My wife, daughter, son-in-law and I are on the road again, this time on Dauphin Island, one of the barrier islands off of the Alabama Gulf coast. There’s a real Low Country vibe here: I almost expect Jimmy Buffet to descend upon us with a ravening horde of parrotheads. It’s scary that way.
It’s bayou country down here, and in fact we’re just a few miles from Bayou La Batre, a place that’s had a weird, kind of sideways film-related history. In the movie Forrest Gump — named as one of the 20 most overrated films by Premiere magazine — Bayou La Batre was the home of Forrest’s buddy Bubba Blue, and later the Bubba Gump shrimp company. Not that it was actually filmed there, you understand: Forrest Gump was filmed in nine states plus the District of Columbia, but Alabama wasn’t one of them.
The other film-related happening in Bayou La Batre was the building in 2005 of the Black Pearl, Captain Jack Sparrow’s ship in the sequels to Pirates of the Carribean. The Bayou is a center for ship-building, and Disney needed themselves a pirate ship, so they contracted with Steiner Shipyard to build the jet-black boat in secret, then sailed it to the Caribbean to shoot the films. Actually, the Pearl is just a prop, a shell built over a 96-foot utility boat.
So there you go. The state of film-making in Bayou La Batre. A location that never was, and a ship that was but wasn’t, if you get what I’m trying to say. Movie magic at its best, and all right here — or not here, as the case may be — in South Alabama.
I hope everybody has a happy Fourth of July, and eats a lot of hotdogs and drinks a lot of beer!
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No hot dogs and beer for me, I’m one an extended chicken breast and salad diet. I feel like a yoyo. You don’t look like a guy who is old enough to have a son-in-law! That’s wonderful rural living and that’s God’s country you are visiting! With all the mention of FORREST GUMP, I’m thinking more of FRIED GREEN TOMATOES. Some nice tidbits there that few would be aware of like the building of Jack Sparrow’s ship in Bayou La Batre.
I patiently await your return Sir, however as French cinema awaits your exquisite insights.
Sam, it is indeed kind of like “Fried Green Tomatoes,” though that took place not in the Low Country, but in the Piedmont, and even though it supposedly took place in Alabama, it was filmed in Georgia and Florida. Alabama can’t catch a break.
I am back and watching the Tour de France.