Midshipmen

Sailing the high seas with Horatio Hornblower and Jack Aubrey

IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION:

THE BARDI PARTY REPORT

I watched Master & Commander for the first time last week. Like Griffin, in 2003, it seemed very much not my cup of tea - boats, men, history, war. In 2003, I liked Lost in Translation and Kill Bill and writing in my Xanga about how I wanted to kiss Jake Gyllenhaal. Also like Griffin, I’ll hold off on watching movies once I get the sense that they’ll come up for this podcast. Master & Commander has come up so often as a David urtext (so much so that when his daughter was born, my baby gift was a Master & Commander onesie), that I put it off for years. Now I can finally say that I LOVE Master & Commander. Blakeney is my son and Aubrey is my husband and Maturin is our boyfriend and Killick is my best friend. I get SO seasick on boats, but I want to go on a boat with John Hodgman now and I want him to teach me about wind. I am a woman obsessed.

My friend Elisa felt the same way after watching Master & Commander three years ago. As David Sims recounted on this week’s episode, she texted him asking what else she should watch in order to scratch this very specific British Napoleonic Homosocial Maritime Itch. David suggested Hornblower.

Hornblower - based on the C.S. Forester novels - is a series of films made for British Television (and subsequently aired on A&E in the states) about fictional seaman Horatio Hornblower. Played by future Mr. Fantastic Ioan Gruffudd, Horatio Hornblower starts off as a lowly twink midshipman, and through valor and kindness and gumption, he rises to the rank of twunk Commander. His mentor and leader is Captain Sir Edward Pellew (played by great British theater and tv actor Robert Lindsay), and his seawife is Midshipman (and later Lieutenant) Archie Kennedy (played by Jamie Bamber, aka Apollo on BSG). Their ship is called the HMS Indefatigable, affectionately called “The Indy” by her men, because “indefatigable” is a crazy word to have to say all the time.

There are eight Hornblower installments. Because I am American, I assumed that the six of us Hornblowing (David Sims, Forky, Elisa, David Ehrlich, myself, and my husband David Salinas) would be able to binge the entire series in the one long weekend we spent upstate in November 2023. This was not the case. Each Hornblower episode is really its own feature film. To this date, we’ve only watched the first four. It’s hard coordinating schedules for six people who collectively have five children and countless destination weddings to attend on any given weekend.

What I like about the Hornblower series thus far:

• Each installment is about a new lesson Horatio needs to learn if he hopes to become a great leader. Like, “don’t get involved in duels” or “don’t trust actresses” or “don’t fall in love with a hot French girl when you’re at war with the French”

• The words “frigate” and “indefatigable” and “Hornblower” and “lef-tenant”

• The incredible sexual tension between two beautiful men - Hornblower and Kennedy. They don’t like each other at first, and then they grow to love and respect each other. Classic dynamic. Also one is brunette and one is blonde.

• In the third film - The Duchess and the Devil - there is a WOMAN on the boat and she is REALLY COOL and is a spy and an actress and she’s also older than Hornblower, which is an interesting dynamic. They had crackling chemistry.

• I really don’t know how they filmed it - it looks pretty great and expensive and there are real boats and real water and cannonfire and shit.

• Ioan Gruffudd has incredible bone structure.

• All of the guys are just really great, stinky looking British character actors. You have to respect.

Horatio Hornblower isn’t really a perfect Jack Aubrey analogue - or at least, not the way Russell Crowe plays him. He’s probably more of a James D’Arcy. Beautiful and aristocratic. But the Hornblower series is definitely a worthy exploration if you want to keep sailing the high seas after M&C.

There’s no easy way to stream them in the states, so David bought the DVD box set. Someone has uploaded them to Internet Archive here if you’re curious, but I can’t really attest to the picture/audio quality.

The Hornblowers (our viewing group) are tentatively set to reconvene later this month to watch the next installment - watch this space for updates.

MERCHANDISE SPOTLIGHT

Speaking of Master & Commander fandom, our friends at SuperYaki are reissuing their line of M&C merch to coincide with our episode!

As seen on David Sims, the Oceans Are Now Battlefields shirt and hat are must-have fashion statements for midshipmen everywhere.

Men must be governed! They also must look cool as hell!!!

Head over to SuperYaki to purchase your own M&C merch, and use code THEBLANKCHECKSPECIAL to get 20% off the Oceans Are Now Battlefields Collection.

LET’S CRACK OPEN THE DOSSIER

The Movie Star

In an October 2002 New York Times article detailing the development and production of Peter Weir’s 2003 seafaring drama Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Fox chairman Tom Rothman—the person perhaps most responsible for bringing an adaptation of Patrick O’Brian’s beloved Aubrey-Maturin novels to the silver screen—was already slightly on the defensive. Weir and Happy Feet writer John Collee’s screenplay was not a strict adaptation of any single one of O’Brian’s books: it combined elements from the tenth and first novels in the series with an assortment of Weir and Collee’s original creations. A full year ahead of the film’s release, Rothman sought to quiet any potential O’Brian hardliners, saying, “My feeling is that as long as you are true to the spirit of the book and the spirit of the characters, then you’ll be all right.” Star Russell Crowe—as you’d want him to be, of course—was less polite, more blunt: “The way I figure it, Patrick O’Brian is dead. And anyway, we’re making a movie here.”¹ Now, this wasn’t Shakespeare or Tolstoy whom Crowe was burying: O’Brian had passed only a couple years earlier in January 2000, and his most recent Aubrey-Maturin novel had been published in 1999. But that was long enough for Crowe to move on.

Besides, the actor was too busy living to fret about death. In a 15th anniversary piece published by The Wrap in 2018, co-star James D’Arcy recounted Crowe in all his (reckless) glory. One day on set, D’Arcy and Crowe were tasked with climbing the HMS Surprise’s crow’s nest while a helicopter and camera circled above. Though D’Arcy obediently donned his required safety harness, Crowe was less willing to adhere to the stunt team’s guidelines over fears that it would ruin the shot. He climbed the rigging without his harness, putting it on only once he reached its summit. In D’Arcy’s memory, “[W]hen we got to the top [Crowe] asked, ‘James, can you see my harness?’ I told him I could sort of see the belt, and he just said…‘Take it off.’ And I told him that they could just remove it from the shot with computers, and he just gave me that Russell Crowe look and said ‘Take. It. Off.’ And as I’m taking it off I’m wondering, if Russell falls…does that make me an accomplice?”² D’Arcy’s fears never came to fruition: thank God, our star is still out here shining.

Organized Chaos and Disorganized Chaos

In that same piece in The Wrap, Weir’s creative process on Master and Commander was described as “organized chaos.” Producer Duncan Henderson explained, “Weir specifically said during pre-production meetings that he wanted many of the scenes to feel a bit like a documentary.” The work to pull off that kind of feel was painstaking. “In this movie,” D’Arcy said, “there were days where we’d only get two or three shots done, and Weir and the crew would be really happy and I’d just be thinking, ‘Huh?!’” More specifically, according to D’Arcy, “there was a call sheet that came out towards the end of the shooting, and the first scene of the day was listed as ‘The Surprise crashes into the Acheron.’ It took up one-eighth of the call sheet’s page… but that sheet didn’t change for three weeks!”³ No matter how slow or difficult, the production offered its director an immersive and energizing peak into lived history. “I came out of this production,” Weir told Variety, “stimulated by the enterprise.”⁴

The real difficulties came in post-production. Amongst the executives at Fox and support studios Universal and Miramax, “fear began to circulate,” in Weir’s words, which he labeled as “very destructive.”⁵ The worries, Weir reported, were mostly due to the film’s lack of an obvious villain and its lack of a female lead/romance, two things everyone could have, you know, obviously seen coming. But things feel different once the advertisers enter the room: per Rothman in October 2003, “The marketing is a challenge. We can’t show the conventional girl in a bodice.”⁶ But Weir never wavered, instead breaking out another of his classic metaphors: “This was our concept. If we dilute it, it’s like a drink that falls between two barstools.”⁷

Speaking to The New York Times in November 2003, Weir was immense with relief (and another metaphor) after serving this period of disorganized chaos: “I look back and feel like I just stepped off a high wire stretched over the Grand Canyon.”⁸ It was a stunt the director was never given the chance to pull off again.

WHAT IS THE TEAM INTO THIS WEEK?

Griffin Newman, Host: “Between THE MANDOLORIAN AND GROGU and the ROBOCOP series starting up on Patreon today I’ve been on a real Phil Tippett kick. On the *very* chill Mando ep I mentioned recently watching a French documentary about him (“PHIL TIPPETT: MAD DREAMS AND MONSTERS”) but beyond the treasure trove of interviews with him in ROBODOC and both seasons of the ILM series on D+ my favorite doc about him is this short from Vice made during production of MAD GOD that delves more into the relationship between his film work and his psychology than anything else I’ve seen:

While I’m at it, if you haven’t watched MAD GOD you should watch the shit out of MAD GOD asap. It’s streaming on Shudder and available to rent most places.”

Marie Bardi, Social Media: “I am once again recommending Victor Wembanyama and the San Antonio Spurs. It’s gonna be a tough finals for me emotionally as a resident of New York City and a sometimes Knicks bandwagoner. I like the Knicks players a lot, and I love New York City when we are good at sports. However, I cannot support James Dolan and his mass surveillance, Trump cronyism bullshit. Go Spurs Go.”

Marika Brownlee, Director of Ops: “This week I’m recommending bringing Capri-Sun to a party for adults. I couldn’t decide what to bring to a friend’s cookout this weekend until I witnessed [celebrity name drop] putting Capri-Suns in a cooler to prep for a 90s-themed party. Theme or no theme, they’re nostalgic and fun to drink!! You will get a lot of people being like “wow I haven’t had one of these in decades”! They WILL taste slightly different because there’s less sugar in them now, but I feel like adults will be happy about that. Flavor-wise I think Pacific Cooler and Mountain Cooler”

AJ McKeon, Editor: “I’ll recommend these Zebra Pen Grays Zebra HIGHLITERs if you want to highlight stuff but not be overpowered with neon”

JJ Bersch, Researcher: “The new Boards of Canada album Inferno—their first in 13 years—is my album of the year (so far), even though (or maybe because?) it has produced the most intense and sustained period of nightmares I’ve had since, like, my freshman year of college when I had consistent visits from sleep paralysis demons lol.”

Alan Smithee, Pseudonymous Editor: “I would like to recommend a little film called The Sheep Detectives. It’s about sheep who are also detectives. It made me cry several times and also laugh out loud several times. Nicholas Braun has a much better English accent than you would imagine. And the sheep! Oh the sheep! They’re such great detectives!”

THIS WEEK ON THE PODCAST

Beat to quarters, men..and nice Brazilian lady holding an umbrella! We're sailing the high seas with John Hodgman this week as we unpack one of David Sims' favorite films - 2003's Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

CRITICAL DARLINGS
This week, it’s springtime for sad boys, with “Obsession!” a horror flick from Blumhouse and director Curry Barker.

MEANWHILE ON PATREON…..

Dead or alive, you’re podding with US! We’re kicking off our Half-Man / Half Machine / 100%-on-Flic series on the films of Robert Cop as we discuss (again) 1987’s RoboCop.

COMING SOON:

ON PATREON, WE ARE MOVING SOME THINGS AROUND TO DEAL WITH OUR PROJECTOR BEING BROKEN LOL. OFFICIAL ROBOCOP COMMENTARY SCHEDULE TO COME!

1. New York Times, October 13, 2002.

2. The Wrap, November 13, 2018.

3. Ibid.

4. Variety, November 6, 2003.

5. Variety, May 31, 2004.

6. New York Times, November 13, 2003.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.