|
PERRY HENZELL (Co-Writer/Producer/Director): To call Perry Henzell a writer/producer/director is to put limits on an artist who has none. Acclaimed as the director of the legendary Jamaican film, THE HARDER THEY COME, Henzell is an author, entrepreneur, raconteur, and an insightful chronicler of Jamaican life in all its complexity. Perry Henzell was born in Port Maria, Jamaica on March 7, 1936, and spent his childhood on a sugar plantation. At 14 he left high school in Jamaica and was sen to school in at Shrewsbury School, England and at 18 he went to McGill University in Montreal where he was enrolled in the Arts. He then returned to England where he started his career in film and TV shifting scenery at BBC TV. He soon graduated to the Drama Department. In 1959, Henzell returned to Jamaica where he formed his own production company in Kingston, Vista Productions. During the 1960s he made hundreds of commercials and several documentaries, building up a studio and crew to the point where he could write, produce, and direct Jamaica's first feature film. Henzell tapped into the Jamaican zeitgeist in 1972 with THE HARDER THEY COME, and ended up reaching the world. With the story of Ivan, an innocent country boy who comes to the big bad city of Kingston to make his fame and fortune as a reggae star, Henzell showed a side of Jamaica that had never been seen by outsiders, and made them care. He made an international star of Jimmy Cliff, and the film’s dynamic soundtrack spurred an interest in reggae music that continues unabated to this day, and was instrumental in bringing global acceptance to world music. However, Henzell has many other creations to his credit. He has authored Power Game, a powerful novel based on the political violence that wracked Jamaica in the seventies, and still plagues many Third World countries. Power Game’s story is seen through the perspectives of several important entities, including the streets, the army, the International Monetary Fund, the ganja trade, and the media. While the novel ends in a Jamaican civil war, Henzell acknowledges, “That hasn't happened in Jamaica, I'm glad to say, but it certainly happened in Guatemala, in El Salvador, …in Colombia, it's happened all around the Caribbean." Henzell has most recently spearheaded the successful opening of the stage version of London’s newest hit musical, THE HARDER THEY COME, to rave reviews. This was a totally different, and much more vigorous, response than initially greeted the film. When the film opened in London 30 years ago, Henzell said “It was a difficult sell. The first night the theatre was empty. Not one critic had gone down there to review it. I had to write up the story of the Jamaican opening and print up thousands of flyers and literally stand outside the underground station in Brixton and hand them out. That turned the tide. The film took off. Time and time again, everywhere, the film would just have died without a lot of hard work." The film ended up speaking to millions with its universal tale of a local boy who comes to the big city to make something of his life, only to see the dream turn into a very grim reality. As Henzell says, "The promise of the city for Ivan was a complete illusion. In the early seventies all over the world the radio was going into the countryside and attracting people into the city with the promise of goodies and the high life. Millions of people responded. So it was a world wide phenomenon." The film stands as part of a larger Third World story, with its journey from rural innocence to urban disillusion. Power Game continues Henzell’s probing look into a hidden and more complex side of the story. NO PLACE LIKE HOME was intended to follow more closely on the heels of THE HARDER THEY COME, reversing Ivan’s journey from country to city with Susan’s journey from city to country, to find the real Jamaica. Its road to the screen in 2006, however, was as tortuous as Ivan’s journey in Henzell’s first film. The film was started almost 30 years ago, but funding became an issue and production was halted, and then re-started several times. In a cruel turn, the negative was lost and Henzell despaired that the film into which he had poured so much of his heart and energy was forever lost. However, in a twist of fate that proves that truth is indeed stranger than fiction, 30 years after NO PLACE LIKE HOME began, the footage turned up in a lab in New York. It was a gift that Henzell doesn’t take for granted, and in between his work on the London stage opening of THE HARDER THEY COME, he has been overseeing the restoration of NO PLACE LIKE HOME, with producers Chris Romano and Dave Garonzik. If not a storybook ending, it is certainly a more uplifting coda to a story that compelled Henzell to turn his back on the film business after years of financial setbacks - despite the critical and popular success of THE HARDER THEY COME, he has made little or no money from it. Not only did he reap no financial rewards from his signature film, Henzell adapted Power Game for a projected television series that failed to materialize due to lack of finance. "I was never able to get financing for anything after THE HARDER THEY COME. I came to grief with the second picture I made. It bankrupted me. It took me years to recover. I was so pissed off I left the film business and started writing novels, apart from writing screenplays for other people." Despite these setbacks, Henzell is indefatigable. He continues to create works that deserve a higher profile. "In 1988 I wrote a full scale musical on the life of Marcus Garvey. What a great story. It was performed at the Ward Theatre downtown. Toots and Ernie Smith wrote the music. I planned a record, but the musical never made the shift abroad where it might have made some real money. But just recently I've had some interest from London." Henzell also wrote a historical novel, Cane, published by Grove Press. Set in the Caribbean during the turbulent era of1780-1815, it concerns an engineer who is deported to Jamaica as an indentured worker and deals with what Henzell calls "the geopolitics of sugar.” Apart from writing films and books Perry Henzell is also planning to publish a collection of his short stories and his regular columns for the Jamaican press. Henzell's hopes someday to put his novel, POWER GAME , on the screen, thus completing the "Jamaican trilogy" of The Harder They Come ,No Place Like Home and Power Game, telling the story of the two Jamaicas, the city and the countryside, and the struggle for which spirit will prevail. |
