From funny name to full-fledged film
“Pirates of the Great Salt Lake” began as just a humorous title for a movie.
Within one week, however, the idea went from being a humorous title to a completed script ready for production, said Nathan Phillips, a writer and producer for the film.
Now, after trips to multiple film festivals across the United States and the world, the Utah-made film is preparing to be released in theaters across the country.
The movie stars local actor Kirby Heyborne as Captain Kirk Redgrave, who along with new friend Flint Weaver (Trenton James), challenges their loner ways to become hapless pirates on the Great Sale Lake.
The two makeshift pirates stumble onto a treasure map that leads them into battle with a shifty pawnshop owner (Larry Bagby). Phillips describes the movie as a “dark, off-beat comedy.”
The film began out of the frustration of Phillips and co-writer and director E.R. Nelson over not having a sufficient budget for the project they intended on doing. Having investors for a movie but no script, they turned the funny “Pirates” movie title that Nelson suggested into a full script.
After finalizing the script, Nelson and Phillips worked primarily for the next month on finding a cast and crew for the film.
They had written the script with Heyborne in mind as Captain Kirk Redgrave. Heyborne led the producers to Bagby and James, associates of Heyborne from other films and the comedy circuit.
Aside from those leads, the remaining actors and crew were all local professionals hired with the help of Christian Vuissa, a co-producer of the film, who was very familiar with the Utah film circle (He previously directed LDS film “Baptists at Our Barbecue”).
The producers were initially reluctant to film at the Great Salt Lake. “The Salt Lake is disgusting and not a pleasant place, especially in August [when the movie was filmed]… when the brine flies were out,” Phillips said.
However, they finally settled on the lake and filmed from two locations on Antelope Island for most of their water shots. Phillips said the lake’s long shores, shallow water and seagulls all helped give the scenes the character the producers wanted.
The filming schedule for “Pirates of the Great Salt Lake” was determined largely by the budget constraints of the film. Operating on a small budget, Phillips said, reduced the amount of cameras and angles they were able to get on each shot. Most importantly, it limited the time they could spend filming.
“The biggest thing you need on a movie is time,” Phillips said. “And time costs money.”
They filmed for a total of 18 days throughout the Wasatch Front with one additional day of filming in Los Angeles. Because of budget constraints, they were not able to do any re-shoots and even had to eliminate a subplot from the film.
“We only [did] what we thought was the very minimum,” Phillips said.
In early February 2006, a final cut of the film was completed, and an original soundtrack was written. The film premiered on Feb. 3, 2006, at the San Francisco Indiefest. Phillips said it was nerve-racking to have the film play before an audience for the first time. However, the film played to packed audiences that generally enjoyed the film, he said.
The Indiefest lauded the film as “an intelligent, satirical, character driven laugh-out-loud funny comedy-action hybrid of Cervantes’ ‘Don Quixote’ and Johnny Depp’s ‘Pirates of the Caribbean.'”
After the San Francisco festival, the filmmakers began to get invited to other film festivals, in places ranging from Indianapolis and New Jersey to Hawaii and Australia. “We wanted to get to play in several different demographics,” Phillips said.
He added the film was well-received by festival audiences. “We usually won an award wherever we went,” he said. But Phillips admits the offbeat humor alienated some audience members. “By putting in smarter, better humor, you [eliminate] 10 percent of your audience,” he said.
Although the film was produced and filmed almost entirely along the Wasatch Front, “Pirates of the Great Salt Lake” is not a typical product of the Utah film scene. “[The LDS film genre] has been really saturated the last couple of years,” Phillips said. Because of this, the perception of “Pirates” as an LDS film was one of their biggest obstacles. The film’s advertising campaign was largely aimed at overcoming this stereotype.
The film’s PG-13 rating (for some suggestive content and violence, according to the MPAA) and one of the movie’s prominent slogans, which states the problem with being a pirate is “that damn Johnny Depp,” help to separate the film from LDS genre films.
“Pirates of the Great Salt Lake” is planning on opening in several markets across the country in April and then expanding to 16 other markets if the film does well. Utah will be among the last markets the film expands to, because the producers said they know the film will draw interest in the local market.
The trailer for the film can be viewed at the Web site www.piratesofthegreatsaltlake.com or at myspace.com.
-tliljegren@cc.usu.edu