‘Captain Ron’ was real

It was during the COVID-19 outbreak – remember 2020? – when Scuttlebutt compiled a list of the best boat movies to watch during quarantine. A popular submission was Captain Ron which featured a Chicagoan who inherited an old yacht and the dubious captain he hired.

In this Loose Cannon report, Peter Swanson explains how truth and fiction merged in the movie:

Captain Ron was real. I knew Captain Ron. Correction: Several of them.

Movie Ron is an archetype, a subset of “Florida Man,” a dude defined by daily headlines down here. No exaggeration, Florida breeds more Rons than it does Pink Flamingos.

It should surprise no one, then, that Captain Ron the movie is a true and accurate depiction. “All books are alike in that they a truer than if they had really happened,” Ernest Hemingway once wrote. (Many books and some movies, he should have said.)

Starring Kurt Russell and Martin Short, the 1992 movie might be pigeonholed as farce, but just because it makes you laugh does not detract from its historical truthiness. – Full report