The Gram­my-win­ning 2000 film, The Clash: West­way to the World, is a fas­ci­nat­ing look at the rise and fall of one of his­to­ry’s great­est rock bands. The Clash did­n’t invent punk rock–bands like the Ramones and the Sex Pis­tols pre­ced­ed them–but they did their best to rein­vent it, mov­ing beyond the self-absorbed nihilism of the Pis­tols to embrace a more glob­al, polit­i­cal­ly engaged ethos that moshed togeth­er a riot of musi­cal and cul­tur­al influ­ences, includ­ing reg­gae and rap. Per­haps no one was more respon­si­ble for inject­ing those influ­ences into the punk sub­cul­ture than the man who made this movie, Don Letts.

The British-born son of Jamaican immi­grants, Letts ran a cloth­ing bou­tique in West Lon­don in the ear­ly 1970s that became an ear­ly gath­er­ing place for punk rock­ers. He lat­er became the res­i­dent DJ at the first punk night­club, The Roxy, at a time when there weren’t many punk records out, so he played a lot of reg­gae. And he start­ed record­ing the scene. “When the punk rock thing hap­pened in about 1976,” Letts lat­er recalled, “the whole ‘Do It Your­self’ prin­ci­ple came into play. All my mates picked up gui­tars and I want­ed to pick up some­thing too, but the stage was kind of full up. So I picked up a Super 8 cam­era, and using the ‘DIY’ prin­ci­ple, taught myself to become a film­mak­er through film­ing the bands I liked and work­ing out how to do it as I went along. I’d nev­er been to film school; I nev­er even read the instruc­tions for the cam­era!”

The raw, unpol­ished footage was edit­ed togeth­er in 1978 and released as The Punk Rock Movie. Letts went on to make all of the Clash’s videos, and in 1981 when the Clash played their leg­endary 17 nights at Bond’s Inter­na­tion­al Casi­no in Times Square, Letts was com­mi­sioned by the band’s mer­cu­r­ial man­ag­er, Bernie Rhodes, to make a doc­u­men­tary. As music jour­nal­ist Chris Salewicz writes in his book Redemp­tion Song: The Bal­lad of Joe Strum­mer, “after each night’s show he’d be hand­ed a wedge of dol­lars by Bernie and told to buy more film.” Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Rhodes then placed almost all of Letts’s footage in a stor­age facil­i­ty in New York and for­got to pay the bill. The exposed film was thrown away.

So when Sony lat­er approached Letts to put togeth­er The Clash: West­way to the World, he had to make do with oth­er archival footage and inter­views. In the inter­views, the mem­bers of the band are char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly sin­cere in their assess­ment of why the band dis­in­te­grat­ed. When Mick Jones formed Big Audio Dyna­mite in 1984, Letts was invit­ed to join the group. The man who brought reg­gae to punk still could­n’t play a musi­cal instru­ment, so he intro­duced film-edit­ing tech­niques to the music. He became an ear­ly pio­neer of sam­pling, using audio clips from old movies and oth­er sources. “When the oth­ers would be lay­ing down their parts in the stu­dio,” Letts lat­er said of his days with Big Audio Dyna­mite, “I’d be run­ning what was tan­ta­mount to a film fes­ti­val in the green room.”

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