Pirates (Primer for Pirates of the Caribbean)

Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, full stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a return to a dead genre that yields treasure beyond a studio's wildest dreams.

In advance of our coverage of 2003's Pirates of the Caribbean, The Curse of the Black Pearl, we've put together a brief primer on pirates, their state-sanctioned origins, Hollywood lineage, and our continued romantic infatuation with those who live beyond the law.

We hope you enjoy this brief history, and we look forward to chatting all things Pirates of the Caribbean on Monday.

Without further ado, we give you Pirates.

As a millennial, the piracy of my youth occurred far from the stunning blue waters of the Caribbean, where my mother had come of age.

It took place in my father's den, by way of a dial-up modem and a bevy of applications surely pumping malware deep into my family's computer, namely Napster, LimeWire, Kaza, Pick Your Poison.

No spoon album was safe, no audio rip of Celebrity Jeopardy was off limits, nor, for some young men and women, though I'd know nothing about this, were the crude digitizations of salaciously sexual material.

We wanted something, we lacked the means to procure it legally, so we did it illegally.

Despite, I might add, ad campaigns designed to seemingly scare us straight.

You wouldn't steal a car.

You wouldn't steal a handbag.

You wouldn't steal a DVD.

Downloading pirated films is stealing.

Okay, so it was piracy.

But that ad campaign wasn't stopping us.

By February of 2001, it's estimated that Napster had over 26 million monthly users.

We were the scourge of music labels and movie studios.

And we operated without remorse.

Because we didn't feel like pirates.

Certainly not the contemporary examples.

Aquatic piracy, as I'll call it, though statistically at a bit of an A deer, had seen an uptick in the 80s and 90s, in particular following the collapse of Somalia, the sudden availability of cheap, Cold War-produced weaponry, and a boom in slow-moving targets, namely tankers and bulk carriers.

There seems to be no love lost between the American or Western public and the pirates that operate off of the eastern coast of Africa.

Look at me, sure.

Look at me, short.

I'm the captain now.

So, why, as Roger Luckhurst asked in his 2017 article, The Timeless Allure of Pirates, do we abhor the modern incarnations while celebrating the brutality of their predecessors?

Quote, the ruthless acts of violence and theft from pirates like Blackbeard, Calico Jack Rackham, and Blackbart Roberts in the 1720s.

How did the pirate shed its associations with murder, rape, and pillaging and dawn of an ear of charming, roguish respectability?

And is there a place for him or her in our modern media landscape?

The pirates we have come to love on screen in the 20th century are modeled after what we know or what we think we know about pirates in and around the Caribbean during during the late 17th and early 18th century.

This was known as the golden age of piracy, to which ChatGPT says, hold my beer.

During this time, the pirates of the Caribbean were largely French, English, and Dutch colonists who attacked Spanish ships and settlements.

And many would tell you that they were simply doing their jobs, and that job was called a privateer.

Privateers were effectively state-sanctioned pirates.

They had an official letter of marque, which gave them permission to rob enemy ships, so long as they gave a portion of the loot to their government.

The legal commission turned what would otherwise be piracy into a form of authorized naval warfare.

But when peace treaties were signed or alliances shifted, privateers found themselves with two options: walk the straight and narrow, or keep doing what they did best.

During this golden age, pamphlets and broadsides about real-life pirates and the crimes that they committed popularized these characters amidst their landlubbin countrymen.

There were also a few key books that blurred the line between fact and fiction, dramatizing the lives of real-life pirates and buccaneers.

Especially popular was The American Pirates by Alexandre Excomoulin, published in 1678, which featured allegedly eyewitness accounts of the lives and experiences of French and English buccaneers.

It's believed that Excomoulin was a French surgeon surgeon who joined a crew of buccaneers.

1724 featured a general history of the robberies and murders of the most notorious pirates by Captain Charles Johnson.

This collection of pirate biographies, which featured Blackbeard and Black Bart, included two female pirates, Anne Bonney and Mary Reed.

In 1720, Daniel Defoe's The Life, Adventures, and Piracies of the famous Captain Singleton hit the press.

It's a novel based on a supposedly factual pamphlet that Defoe had written about real-life Captain Avery.

Fun fact, Defoe, an English merchant, journalist, and novelist, is considered the father of the English novel.

In fact, his Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, is considered by some to be the first English novel.

Though that's no more hard fact than the tales of the book itself, which are supposedly based on the life and experiences of a real-life Scottish sailor, Alexander Selkirk.

Now, Crusoe created a new new genre, or inspired a glut of imitations, about castaways on deserted islands called Robinson Aides.

But by the end of the 18th century, pirate fiction seemed to be fizzling out.

But as any good pirate knows, no treasure stays buried forever.

Lord Byron's epic poem, The Corsair, which was the French term from privateer, breathed new life into the pirate story in 1814.

And in 1822, Sir Walter Scott took the entire enterprise back to its roots with, you guessed it, the pirate.

Scott, a Scottish novelist, credited by some as the creator of historical fiction, had himself a hit.

The pirate was adapted into three different stage plays and triggered a new slew of copycat work.

But pirates were changing.

Most importantly, they weren't scallywags anymore.

They were romantic.

Well, at least they were part of the romantic movement.

As Edward Lucy Smith wrote, the pirate novel, quote, loosened its roots in reality and set out instead to create archetypes which fulfilled the demands of uninstructed popular fantasy, end quote.

Historical roots often remained, but the floral flourishes were ever the more fictionalized.

Pirates had become mythical, folkloric heroes, and they were especially popular amongst the youths.

Stateside, Edgar Allan Poe's stories about pirate treasure, like the gold bug, were becoming especially popular, even as privateering, roughly midway through the 19th century, was abolished, the practice viewed as anarchic.

But there's perhaps no title more evocative of the pirate genre than Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island.

Published in 1883, the Scottish writer had first serialized the story in a magazine under the title The Sea Cook, a story for boys, under the pen name Captain George North.

Now, Stevenson had been strongly influenced by a general history of the robberies and murders of the most notorious pirates, which was rumored to be written by Daniel Defoe under a pseudonym.

But Stevenson gave the genre the embellishments that people would begin to remember.

The one-legged seamen, black-sailed ships, X-Marks the Spot, and parrots yelling, pieces of eight!

It's difficult to quantify how influential Treasure Island has been to the pirate genre.

Actually, it's not.

As of 2015, it holds the Guinness Book of World Records record for being the most oft-adapted work of literature for film and television.

It has been done 41 times.

Take that, a star is born.

And I think Hollywood's got a few more in them.

What about you?

The first screen adaptation of Treasure Island wouldn't come until 1917, nearly a decade after 1908's short film, The Pirates Gold.

The Pirates Gold is important for a few reasons.

Not only is it one of the first instances of pirates on screen, it was directed by D.W.

Griffith, who would go on to direct Birth of a Nation and, for better and worse, be one of the most influential figures in the development development of narrative film.

The heroes of the pirate's gold are not the pirates but rather the pirates gold, which ends up hidden behind the fireplace bricks of a widowed mother, only to be discovered years later by her bankrupt and suicidal son, therefore saving the family from ruin.

Treasure Island hit the silver screen in 1917 with an unusual twist.

Most of the actors are kids or teens, and Long John Silver is played by a roughly 12 or 13 year old girl dressed as a man.

By the early 1920s, the formula of the pirate story had ossified into a set of rules as rigid as the Pulp Western, and no one had a handle on the genre quite like Raphael Sabatini.

The English-Italian scribe of buccaneer romances was popular, both publicly and in Hollywood.

He smartly saved the cat and gave his heroes sympathetic beginnings.

His pirates were usually born gentlemen swayed into piracy not by temptation but necessity, often burdened with a painful secret secret of past hardship, and whose resilience, wit, and ingenuity are matched only by the humble inadequacy they feel in the presence of a good woman.

Adaptations of Sabatini's work began with The Seahawk, published in 1915, adapted in 1924, for the first time, and Captain Blood, published in 1922 and adapted in 1924, again, for the first time.

The genre had even attracted Hollywood's biggest buckler of swash, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., known for the three musketeers Robin Hood and the son of Zorro.

Fairbanks' The Black Pirate was a milestone of early two-tone technicolor, but the genre would be pirated away by another leading man, Errol Flynn.

The Australian thespians stumbled into pirate movies by accident when Robert Donit dropped out of Captain Blood.

Warner Brothers needed a body, and they took a chance on Flynn's, which was great, at 6'2 ⁇ and 180 pounds.

Released in 1935, Captain Blood was a modest commercial success, but it was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture, and it helped establish the 26-year-old Flynn as the natural successor to Fairbanks and a, quote, symbol of an unvanquished man.

I should also note that Flynn's co-star, the then relatively unknown 19-year-old Olivia de Havilland, was catapulted into stardom.

And the film has been said to have helped Warner Brothers transition into more prestige fare.

More important to our story, though, Captain Blood heralded the golden age of pirates in Hollywood.

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A year before Captain Blood, MGM released 1934's Treasure Island, a children's movie with a crucial contribution to the genre.

The pirate accent, as invented by actor Robert Newton.

Errol Flynn may have been synonymous with pirates, and he would continue to make good on the promise of Captain Blood with 1940s' remake of Seahawk and 1952's Against All Flags.

But he was far from the only buccaneer seeking a pile of gold from a major studio.

Burt Lancaster, Basil Rathbone, Cornell Wilde, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

were all familiar faces across the high seas.

And it wasn't just the stars that were benefiting.

One newspaper clipping from the time made mention of World War I veterans who had lost limbs in action, finding work as actors and extras in pirate films.

Now, the real pirates of the era were, of course, the studio heads, warring and pillaging in boardrooms and on back lots, and the on-screen pirates were a far cry from the 17th-century privateers that had inspired them.

And this was in large part because pirates existed as a branch of a much larger genre, the swashbuckler.

Though the term originally referred to a ruffian bully, more bravado and swagger than courage or skill, it had evolved across the 19th and early 20th centuries to come to describe a daring, athletic, honor-bound hero of swords and capes adventures.

The swashbuckler is a charming rogue.

As Jeffrey Richards, Richards in his book Swordsman of the Screen put it, quote, he maintains a decent standard of behavior, fights for king and country, believes in truth and justice, defends the honor of the lady, even if he is an outlaw.

Richards goes on to posit that the swashbuckling genre itself is, quote, an exhilarating excursion into pure style, a heady blend of male beauty and agility, the grace and color of historical costume, the opulence and splendor of period sets, and the spell-binding leisure domain of horseback chases, chandelier swinging, and dazzling swordplay.

End quote.

The pirate film put the action on the ocean, even though it rarely showed actual acts of piracy.

Pirates had become self-sufficient outcasts.

They were frontiersmen.

They represented unbridled freedom and living outside the law.

But they could be recruited or conscripted into the defense of strict codes of honor and at times even the monarchy.

They were, in effect, the inverse of the privateers that had inspired them.

Cold War naval superiority nearly eliminated what was left of the pirate of the high seas, and by the 1980s, pirates had been scrubbed from Hollywood too.

They were expensive, they were out of style, and they were increasingly risky.

The genre inverted on itself, turning to parody and cosmetic twists in a stab at relevance.

Pirate musicals, funny pirates, pirates in space, those that played it even somewhat straight, like Roman Polanski's Pirates, released in 1986, suffered massive losses at the box office.

Pirates grossed just under $7 million against a $40 million budget.

The trend trickled into the 1990s, with straight-to-video fare, TV movies, and children's children's entertainment like Hook and Muppet Treasure Island.

At the same time, the swashbuckling genre had run aground and become increasingly landbound.

The Princess Bride, Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, The Three Musketeers, arguably even Braveheart, and leading men were being drawn towards the burgeoning action movie genre, with the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis, Val Kilmer, and many, many more.

In 1995, production company Carol attempted to revive the pirate genre with Cutthroat Island, but they merely hammered another nail in its coffin, or was it Davy Jones' locker?

Directed by Rennie Harlan, starring his then-wife Gina Davis, Matthew Modine, and Frank Langella, the tale of a daring female pirate and her reluctant rogue ally failed to find an audience.

It lost, adjusting for inflation, nearly $150 million.

Carolco went went bankrupt, Gina Davis and Rennie Harlan got a divorce.

The truth is, Carol Co had been taking on water for years, and the film failed for a whole host of reasons we'll certainly get to when we cover it.

But for now, know that Gina Davis and Rennie Harlan suffered arguably irreparable harm to their careers, and Hollywood chalked it up to another example of why you shouldn't go swimming in pirate-infested waters.

Heading into the 21st century, the battle at the live-action box office was, if you squint hard enough, not unlike the French, Spanish, English, and Dutch duking it out in the Caribbean hundreds of years earlier.

Studios warred, raided, and pillaged, stole talent, ideas, and stars, and Disney found itself with neither the treasure nor the munitions to compete.

IP, as it always had been, was Hollywood's gold, and Warner Brothers, in particular, hoarded the likes of Harry Potter, The Matrix, and the Lord of the Rings.

Sony, for their part, had Spider-Man and Men in Black.

20th Century Fox had Star Wars and X-Men.

Disney had a slew of films based on theme park rides that had flopped, one after another, in quick succession.

Tower of Terror, Mission to Mars, and The Country Bears.

The Mouse House needed muscle.

It needed privateers.

It needed pirates.

I'm sure the irony of the squeakiest clean studio wary of a a PG-13 rating being responsible for the revival of a dastardly archetype wasn't lost on Disney CEO Michael Eisner.

Maybe he was simply out of options.

Or maybe he took a cue from Byron.

Quote, he knew himself a villain, but he deemed the rest no better than the thing he seemed.

As we'll discuss Monday, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Curse of the Black Pearl, wouldn't just write a listing ship.

It would remind us why we love outlaw waters, so long as we're not the ones being robbed.

What Went Wrong is the Sad Boom podcast.

This episode was presented by Chris Winterbauer, with post-production and music by David Bowman.