Recommended Books & Films

Books

General -- Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley, by Timothy White (Guernsey Press), chronicles the reggae musician's life and career, from poverty to international fame.

Jamaican Folk Tales and Oral Histories, by Laura Tanna (Institute of Jamaica Publications), is a collection culled from the best Jamaican storytelling and told with humor and style.

The Cimaroons, by Robert Leeson (William Collins), is the story of an enslaved people who fought stubbornly for their freedom. Their story does not appear in many history books, yet is true and exciting.

X/Self, by Edward Kamau Brathwaite (Oxford University Press), one of the finest of the Caribbean poets, traces his African/Caribbean ancestry in an extraordinarily rich, imaginative sequence of poems.

History -- The Gleaner Geography & History of Jamaica (Gleaner Company) is a regularly revised textbook through which Jamaican schoolchildren learn about their country. The latest edition is available in major bookstores around Jamaica.

Travel -- Tour Jamaica, by Margaret Morris (Gleaner Company), describes an island of infinite variety with interesting and warmhearted people. Covering six regions, the book provides data on places of interest, local personalities, and historic and topical anecdotes. Featured are 19 recommended tours.

The Adventure Guide to Jamaica, by Steve Cohen (Hunter Publishing), leads you on a tour of unforgettable parts of the island few visitors know how to reach.

Cuisine -- The Jamaican Chef, by Byron Murray and Patrick Lewin (Life Long Publishers), provides recipes for an array of island dishes.

Traditional Jamaican Cookery, by Norma Benghiat (Penguin), includes local recipes never before written down, having been passed down by word of mouth.

Films

More than any other island in the Caribbean, Jamaica has offered itself to the movie industry as a site for fabricating celluloid dreams. Partly the result of savvy marketing, partly the result of a landscape varied enough to offer diverse film-making settings, the island might at any time during your visit host crews for filming movies, documentaries, or TV shows and commercials.

This is to some extent the heritage of 1940s and 1950s film star Errol Flynn, whose parties and personal shenanigans added a Hollywood gloss to Port Antonio and other areas of Jamaica. The actor owned both a hotel and a house in Port Antonio for years, and the town is still the home of his widow, ex-film actor Patrice Wymore. Hollywood filmmakers first visited the island in 1941 to shoot exteriors for the George Brent and Ann Sheridan comedy Honeymoon for Three, and again in 1954 to shoot the climax of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Altogether, more than 50 motion pictures and dozens of documentaries, music videos, and TV commercials have been filmed amid the shantytowns, Great Houses, Spanish and English colonial forts, deserts, beaches, and seascapes of Jamaica.

The best-selling novels of the 20th century include the James Bond spy series written by Ian Fleming at his house on Jamaica's northeast shore. The movie versions of some, such as Dr. No and Live and Let Die, were partly filmed in Jamaica. The filming of other, even larger, adventure films followed shortly after the first Bond films. Although its story is set mostly on Devil's Island off French Guyana, Papillon, starring Steve McQueen, was largely filmed in Jamaica, near the crowded North Shore town of Falmouth. A make-believe French colonial prison was constructed, using British overseers and an army of Jamaican carpenters and masons.

During the 1970s, when Jamaican politics took an abrupt turn to the left, foreign filmmakers (as well as investors in other industries) stayed away from the island. In 1984, however, the newly elected centrist prime minister, Edward Seaga, relaxed import-export laws and enacted tax incentives for the film industry, making Jamaica again an important site for international films. The government also cut red tape. Filmmakers were lured in addition by Jamaica's trained technicians and actors (all nonunion, offering services priced much lower than their U.S. or British counterparts), and occasional access to army and navy facilities. Because of the various advantages, Jamaica snared the location rights for Tom Cruise's Cocktail, Whoopi Goldberg's Clara's Heart, Bill Murray and Peter O'Toole's Club Paradise, and a 1990 remake of Lord of the Flies. Each was filmed near Errol Flynn's old stamping ground, Port Antonio.

Documentaries have been filmed in Jamaica as well. Heritage Films chose the Blue Mountains as a cost-effective substitute for Kenya and Tanzania when producing a biography of zoologist Dian Fossey. Entitled The Strange Life and Death of Dian Fossey, this film should not be confused with Sigourney Weaver's Gorillas in the Mist, which was shot in Africa. Several films dealing with reggae have also been produced in Jamaica.

For the 26-episode remake of the Flipper TV series, which presented the adventures of two young brothers with a herd of tame dolphins, the locale was shifted from the Florida Keys to Jamaica, and the script was updated to include a Jamaican actor as one of the young protagonists.

Even in films not requiring a Caribbean setting, Jamaica retains a strong pull on the imaginations and budgets of Hollywood filmmakers. One such example is the humorous horror movie Popcorn, which a viewer might easily believe had been filmed in Los Angeles. Actually, the film was shot with English and American actors in Kingston, and has nothing to do with swaying palms and coral reefs. Most challenging to the film's art directors was the creation of a giant mosquito poised menacingly atop the protagonists' car.

The Lunatic, released in 1992, is a ribald comedy. Set in a tiny Jamaican hamlet, it tells the madcap story of a vagabond with a good heart, a "randy" German visitor, and a butcher of many talents. The film has been called "a Caribbean fantasy."

Wide Sargasso Sea (1993), an adaptation of the Jean Rhys novel of 1966, received good critical notices. Rich in imagery of 19th-century Jamaica, it tells the story of a young English aristocrat named Rochester (played by Nathaniel Parker) who arrives in Jamaica and marries a Creole sugar-plantation heiress (played by Karina Lombard). Rochester turns out to be the Rochester -- that is, the brooding man of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. In her novel, Rhys attempted to "fill in" the doomed saga of Rochester's first marriage as a prelude to Jane Eyre.

Stepping Razor -- Red X (1993) has been called a "reggae Malcolm X." This politically galvanizing portrait tells the tragic story of reggae legend Peter Tosh, who was murdered in 1988. The voice in the film is that of Tosh himself, culled from the "Red X" tapes he was working on for a planned autobiography. Much vintage footage of life in Jamaica in the 1960s is shown in the film, along with re-creations of Tosh's childhood.

Cool Running (1993) is loosely based on the story of a Jamaica bobsled team that achieved massive publicity at the 1988 Winter Olympics. The team had practiced without ever having seen snow. The film was shot not only in Calgary (site of the Olympics) but also in Ocho Rios and Montego Bay. One critic suggested it was a snowbound Chariots of Fire with reggae music.

How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998) is an effective commercial for the island, starring Angela Bassett as a vacationing San Francisco stockbroker who dallies with Taye Diggs amongst lush scenery. The Jamaica tourism board says that travelers still call to ask where the movie was shot. The answer: mostly in and around Mo Bay, at Half Moon Beach and the Round Hill Hotel, where Diggs returned for his off-screen wedding.

Several less flattering films focus on the lives of gangsters ("shottas") and drug traffickers in Kingston. Belly (1998) features rappers DMX, Nas, Method Man, and TLC's T-Boz; popular Jamaican actor Paul Campbell stars in Third World Cop (1999); and Wyclef Jean appears in Shottas (2002).

Instinct (1999) stars Cuba Gooding, Jr. as a psychologist studying a disturbed anthropologist, played by Anthony Hopkins, who's been living with a pack of gorillas in the African jungle. The movie is another example of the Jamaican landscape's scenic versatility, with the Roaring River and rainforests outside of St. Ann plausibly standing in for the wilds of Rwanda.

Although Jamaica does not feature prominently in any recent releases, many of the films previewed above are available on DVD.

Caribbean Actors Ask, "What About Us?" -- African-Americans applauded the historic wins of Jamie Foxx and Morgan Freeman, who walked off with Oscars for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, respectively, during the 77th annual Academy Awards in February of 2005.

Although applauding the achievements of these Americans, many Caribbean actors also expressed resentment that too few West Indian roles go to islanders. "The parts are almost invariably given to black American actors -- not us," said Sidney Patterson, a young aspirant actor from Jamaica.

Sonja ("Lace") Bernard, a Jamaican actress, claims that she wants "to see more West Indians playing more than just the "bad guy Rasta" or the "nanny."

The son of Bahamian immigrants, Sidney Poitier is the first and only actor, with roots in the islands, to win an Oscar. He took the Best Actor prize for his performance in Lilies of the Field back in 1962. In 2002 he also took home an Honorary Lifetime Achievement Oscar.

Ron Bobb-Semple, who has played Pan-African leader Marcus Garvey, said, "The time has come for Caribbean actors who are in Hollywood to be cast more. What's wrong with using 'the real McCoy?'"

Bernard mocked American blacks trying to imitate West Indian blacks. "When they have roles calling for a West Indian character, Hollywood almost invariably casts an American actor. The script writer then has him add a couple of 'mons' at the end of every sentence, and that seems to be enough to satisfy a director that the guy is Jamaican (or whatever). Did you see Denzel Washington in The Mighty Quinn (1989)? If you did, my case is closed. His impersonation of the character of Xavier Quinn was so bad I couldn't sit through the movie."