When you frolicked on the Chart Room, Full Moon Saloon or Louie’s Yard in Key West throughout the late Seventies and early ’80s, you knew Jimmy Buffett. The legendary Chart Room on the Pier Home Resort, the “Moon” the place writers and renegades shared tales, and the high-rollers’ haven known as Louie’s Afterdeck have been his go-to spots.
In these days I used to be residing with Phil Clark, a charismatic man with a renegade soul, who had turned out to be the topic of my favourite Buffett music: “A Pirate Seems at Forty.” I received to know Jimmy by way of Phil, and thru the literati, smugglers and fishing guides who frequented the aforementioned island hotspots.
Jimmy was perennially laid-back however at all times prepared for journey, and he appeared to mild up each room he entered. What he couldn’t do, in these tentative early days of the know-how revolution, was function a pc — and that’s why he reached out to me.
It occurred a few 12 months after Phil was caught importing illicit substances and disappeared. I used to be working as a part-time workplace supervisor for a troublesome boss, who taught me what folks then known as “phrase processing.”
At that time, Jimmy lived close to Louie’s and was writing a screenplay — handwriting it in capital letters on yellow authorized pads. He wanted somebody to enter the script onto his laptop, an Apple IIc that he barely knew how one can activate, and a mutual pal instructed he rent me.
Whether or not it stemmed from Jimmy’s lengthy affiliation with Phil, his acquaintance with me or his personal easygoing nature, he determined to belief me. His laptop shortly turned my duty, and he gave me a workspace in his condominium and the liberty to wander out and in as wanted.
Much more essential, he trusted me together with his screenplay — which in these days was his ardour and the main target of his intense creativity.
Its working title was “The Margaritaville Film,” and it was filled with partaking characters that included the carefree Delaney and a person named Frank Bama. Frank later turned up because the protagonist of Jimmy’s novel “The place is Joe Service provider?” (and, oddly sufficient, as an eccentric helicopter pilot performed by Jimmy himself in a number of episodes of tv’s reincarnated “Hawaii 5-0”).
“The Margaritaville Film,” set on a fictional island that had rather a lot in frequent with Key West, was a sun-drenched romp and a complete delight. The great guys triumphed, the hero wound up together with his love curiosity, and just about everyone who learn the script pages (meticulously printed on a dot-matrix printer we acquired someplace alongside the road) wished to maneuver to the fictional island.
For me — regardless of occasional all-nighters essential to sustain with Jimmy’s fast-paced writing, and intensive edits required by his frequent character revisions — it was a uncommon privilege to watch his artistic course of because the story unfolded.
Sadly, the beautiful feel-good script (although accomplished) by no means turned a movie. For a number of causes, together with Jimmy’s resolution to open the primary Margaritaville Retailer, he put the venture apart. He gave me his stack of yellow pads and the ultimate printed script, and advised me to hold onto them till he wished them once more.
I did, storing them safely for many years whereas his expertise introduced him huge success in realm after realm. We reconnected a few 12 months earlier than his demise, and the script and yellow pads lastly went dwelling with him.
Jimmy Buffett will at all times be famed as a singer-songwriter who impressed a mystique, a way of life and finally an empire. But that doesn’t totally talk the breadth of his creativity. Although “The Margaritaville Film” was by no means produced, scripting it set him on the trail to put in writing “Tales from Margaritaville” and his different top-selling books — and turn out to be one of many main storytellers of our technology.
