This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2006, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
What happens when everyone says they like the movie you've made but nobody will book it into theaters? That's the challenge facing Utah filmmaker E.R. Nelson, director of a quirky comedy called "Pirates of the Great Salt Lake."
Nelson filmed the low-budget movie in 18 days last August, mostly in Utah County and on the west shore of Antelope Island. Even by pirate standards, it was a tough shoot. The heat along the Great Salt Lake was brutal, brine flies swarmed everywhere, the crew ran out of drinking water and their remote-controlled helicopter crashed into the lake, ruining a $5,000 camera.
"It was absolute hell," Nelson said. "Everything that could go wrong . . . did go wrong."
The movie is about two college-age misfits who fancy themselves as modern-day buccaneers and set out on a leaky rowboat on the "Great Sea" in search of a cursed treasure. But few take them seriously. When the pair try to raid a couple of picnickers, the woman coos, "Look, dad - pirates!"
"Do you know what our problem is?" the pirate captain asks his sidekick. "It's that damn Johnny Depp. Ever since he started playing a pirate, nobody fears us anymore. Everybody thinks we're cute."
Although Sundance rejected a rough cut of the movie, "Pirates" has screened this year at seven other film festivals, where moviegoers - some dressed as pirates - laughed in all the right places. The movie won audience awards at the SpudFest Film Festival in Idaho, the Phoenix Film Festival and the Garden State Film Festival in New Jersey.
Nelson says he's had nibbles from small regional distributors. But national bookers are leery of the movie because it has no big-name stars. The movie's best-known actors are Larry Bagby, one of Joaquin Phoenix's bandmates in "Walk the Line," and Kirby Heyborne, the likable blond Utah actor from "Saints and Soldiers" and "The R.M."
"That's their concern - "how do we market a movie without Jack Black?" Nelson said. His answer: "Napoleon Dynamite," the underdog inspiration for comic indie filmmakers everywhere. Although the two films' stories are very different, Nelson believes that "our movie has the potential to do what 'Napoleon' did."
So he and co-producer Nathan Phillips have begun a new marketing push for their film. They've created a "Pirates" page on MySpace and will screen the movie at several more festivals this fall. If they can't land a distributor by winter, they plan to book the film themselves into a handful of theaters next February and hope that word-of-mouth spreads. A DVD release would follow next July - not coincidentally, the same month that "Pirates of the Caribbean 3" hits theaters.
Despite the movie's low-profile so far, Nelson is hopeful it will eventually find a wider audience. As he has learned in recent months, there's a whole cult of pirate fans out there.
"Shiver me timbers! I'll get all me hearties to see our movie!" he said next. (OK, no he didn't. But it's more fun than what he actually said.) Arrgh!!