. Now find that jealous wench type- yeah, you know… the one with the bad weave. The stalker type. The loud, rude, can’t-seem-to-find-a-man type; she’s always yelling angrily at someone. Actually, make sure all your actors can yell since we don’t mike up when we roll camera. Make sure you do the same for the men, but make sure to emphasize the angry black man stereotype. We can’t have a movie without at least one black man who looks like he wants to kill someone; having 2 or 3 will be ideal. So what if they’ve played the same role 20 times in 60 different movie parts with each other? Hey, if porn can do it, so can we.
3. Find oversized homes with barely-there furniture like the ones you’ll find at any rent-a-center/unclaimed freight stores. We need rooms that echo. We also need those cheesy sound effects for every time our actors break into one of their many unnatural and needlessly over-the-top dramatic poses. Finally make sure we have only one cameraman, and one person for sound(I know sound will suck in every location, but who cares), and another for wardrobe- in fact, since we’re trying to keep production costs to a minimum, make sure there are no more than 15 people helping produce this movie.

Did you get all that? Excellent! Yeah, I know. So what if this is just Akan drama done outside? Well, no one has bothered to notice so far. Hehe! Now go out there and fascinate your Ghanaian and Nigerian audiences!