Pirates of the Caribbean 4

[Telefrog]

I was sure we had a thread about this already, but I couldn’t find it.

[TheTrunkDr]

sigh each was just so much worse than the previous that this might actually get a negative score. I really have no interest in this at all.

[Bahimiron]

It’s based (loosely and increasingly so as more and more news comes out) on Tim Powers’ On Stranger Tides, which is an awesome book. The only way they could pique by interest more would be if they’d said the plot was going to be Captain Jack Sparrow trying to discover the secret of Monkey Island while racing against his old enemy the ghost pirate LeChuck and having to put up with a somewhat inept first mate named Guybrush Threepwood.

[Rasputin]

Hopefully they’ll write Captain Jack’s dialogue straight this time, like it was in the first movie, and let Depp wackify it with delivery instead of writing it wacky and then getting MORE wacky when performed. This was one of the major pieces of why the 2nd and 3rd movies blew so badly compared to the first.

[Rob_Merritt]

I liked the second movie quite a bit, if only because it was like watching monkey Island ™ the movie.

[Jazar]

@Rob_Merritt

I liked the second movie quite a bit, if only because it was like watching monkey Island ™ the movie.

Yeah that scene of them heading towards the Voodoo Lady™ 's house was straight out of MI2.

[Woolen_Horde]

@Telefrog

I was sure we had a thread about this already, but I couldn’t find it.

It’s not hard. Just search for “Depp”

Quarter To Three Forums

[BobJustBob]

The second movie was pure garbage (overly long, boring, no plot) but the third was quite good. I’m tentatively on board for this one.

[mystery]

Granted, the 2nd and 3rd movies don’t compare to the first, but they’re all still a lot of fun. I figure this one will be another along those lines.

I’m still looking for someone to create an animated looping background for my desktop of the two ships fighting broadside over the whirlpool.

[Rightbug]

@BobJustBob

The second movie was pure garbage (overly long, boring, no plot) but the third was quite good. I’m tentatively on board for this one.

Yes, I’m in the small minority who actually liked the third movie as well. Some people found it over-complicated and confusing but I thought they did a good job of following through with all of the themes and plot-lines which had been raised by the first two movies and they avoided the cheap Hollywood trap of giving Orlando Blooms character a happy ending when the story clearly demanded that the series end with Bloom becoming captain of The Flying Dutchman.

I’m probably also in the minority in feeling that, while Depp’s character is what makes the movies great, Orlando Bloom’s character was the soul of the original trilogy and I worry what the loss of he and Keira Knightly will mean for the fourth movie.

[Houngan]

@Rightbug

Yes, I’m in the small minority who actually liked the third movie as well. Some people found it over-complicated and confusing but I thought they did a good job of following through with all of the themes and plot-lines which had been raised by the first two movies and they avoided the cheap Hollywood trap of giving Orlando Blooms character a happy ending when the story clearly demanded that the series end with Bloom becoming captain of The Flying Dutchman.

I’m probably also in the minority in feeling that, while Depp’s character is what makes the movies great, Orlando Bloom’s character was the soul of the original trilogy and I worry what the loss of he and Keira Knightly will mean for the fourth movie.

The biggest problem I can foresee is that the first movie was broadly the same plot as On Stranger Tides (fish out of water gets caught up with Pirates, discovers that magic is real, gets swept up in intrigue between pirates and wealthy landowners, becomes a pirate himself, etc. etc.) so they have a serious problem with repetition.

At a guess, I’d say they wrote Tim Powers a big fat check as a way of saying “Thanks for the plot, sorry we didn’t actually license it from you.” and then scrapped everything but the fountain of youth from the book for the fourth movie. It will be Jack Sparrow needing to find the fountain for some reason, and nothing else from the book. Which was fantastic. I’m just hoping they get Woefully Fat in there somewhere.

H.

[sinnick]

@Rasputin

Hopefully they’ll write Captain Jack’s dialogue straight this time, like it was in the first movie, and let Depp wackify it with delivery instead of writing it wacky and then getting MORE wacky when performed. This was one of the major pieces of why the 2nd and 3rd movies blew so badly compared to the first.

This reminds me of a great story that Terry Rossio posted on his blog several years ago. I tried to figure out how to link directly to it, but since Myspace redesigned their blogs, everything is poorly formatted and hard to read, so I’ll just quote the whole story here … apologies in advance if this seems like a big wall of text, but it’s worth it:

@Terry Rossio

Our favorite line we wrote for PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN is one we didn’t write.

This is how it goes, some days, when you’re a writer working on set of a major motion picture:

6:15 A.M., my writing partner, Ted Elliott and I get called into director Gore Verbinski’s office after a 30-minute morning commute to work via ferry along the coast of St. Vincent (yeah, sure beats the 405 at rush hour). Gore explained there was a change planned for that day’s shooting. The stunt guys had figured out a brilliant way to pull Johnny Depp out of the water onto the moving ship – but it meant Depp had to land back near the ship’s wheel. The script had called for him to land mid-ships and move toward the wheel. The new staging meant Depp’s character had to say something to order his crew away, and leave him alone for the final shot –

And this was the end shot of the movie, could we come up with a command that was interesting, meaningful, a bit more profound than “Back to work, Mates!”

Sure.

Ted went off to talk to the captain of one of the film’s working ships, the Lady Washington, and try to scare up some authentic nautical commands. I went to find Depp and warn him that some new dialogue was coming. Johnny was cool with it, and even had suggestions – as research for the role, he’d been reading stories of seafaring men, he said, so “How about something like, ‘We venture forth over waves of adversity beneath clouds of adventure, always searching for that elusive shore of our dreams…?’”

“Right,” I said… “Uh, something just like that. We’re working on it.”

So I go hook up with Ted on the Lady Washington, and they’ve come up with some possible phrases. There were a few that weren’t right at all – chief among them, I recall, was “Put the wind to our aft!” That’s just not a line you want to use to end a movie. We all liked the phrase, “To stations! Let go, and haul to run free!” I particularly liked the ‘run free’ part, it seemed appropriate for Depp’s character, who considered his ship a symbol of freedom.

So we run that line past Gore, he stares off into the distance, says “I dunno, I get kind of a BORN FREE vibe out of that, maybe something else?”

So, back to the Lady Washington. On the way we get the message from a PA via walkie-talkie that Depp wants us to meet him in make-up, but the ship is on the way, so we stop off there first, to try to find another line.

Now I will always remember this:

We hear a shout, look over, and there’s Johnny Depp racing toward us full speed from the make-up trailers, only half in costume, waving a piece of paper over his head. He’s shouting – I kid you not – “I’ve got it! Got it!”

He races full speed toward the gangplank, and let me tell you something about gangplanks, they’re not very sturdy. Whenever we went across the production was careful to have a sailor on either end, one to help you on, the other to help you down onto the ship.

Depp wasn’t waiting for that – he bounded onto the gangplank, it bounced him into the air, and light as a feather he came down on it, bounced up again, and landed gracefully on deck. Hey, that’s why he gets the big bucks. He comes up to us, breathless, says “I got it.” and shows us the paper.

Well, with a build-up like that, from your major star, you’d better hope that it’s good. We look at the paper, and beneath a bunch of crossed-off efforts, it says –

“Bring me that horizon!”

Ted and I look at each other.

“That’s pretty good,” Ted says.

Hell, it was really good. We put it together with the previous line and it sounded great, “Let go and haul to run free! Bring me that horizon!”

We took it to Gore. He thought about it for all of half a second, said “That’s pretty good. That’s really good.” Now he even liked the ‘run free’ lead-in, too.

So by mid-morning we were rehearsing. The only thing left was the first line, the reference to the crew. Depp gamely tried our first effort, which I think was something like, “What are you looking at, you rickets-ridden layabouts! Back to work!” After spitting that out a few times he came over and demanded a better line. We worked through a few – Depp’s candidate was ‘starving maggots’ but I pointed out that seemed like a contradiction – and then Ted came up with “scabrous dogs.” So, the end line of the movie was finally set:

JACK SPARROW: “What are you lookin’ at, you scabrous dogs? Back to work! Let go and haul to run free! Bring me that horizon!”

As of this writing, I don’t know if the movie is good, or if the lines made it in, or even if they work the way they should. But if the film is good, it’s fun to think that the final line of the film was written the day it was shot.

I hope it does work.

I hope the movie is great.

Because I’ve got something pinned above my desk. The scrap of paper Depp was waving as he raced out of the trailer, that he wrote the line on –

I kept it, of course.

It has our favorite line in the movie – one we didn’t even write!

[Delta]

Oh, what a fantastic story. I’m a big Depp fan thanks to the whole philanthropy thing, and this just confirms it.

“Bring me that horizon” is pretty much the PotC line for me - and it was written by him!

Cheers for that, Sinnick. Brightened up my evening a bit.

[Mark_Asher]

@Bahimiron

It’s based (loosely and increasingly so as more and more news comes out) on Tim Powers’ On Stranger Tides, which is an awesome book. The only way they could pique by interest more would be if they’d said the plot was going to be Captain Jack Sparrow trying to discover the secret of Monkey Island while racing against his old enemy the ghost pirate LeChuck and having to put up with a somewhat inept first mate named Guybrush Threepwood.

From what I’ve picked up, they bought the movie rights to Powers book mostly to avoid any possible legal issues over the story of a pirate searching for the Fountain of Youth. With the money these movies make they could drop a healthy six figures in Powers lap, no problem.

And yes, it is a great book and I love most of Powers books. This movie won’t be anything like his book, though.

[Daagar]

I’m glad to see I’m not the only one that enjoyed the third movie (I actually like all three, but 1 & 3 certainly exceed 2). It was completely over-the-top and they were completely unashamed about it. The whole ship battle in the whirlpool was waaay too long for any other movie, but here it worked. I’m quite interested to see number 4. So long as it isn’t Mummy 3, it’ll be good. I hope.

[MatthewF]

Wow, what a great story.

[Cosmic_Hippo]

They should go for broke and add ninjas.

[Houngan]

Zombies, magicians, gods, pirates, puppets, chicken spells, wenches, winches . . . yeah, I could see a ninja in there. He needs a cool name though, like Inscrutably Yellow.

[rhinohelix]

@Houngan

Zombies, magicians, gods, pirates, puppets, chicken spells, wenches, winches . . . yeah, I could see a ninja in there. He needs a cool name though, like Inscrutably Yellow.

…and cue Dirt.

You have to have an anchor of normalcy to keep it from being a Burton weirdfest, which is why Will-Elizabeth-Norrington triangle is.

[Houngan]

@rhinohelix

…and cue Dirt.

You have to have an anchor of normalcy to keep it from being a Burton weirdfest, which is why Will-Elizabeth-Norrington triangle is.

That’s who the protagonist of the book was, the normal guy thrust into the crazy pirate world. Really, the first movie is pretty much the book, except less so.

H.