From 1973 Jamaican Cult Film to Broadway?

A storm had knocked out the power in this remote and inaccessible corner of southwest Jamaica, a place where the sands are gray, the August seas stormy, the roads often unpaved and tourists few and far between at any time of the year.

So the group of men sitting around the outdoor table at a strange place called Jake’s--a collection of rental shacks on a blustery cliff top designed to appeal to those with a taste for complete and unpampered isolation--were talking and drinking by candlelight as the sea pounded just a few feet away.

But in the flicker of the light, a few of the faces looked strangely familiar.

And unless the crashing surf was playing tricks with the sound, it sure sounded like they were talking about writing a Broadway musical.

The power suddenly came back on, illuminating the face of Trevor Rhone, inarguably Jamaica’s best-known playwright. The author of about 20 plays, Rhone is widely studied in college courses on post-colonial literature. His play “Smile Orange” played widely in England and Jamaica, and he was feted with one of the so-called Living Legend awards by the National Black Theatre Festival at its regular meeting in Winston-Salem, N.C.

Although he wrote the screenplay to the movie “Milk and Honey,” Rhone’s career was made about 30 years ago, when he wrote the screenplay to “The Harder They Come,” the low-budget but phenomenally successful 1973 movie that introduced countless young Americans to the talents of a young singer called Jimmy Cliff and the pleasures of a then-largely unknown musical form called reggae.

“The Harder They Come” was produced and directed by Perry Henzell, a white Jamaican, but long the major force in Jamaica’s tiny film industry.

Actually, Henzell pretty much invented Jamaica’s film industry (as well as its mainstream tourist industry), since there had never been a hit Jamaican movie before 1973. Come to think of it, the list thereafter also has been pretty short.

And sure enough, it was the bearded, balding Henzell who was sitting across the table from Rhone.

By now, a visitor’s interest was well and truly piqued.

But who was the third man--far younger than the aging Henzell and Rhone--at the table?

He had to face some intrusive questions from a reporter who first identified himself, but he generously revealed himself to be a Los Angeles novelist named Michael Guinzburg, the author of “Beam Me Up, Scotty,” a darkly comic novel with a hero who’s a recovering drug addict.

Had Guinzburg been in this part of Jamaica long?

“Yes,” he allowed, “several weeks.”

Work or pleasure?

“Work.”

“You must have come here to write,” the visitor says.

“Actually, I had this idea,” Guinzburg said. “We’re all turning ‘The Harder They Come’ into a Broadway musical.”

Ah.

“The Harder They Come” told the story of a young, would-be singer played by the effervescent Cliff. After being exploited by his record label and abused by racist capitalist forces, Cliff’s character became a cop-killing drug dealer but also a popular folk hero. In the 1970s, audiences at scores of campus movie houses in the United States embraced the film as a timely musical parable of political revolution, told with Henzell’s signature irreverence and joie de vivre.

Especially beloved of those who went to college in Boston, the film broke all records and ran for years at the now-defunct Orson Welles Cinemas in Cambridge, Mass. Although viewed by many critics as a rough-and-ready affair, it enjoyed almost as many midnight showings around the country as “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

And from “You Can Get It If You Really Want” to “Sitting in Limbo,” many of the songs in the movie became hits, ultimately paving the way for another young reggae singer named Bob Marley, whom Henzell first began to visit and nurture while researching the movie.

By now, Rhone is talking. “Michael came to us with the idea for the musical,” says the playwright. “And so here we all are. We’re doing a session every day.”

“We always knew the triumph of capitalism would be ugly,” says Henzell, rocking back in his chair and muttering about the evils of American foreign policy. “But we never knew it was going to be this hideous. People are ready again for ‘The Harder They Come.’ ”

“The score,” says Guinzburg, “is unbelievable. It’s hit after hit after hit.”

So is the plan just to put the movie on stage?

“Not at all,” Henzell says, eyes flashing. “Movies are all about realism. On stage, you can do anything you want, and realism is death. We’re all going to have to let go of the movie as much as we can.”

A day later, Guinzburg says that he doesn’t want to talk about business details, since the final deal has not yet been inked. But he has clearly talked to many of the major Broadway players.

But Ginsburg’s idea seems golden--at a time when staged versions of camp musicals such as “Hairspray” and “The Producers” are the most popular shows in New York--and here he is in Jamaica, putting these old collaborators and musical revolutionaries together, coaxing out a script and making it happen.

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Chris Jones is an arts reporter for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.