A type of hybrid between Gilligan’s Island, Robinson Caruso and The Mosquito Coast; with a dash of the urban angst of Seinfield. Eating Buccaneers is an independent comedy to be released this week.It involves four advertising types—the agency v.p.,the junior account executive, copywriter and art executive who have to work together with their neurotic client when their charter plane crashes in Northern Canada. Its highly implausible, low budget, yet risks to be quite amusing as a situation comedy. The actors seem to be more marooned in their own minds more than suffering in the wilds. However, the whiff of mortality tends to expand on their fragile and vulnerable natures. 
With little sustenance and few prospects of being found, the group’s early solidarity rapidly dissolves. ”Nobody’s gonna search for us” mumbles the copywriter, ” we’re in advertising”.Or to the customer ”we’re not going to eat you my friend, you’re a client.” This is not the flight of the Phoenix, but the crash and subsequent reflections on life could be reminiscent of James Hilton’s Paradise Lost. Maybe Shangri-La exists just south of the tree line.
The superficiality of the ad industry workers, is in itself a compelling critique of the industry and their role, mostly unconscious, in encouraging and abetting over-consumption. Its an industry that lends itself to satire due in part to the absurdity of their role and the insecurity of employment. Bill Keenan, an ad industry creative director, wrote and directed ”Eating Buccaneers”. H.G Wells once said, ”advertising is legalized lying” and ” what really matters is what you do with what you have,”and Keenan appears to have transcended the limitations of advertising and realized a good flick with limited resources. The scenario seems to lend itself more to the stage, which would lower the cinematic expectations, however it does appear cleverly made, and reliably captures the archetypes that have been associated with advertising agencies.
Also, the difference between cinematic art and advertising art seems to narrow and the edges of demarcation are more blurry all the time:
”I pay the bills writing freelance advertising. The interesting thing about a TV commercial is that it’s really a thirty second short film in the sense of working with film people. For each spot, I get to choose the director. Then along with the director, I work with the casting director to pick the cast and I then have a close-up opportunity to observe the cinematographer at work. After I finesse the cut with the editor, I choose and work with the music composer. It’s really been a tremendous training ground for my film work.”( Bill Keenan, Jeff White interview, Victoria Film Festival )
”We shot the movie on HDCam for a number of reasons. First was budget. We just couldn’t afford 35mm. We rented a top of the line Sony 900R and shot the footage—uncompressed—onto HDCam tape. This was big learning for me. Lot’s of video cameras are HD but most of them compress the image onto a smaller tape or hard drive. Any time you compress the image you degrade it. When we had our cast/crew screening at the Royal Theatre in Toronto, in full 1080i high-def, the picture was magnificent. In some of those forest scenes, with the sunlight coming through the trees, you couldn’t have shot it any more beautifully than if you had a huge Hollywood budget. We also tested different cameras for how they handled the contrast of a forest where bright sunlight and darker shadows exist side by side and we felt the Sony did the best job.” ( Jeff White Interview )
”I think people go to Hollywood movies based on what stars are in it, for the most part. That’s why lukewarm reviews don’t prevent people from seeing their favourite stars. For indie and festival movies, critical/media response is everything. The Toronto festival launched Michael Moore. Look at Slumdog Millionaire. I heard it was destined to direct-to-video until it won the audience award at TIFF. Juno first opened on something like seven screens in North America. That’s it. They didn’t know what they had. They opened it slowly and let the word build until critical acclaim made it hugely successful.” ( Bill Keenan interview, Jeff White, Efilmcritic.com )
The modern template for this genre of film, would clearly be the series ”Lost” on ABC. Keenan appears to approach the idiom from an engaging yet different perspective, but can pick up cues from Lost, through weaving touches of mythology, illusion and the surreal juxtaposition between reality and fiction in order to develop a cult base.
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