There was a time once when MTV was a vital network with original music-oriented programming that people actually watched. Yet, somehow, back in their early 1980’s-prime, they did not appreciate Cameron Crowe’s first film, a documentary profile of Tom Petty and his Heartbreaker bandmates, as they began promoting their Long After Dark album. If it had premiered five years later, it might have been a mainstay on MTV, but instead it disappeared after one late-night 1983 broadcast. Long sought after by fans, Crowe’s Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party, co-directed by Doug Dowdle and Phil Savenick, screens nationwide this Thursday and Sunday, followed by a special twenty-minute package of bonus footage.
Reportedly, Heartbreakers Beach Party helped inspire This is Spinal Tap, but MTV just did not get it. Stylistically, it shares an eccentric kinship with Les Blank’s long-unreleased Leon Russell documentary, A Poem is a Naked Person. Instead of conventional talking heads, each looks for offbeat but telling moments and neither feared the occasional distraction. Crowe even indulges in periodic sight gags, which probably would have endeared it to the MTV audience had they had more time to acclimate to the humor of Late Night with David Letterman, and the like.
Crowe also injects himself into the film as the host and on-camera interviewer, who is so nebbish, he even mocks himself. Yet, in retrospect, his presence hardly feels unusual after several decades of Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock, Louis Theroux, and other idiosyncratic documentarians who appear in their own films. Regardless, viewers are more likely apt to remember Petty hailed from Gainesville, Florida after watching the band giggling as the town’s mayor tried to praise Petty’s upstanding moral character, at the ceremony awarding him the key to the city, than they would from a series of drily conventional interviews with his high school music teacher.
Unlike Russell, Petty seemed to appreciate and cooperate with the film’s off-kilter sensibility, by suggesting Crowe conduct their interviews in the backseat of a rented limo. Regardless, the Petty family certainly embraces the film now, since his daughter, music video director Adria Petty, co-hosts the bonus featurette with Crowe.
Perhaps most importantly, Beach Party captures the band in their prime. For instance, Crowe includes a great Heartbreakers jam on “A One Story Town” and the full music video for “You Got Lucky” (which featured a hover car from Logan’s Run).
It just goes to show sometimes MTV was uncool even when it was cool. It definitely helps put Petty’s pre-“Don’t Come Around Here No More”/Full Moon Fever career in prospective. In fact, Petty nicely captures the spirit of the 1980s when he talks about the optimism expressed in the tune “Straight into Darkness.” Highly recommended for Petty fans and anyone interested in the development of rock docs as a genre, Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party screens nationwide this Thursday (10/17) and Sunday (10/20), including the AMC Empire in New York.