Michael Bay’s a busy guy these days. Right now, he’s shooting Pain and Gain, the dream project he’s always wanted to do, which is a smaller, black comedy about gym rats pulling a kidnapping.
In exchange for making a smaller film, he’ll shoot Transformers 4 for Paramount, which is how the 70’s filmmakers tried to run their careers. You do one for them, a big commercial flick like The Godfather, and one for yourself you can get made with your newfound clout.
Now Bay is heading for TV, like a lot of people in Hollywood, because it gives you more freedom than features, and you can tell some incredible stories over a long period of time.
Where others have headed back to the gladiator days with Spartacus and Rome, and the mediaeval Game of Thrones is the hottest thing since sliced bread, Bay is going to do a pirate show called Black Sails that will be shooting in Cape Town, South Africa.
As Entertainment Weekly reports, the show got the greenlight for eight shows on Starz for a scheduled debut in 2014. Black Sails is about Captain Flint, “the most brilliant and most feared pirate caption of his day.” Flint takes on a protégé, John Silver, and their adventures on New Providence Island, a pirate paradise with plenty of thieves, hookers and skeeves.
The head of the Starz network, Chris Albrecht, said, “Along with the high-octane action that is a hallmark of a Michael Bay production, it has the elements that Starz originals are striving to bring to the premium landscape…epic, larger than life, cinematic storytelling.”
And with Bay at the helm, you know there’s gonna be tons of sh*t blowin’ up, and pirate babes galore, otherwise it just wouldn’t be Bay.
