The Cove Movie theaters and showtimes

Simon Hutchins went to work for Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jim Clark as a deck hand in 1995, leading dives off the Netscape founder’s yachts.

Photographer Louie Psihoyos met Clark, a Palm Beach billionaire, while taking his picture for the cover of Fortune magazine in 1999.

The three would go on to sail some of the world’s best dive spots in Fiji, Tahiti and the Galapagos Islands aboard Clark’s 156-foot yacht, Hyperion. Hutchins led the expeditions while Psihoyos took underwater footage that he would edit into stunning, 15-minute DVDs — leading Clark to suggest that the three make a real movie. But what kind?

“I don’t care, but let’s make a difference,” was Clark’s response, Hutchins recalled in a telephone interview.

And so began the multiyear project that resulted in The Cove, a guerrilla documentary about the mass killing of dolphins in Taiji, Japan, that’s racking up accolades on the film festival circuit, including the audience award at the Sundance Film Festival.

The movie debuted July 31 in Los Angeles and New York. It opened Friday in select theaters in Palm Beach County and elsewhere.

Psihoyos and Hutchins eventually came to meet Ric O’Barry, the underwater ringmaster-turned-activist who found fame and fortune early in life training the dolphins who played “Flipper” in the mid-1960s television show. O’Barry, the film’s central character, has sought redemption ever since, blaming the kitschy TV program for inciting a worldwide fascination with dolphins as entertainment.

“I was buying a new Porsche every year,” O’Barry says in the film. “But I was as ignorant as I could be for as long as I could be.”

What’s wrong with dolphin shows? Plenty, says O’Barry, who says the mammals’ permanent smiles betray a life of misery and stress in captivity.

“Ric is such a compelling character,” said Hutchins, 46, speaking from Los Angeles before the movie’s premiere there. “He’s basically been working on this script for 35 years.”

The movie depicts the new O’Barry as a cross between an environmental activist and rogue Navy SEAL, donning scuba gear, slicing open nets and busting locks to free the finned creatures wherever they may be in captivity.

“I spent 10 years building that industry up,” O’Barry says. “And I spent the last 35 years trying to tear it down.”

The industry, it turns out, leans heavily on the small Japanese fishing village of Taiji, where local fisherman have made a seasonal practice of herding tens of thousands of dolphins into a small cove for either capture or slaughter.

The Cove makes the point that what’s sold as food should not be. Dolphin meat — part of the lunch menu in some Japanese schools — is so saturated with mercury, at 2,000 parts per million, that it’s poisonous to humans.

O’Barry leads Psihoyos, Hutchins and the team to Taiji. Here, the movie takes a 007 turn, as the team assembles an array of high-tech gadgetry (video cameras hidden in rocks, military-grade thermal camcorders, underwater microphones) and begins running covert night missions to plant the video equipment around the heavily guarded cove — all while dodging police and fishermen in the interest of exposing the practice to a world audience.

But the film touches on the ugly politics of the business as well, showing, among other things, how Japan buys the support of impoverished nations as it petitions international commissions to roll back a 1986 ban on commercial whaling.

“We wanted to take a pen-is-mightier-than-the-sword approach,” Hutchins said. “Make a beautiful movie that everybody would watch.”

Showtimes are available at www. thecovemovie.com