I do a lot of my work from a cafe in the afternoons, and for the past couple of days I’ve sat near a group of high school kids having the old ‘Pirates vs Ninjas’ conversation. After cutting them some slack for being about five years behind the curve, I realized that there’s this burgeoning new audience for dumb pirate movies that Disney’s big franchise just isn’t serving.
It occurred to me that I could make buckets of easy money if I simply married the Wild Hogs premise with some pirate lore. I quickly wrote up a treatment and warmed up the fax machine, but luckily I checked the trades first. You can never be too careful. And there I discovered that a guy named Jordan Cahan had beaten me to the punch, and that Click! director Hank Coraci had already signed on.
I’ll give it to Cahan — Part-Time Pirates (his title) is catchier or at least less cynical than You’ll See Anything, But Still Wouldn’t Give Shane Black $10, You Jerk (my title). Though the plot, in which some working men hit the ocean and raid their bosses’ yachts, is pretty similar. Coraci is definitely gung-ho for the project: ‘Pirates are the original punk rockers. Politically and socially with everything going on in the world there’s never been a better time than now to revive that spirit. Arrrrrrgh!’ That’s what he told the Hollywood Reporter, anyway. ‘Arrrrrgh!’ and everything.