{"id":10867,"date":"2020-08-02T14:52:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-02T21:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=10867"},"modified":"2020-08-03T14:55:27","modified_gmt":"2020-08-03T21:55:27","slug":"rockers-cia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2020\/08\/02\/rockers-cia\/","title":{"rendered":"Rockers CIA"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/cia-guns-and-rasta-inside-the-making-of-rockers-reggaes-most-iconic-film\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">from The Daily Beast<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">CIA, Guns, and Rasta: Inside the Making of Reggae\u2019s Most Iconic Film<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Rockers is an absolutely wild movie with a backstory that\u2019s much, much wilder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/author\/patricia-meschino\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Patricia Meschino<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Rockers Movie Intro - Great scene from the classic late 70s Jamaican film.\" width=\"1080\" height=\"608\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Io8K2noPT78?feature=oembed\"  allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Rockers<\/em>\u00a0is, arguably, the finest reggae movie ever made.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The 1978 film tells the story of a financially struggling drummer, Leroy \u201cHorsemouth\u201d Wallace (portraying himself), who buys a motorbike with the intention of making extra money by distributing producers\u2019 records to shops across the island. When the bike is stolen by an upper-class organized crime ring, Horsemouth and his friends set out to retrieve it and take back most of the criminals\u2019 ill-gotten goods and distribute them to Kingston\u2019s ghetto dwellers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The skeletal plot is best summarized as a Jamaican reinterpretation of the legend of Robin Hood meets Italian director Vittorio De Sica\u2019s&nbsp;<em>Bicycle Thieves<\/em>, yet&nbsp;<em>Rockers<\/em>&nbsp;mesmerizes as a kaleidoscopic view of late &#8217;70s reggae, one of the most fascinating eras in Jamaican music\u2019s trajectory, and in its respectful, almost mystical presentation of Rastafarian culture, a relatively unknown way of life at the time of the film\u2019s international debut.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Made on a budget of $250,000 and directed by Theodoros \u201cTed\u201d Bafaloukos,&nbsp;<em>Rockers<\/em>&nbsp;caused a near riot at the Cannes Film Festival in 1979 when crowds clamoring for tickets to the four scheduled sold-out screenings jammed the streets surrounding the theater and refused to leave. A review in the French daily<em>&nbsp;Le Monde<\/em>&nbsp;enthused, \u201c<em>Rockers<\/em>&nbsp;is not a film, it is a work of art. So good it is difficult to believe, yet it is real.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Rockers\u00a0<\/em>secured U.S. distribution in 1980; 40 years later, the film continues to be widely screened, critically lauded, and now, meticulously documented in a spectacular 320-page coffee table book, published by Gingko Press.\u00a0<em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Rockers-Making-Reggaes-Most-Iconic\/dp\/3943330486#:~:text=all%208%20images-,Rockers%3A%20The%20Making%20of%20Reggae's%20Most,Film%20Hardcover%20%E2%80%93%20June%2016%2C%202020&amp;text=Set%20amongst%20the%20reggae%20scene,among%20music%20and%20cinema%20fans.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Rockers: The Making of Reggae\u2019s Most Iconic Film<\/a><\/em>, was initially written by Bafaloukos in 2005 (he died in 2016 at age 70, due to complications from non-Hodgkin\u2019s lymphoma). Featuring many previously unseen, stunning black and white and color photos taken in New York City and throughout his travels to Jamaica in the mid to late &#8217;70s, the<em>\u00a0Rockers<\/em>\u00a0book chronicles Bafaloukos\u2019 personal narrative as vividly and insightfully as it does the landmark film bearing its name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>[ <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/cia-guns-and-rasta-inside-the-making-of-rockers-reggaes-most-iconic-film\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">click to continue reading at TDB<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from The Daily Beast CIA, Guns, and Rasta: Inside the Making of Reggae\u2019s Most Iconic Film Rockers is an absolutely wild movie with a backstory that\u2019s much, much wilder. by Patricia Meschino Rockers\u00a0is, arguably, the finest reggae movie ever made.\u00a0 The 1978 film tells the story of a financially struggling drummer, Leroy \u201cHorsemouth\u201d Wallace (portraying [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10867\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}