Baggin’ a little career bounty

FOR years, they have lived before the mast, chasing treasure and disaster from St. Vincent to Dominica to the Bahamas (not to mention Burbank and Palmdale). Lashed by wind and water, scorched by sun and sand, occasionally eaten alive by mosquitoes, they may not be screamed at by swooning girls, but their place in film history is undeniable. They are the pirates of “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

Ragetti and Pintel; Cotton and Mr. Gibbs; Marty, the small pirate: These may not be household names like Jack Sparrow, Will Turner and Capt. Barbossa, but without them, the captains would be crewless and the movies much less rich -- what would “The Curse of the Black Pearl” be without Ragetti’s rolling eye or Pintel’s sinister “Hallo, poppet”?

“My biggest break was that they couldn’t find short, bald and crazy in London,” says Lee Arenberg, who plays Pintel. “Gore” -- that’s director Gore Verbinski -- “is a stickler for authenticity, and he wasn’t reading out here in L.A. But the English guys crashed and burned, which was great for me.”

A Santa Monica native, Arenberg loved “livin’ the ride,” as many of the cast and crew refer to the years-long, multiple-location, hurricane-interrupted experience of shooting the three movies, the second and third at the same time. It left all involved very tan, very fit and very, very famous.

“Everywhere I go, people know me,” says Marty Klebba, who plays Marty. “The other guys, sometimes people don’t recognize them without their costume, but I’m little so all the kids know me.”

“It was an extraordinary turnaround for me,” says Kevin McNally, whose Joshamee Gibbs is, when first seen, a respectable if drink-loving sailor who is afraid of pirates, only to become Capt. Jack’s less-than-courageous skipper. “You do all these small films and rarely meet anyone who has ever seen them, and now this. It is a definite advantage on the playground,” he adds. “You finally have a chance to be cool to your kids.”

How many dads can say they’ve been to pirate school? That’s how the job started, way before “The Curse of the Black Pearl” began shooting, when many of the pirates were taught how to use a sword, climb rigging and, most important, work the cannons.

“I had no idea how to fire a fake cannon,” says Arenberg, who certainly does now. “It’s very awkward, especially on a moving pirate ship. Every time we did it, even for comedy, we took it quite seriously. It was very dangerous, people got toes smashed and shins bruised and Gore, of course, wanted big, bouncing cannon shots.”

David Bailie, who plays Cotton, the mute pirate with the parrot, had enough training to skip pirate school -- as an alumnus of “Cutthroat Island,” he knew his way around swords and cannons. What he wasn’t used to was parrots.

“Anyone who has not had a parrot squawk in their ear really hasn’t lived,” he says. “They get lonely, you know, and they bellow about it.”

As a reluctant parrot expert, he now knows too well the difference between your union birds and your neophytes. A few days before the trained parrots hired for “The Curse of the Black Pearl” were to be sent to St. Vincent, a bird flu broke out in California, so untrained ringers from Miami had to be substituted.

“All these birds could do was sit on your shoulder when you were standing absolutely still,” he says. Which in Cotton’s case wasn’t often. “I’d move and the bloody thing would fall off, grab my arm muscle in his beak and just hang there.”

McNally missed his pirate training course as well. His character was first conceived as too cowardly to engage in any sort of fight, so the actor was given a pass from pirate school. Then a few weeks into shooting “The Curse of the Black Pearl,” Verbinski came up and mentioned that he’d gotten himself into a bit of a jam -- the script now called for Gibbs and his crew of four to defend themselves from a hundred cursed and skeletal pirates who couldn’t be killed. “So,” McNally explains, “suddenly Gibbs was going to have to kick ass. I got a very good fencing instructor and learned as quickly as I could.”

It just got worse. In “Dead Man’s Chest,” he had to run across a river, then deep sand, then grab a rope and haul himself up onto the ship. “I felt every one of my 49 years,” McNally says.

Arenberg worked so hard toting Davy Jones’ chest through the jungles that he started to lose his trademark gut. “Gore came up to me and said, ‘Where’s the belly? You’re starting to look too cut.’ So he put me on double portions, which was great.”

Nobody said it’d be easy

NO one involved would describe the shoot, which amounted to about three years out of the actors’ lives, as grueling because it was too much fun. But it was certainly intense. McNally, at one point, had to swim through choppy seas and climb the rigging up on deck -- the hardest thing he’s had to do as an actor, he said.

“There I am treading water in my soaking wet sailcloth costume, then swim to the boat and pull myself up,” he says. “It was very much like being a real pirate, only you had a director yelling at you to ‘act louder’ and you had to do it four or five times.”

And then there was the bone cage. In the second film, “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,” the crew of the Black Pearl is captured by cannibals and hung over a ravine in a huge cage made of human bones, which eventually they swing, roll and crash to freedom. In reality, the cage was made of steel covered in foam bones and the sequence was inordinately complicated to shoot.

“Wherever we were,” McNally says, “Barbados, St. Vincent, at some point they would tell us, ‘And next week we’re going to do the bone cage.’ We’d all groan, ‘No, no, not the bone cage.’ When I saw the film I couldn’t believe it, the sequence is what, four minutes? And it practically killed us.”

The bone cage. Bailie too groans in remembrance. “The thing weighed 250 pounds. There were only five of us carrying it, and Marty Klebba, who’s another 80. I must tell you,” says Bailie, who turns 70 this year, “that I am not a young man.”

Klebba may have been too short to help with the bone cage, but as a professional stuntman, he was the only member of the acting crew who did his own stunts. So his days were twice as long because he shot the acting scenes and then the action scenes. While the on-deck scenes in the first film were done out at sea, many of those in the second and third films were shot in an enormous soundstage in Palmdale, where conditions, though more controllable, were also more intense.

“I definitely got beat up,” he says. “You’re in a harness a lot because one bad move and you’re going over the side, which is not fun. There are 60- to 70-mile-an-hour winds, the water is very cold and the deck is pitching.”

During these moments, he says, pirate Marty took over. But Klebba is still recovering from severe sunburn on the top of his bald head. “They tried to give me a hat in the first movie,” he says, “but with all the action, I lost that real quick.”

At the center of all the adventure was, of course, the acting. Being around the likes of Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush and Bill Nighy, Arenberg says, was the biggest thrill of the ride. “Johnny lit everything up with his magnesium flame,” he says. “He set up everyone’s success. And Geoffrey Rush, he’s an Australian so he just hung with the guys. I learned so much from just watching him.”

In one big scene from “The Curse of the Black Pearl,” Rush had to work with a trained monkey who was having a bad day. Take after take after take went by, Arenberg remembers, with Rush playing the scene perfectly every time while the monkey swarmed and chattered and the trainer occasionally hit Rush in the face with his little squirt bottle until finally the monkey hit his marks.

“At the end I went up to him and said, ‘Man, I can’t believe you were able to do that,’ ” Arenberg says. “And he just grinned and said, ‘Had to, mate. Because if I didn’t, we would have never gotten it.’ ”

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mary.mcnamara@latimes.com