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Boats a platform for entertainment industry

With the sports and entertainment industries increasingly in convergence, it was bound to happen, and the skull and cutlass on the sails of the 70-foot sloop that cruised into Vigo's harbor on Friday are high-flying proof that the era of cross-promotion has arrived at a new, but not necessarily safer, place.

Sports have spawned scores of Hollywood films, from the sublime (Raging Bull with Robert De Niro) to the ridiculous (The Fan with Robert De Niro). Now, in a novel case of life imitating art before the art is ready for release, it is a Hollywood film's turn to spawn something sporting.

If the sequel to Pirates of the Caribbean were not opening worldwide next July, there would be no American-led entry in the Volvo Ocean Race, which begins in earnest today when seven boats sail out of this Galician port on the first of nine legs, one of which will start in New York in May.

Without the sequel, Paul Cayard would still be on semi-sabbatical at home in San Francisco, helping his two teenage children through the vagaries of high school, instead of preparing to lead another cosmopolitan crew on a controlled panic of a circumnavigation through the doldrums and the southern oceans.

But for the moment, Johnny Depp is on location in the Caribbean reprising his role as the disheveled, offbeat captain of the Black Pearl. And earlier this week, the more clean-cut and on-message Captain Cayard gave a reporter a tour of the other Black Pearl as his crew members hustled around the new yacht in an attempt to make up for lost months.

"It's good to be a pirate," said Cayard, not for the first time and almost certainly not for the last.

This race, after all, stretches for nearly eight months and includes extended stops on five continents for retooling and for meeting and greeting, which was a big part of the reason Disney concluded that the Volvo was a good vehicle through which to promote its film.

The company had already done something similar, naming its National Hockey League franchise the Mighty Ducks in 1993, after the team in its misfit-teens-make-good hockey movie. But that tie-in came after the movie's release.

"A lot of studios put up a logo, as they do with Nascar, but it's nothing as organic as this," said Donald Evans, vice president for marketing and promotions at Buena Vista International, Disney's worldwide marketing and distribution division.

"Movies are not a tangible experience," Evans said. "You go to a theater and watch a movie. It plays to you. This was an opportunity to bring a piece of Hollywood and piece of the movie literally around the globe."

The organizers of this quadrennial round-the-world race, formerly known as the Whitbread, brought the idea of sponsoring a boat to Disney in the fall of 2004, not knowing that the company was planning a Pirates sequel. Disney came on board in March, by which time some of the other Volvo entrants, including Spain's Movistar, were already testing their boats under sail.

Initially reluctant to commit because of family obligations, Cayard, the 46-year-old America's Cup veteran who won this race in 1998, was not announced as skipper until early in August. Still, he has managed to put together an experienced sailing team.

"This race gave me more on a personal level than any other sailing competition I've been in, including the Olympics," Cayard said.

At the capitalistic core, there is no philosophical difference between a software company using a sailing race to boost awareness of one of its brands and a film studio using a race to promote one of its products. But on the surface, it certainly seems different. Software, despite ever-more nautical uses, is not inherently about star power and adventure on the high seas.

"I'm not bad mouthing typical commercial sponsorships, because we've all raced with those for years, and they're great," Cayard said. "But this thing with Pirates, it's more of a vision or dream, so that was very intriguing to me, and at the end of the day, that was what put me over the edge. And despite being extremely late and despite being way under the gun, I was ready to jump in."

Well aware that the vision thing ran the risk of veering into undignified territory, Cayard and his sailing team worked with Disney to find the appropriate linkage between the pirate ship and the race boat. (Any company that would name an NHL team the Mighty Ducks bears close watching.)

"We didn't want to have cannons coming out of the side of the boat and teak decks," said the Black Pearl's shore manager, Kimo Worthington.
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