Cameron Crowe on Resurrecting Tom Petty Doc ‘Heartbreakers Beach Party’

Before “Almost Famous” and all his other directorial efforts, Cameron Crowe immortalized a different kind of golden god: Tom Petty. A nearly forgotten documentary he co-directed about Petty & the Heartbreakers in 1983, titled “Heartbreakers Beach Party,” has been pulled out of the vault and restored, for showings that will take place in theaters across the nation on Thursday and Saturday of this week.

Never publicly available for viewing since briefly airing on MTV in February ‘83, the rock doc is an illuminating lark, catching Petty and his bandmates as they ride out the crest of their first big swell of success, with the group’s fifth album, “Long After Dark,” just about to come out. They’re still in the prime of rock ‘n’ roll youth and highjinx, although Petty is far enough into his career to wonder what his legacy might be, decades down the line. Now we have yet another answer: it’s legacy enough that still-loyal fans will be visiting cinemas to experience a gratifying artifact that only a small percentage have even heard about until now.

Crowe is happy not just about the film being revived but the chance to add an outtakes section, in which he talks anew with Petty’s daughter, Adria, and brings up some never-before-seen clips, like a surprisingly tender acoustic performance of the Elvis Presley classic “His Latest Flame.” (It was the star’s reverence for Elvis and his sometimes cheesy movies and soundtrack songs that led the band to record the goofy song “Heartbreakers Beach Party,” a B-side that gives the documentary its name.)

The filmmaker spoke with Variety about his memories of making the movie and the jolt it gave him in further considering his career, at a time when he only had the screenplay for “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” under his filmic belt. “I can’t say it really lit everyone up when it first came out, but it’s so much fun to have this out now,” he says. (Ticket information for this week’s showings — including screenings on Petty’s 74th birthday, Oct. 20 — can be found here.)

This is being touted as “Cameron Crowe’s first film.” Do you think of “Heartbreakers Beach Party” as your first directorial effort?

I do. I had only done print journalism, and I was really nervous when Danny Bramson said, “Let’s do a video profile.” I was nervous about being a person on camera because I had always had a problem with people that insert themselves and try to give you their version of the person they’re documenting or profiling. But then I started to really have fun doing it, asking him how he wrote “The Waiting” and “I Need to Know,” for example, and I just felt like, “OK, I get to sit here and put you in the front seat of you asking Tom Petty how he wrote these songs — this is fun.” But I was still just a writer and interviewer…

Then we were in the RV, on the road to the video shoot for “You Got Lucky”… He was playing this great solo version of Elvis Presley’s “His Latest Flame,” and I got chills. That didn’t make it into the early version of “Heartbreakers Beach Party,” but we’ve put it in the outtakes (for the theatrical release). I was really enthralled by what we were getting. And he said, “I’m gonna play one more song for you.” I had written “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” and it had just come out and was doing OK. He told me that he had a stereotype against him growing up in Gainesville, having long blond hair — that people thought he was a stoner who was a little bit thick and not that smart, and that he always got misjudged because of his hair and his look. So he had written this novelty song called “I’m Stupid.” And he said, “Pick up the camera. Let me do this song right to you.”

And I’m like, “Well, I’m not really the director. I’m just the writer and the interviewer.” And he said, “Get the camera back. Put it right on me and film me doing this song.” And so I did. And he does this song, “I’m Stupid” right into the camera. And I remember being hit by a thunderbolt: This is what it’s like to be a director. Like, they’re doing it right to the camera, you are there, and there’s no middleman, no editor, no tape recorder, there’s no transcript. It’s just this is the moment and you’re there. He finished the song, we pressed stop on the camera and he said, “Congratulations, you’re a director.”

I never forgot it — and I never stopped directing in one way or another since then. So I always think of it like it was Petty with that song, “I’m Stupid,” saying, “Forget the protocol, man. Put the camera on your shoulder and shoot it.” And it’s a credo worth remembering.

You are not on camera a lot in the film, but when you are, at one point you address the camera and say you’ve been a rock journalist for 10 years. As if that’s an epic amount of time — which it was, then.

I know, I know. I see that and I’m like, “Wow, you’re just throwing that away, like you’re an elder statesman for rock journalism.” It’s kind of funny. I was really nervous doing all that stuff on camera because I just felt like it was like, “Look at me, look at me.” I’m really happy, of course, that it exists now. Because you look at it and one guy lives forever and he’s timeless in a black leather jacket, and he’s Tom Petty and he’s giving you this answer from his heart. And the other guy is in a kind of a weird plaid shirt with ‘80s hair, looking really happy that it’s going so well, and that’s me. He looks so much more classic when you see what else was going on at the time. But I’m happy we’re both in it.

I did not see it when it aired on MTV for the first and only time. And it sounds like not many people did. There was something about it only airing at 2 in the morning? That can’t be true!

Oh, it’s true. I think it might’ve even been later. I stayed up real late, and then got a call from an MTV executive a day or two later, and it was like a sympathy call. I think the suspicion was that not all of the footage was properly cleared. But it might’ve been that it just didn’t quite fit into their newly structured format.

Plus, it wasn’t generated by them: It was Danny Bramson, who had paid for it out of the publicity budget that he’d gotten from starting Backstreet Records, which was the way they were figuring out the debate that was going on between MCA and Petty… It was like, how are we gonna keep him a happy recording artist for the MCA company? And they figured out how to give Danny his own label, and then Petty started recording for Backstreet. Then, this being at the beginning of MTV, Danny was like, “OK, let’s come up with a little film to go along with this Petty album” (“Long After Dark”). He brought his friends in — me and a guy named Phil Savenick and the editor, Doug Dowdle — to make this film, and he paid for it, which meant there was nobody over our shoulder. So nobody was invested at MTV. It was like, “Do you want to play this?” And then the answer was: briefly. And then it did really only air once. Yeah, it seems impossible, but it was painfully possible.

It really didn’t quite work for a lot of reasons. I mean, there wasn’t kind of the talking head; there wasn’t a voice making it palatable for the casual listener. It was all of a sudden you were thrust basically into the band and their sense of humor, and videos were played within it. I think it was viewed as a way to get the videos played, but on our terms — so it was kind of messing with the protocol, I think, a little bit. And also we put time codes in, and there was some stuff that crossed the line, profanity-wise, and things like that.

Had this lingered in the back of your mind as something you really wanted to see the light of day again, or had you forgotten about it till somebody came to you and said, “Let’s do something with this”?

It’s a good question. It lived in little chunks on YouTube — like, bad-quality chunks, particularly with “I’m Stupid,” which was just a hilarious novelty song. But basically it was gone. Although (Peter) Bogdanovich used a piece of a couple pieces of it, without credit, I think, in the Petty documentary that he did, “Running Down a Dream”; there’s Tom writing “The Waiting” and some things like that, and I knew that that had come from this film. But basically it was gone.

And Adria Petty, who was a little girl in the kitchen when we were filming this at Tom’s house, 8 years old, I think… She has gone on to be an amazing custodian of the Tom Petty estate and legacy and keeps the flame burning, really, in the way that makes you know that she gets what it is to be a fan of the band, just as Tom was a fan of his own band. Adria had put together this great documentary (for the deluxe reissue of) “Wildflowers,” and I had gone to the premier screening of that and was hanging out with Adria a little bit afterwards. She said, “We’re gonna put out ‘Long After Dark’ again, and we should put out ‘Heartbreakers Beach Party.’” In a world where people say that and then they never follow up, I felt that, Adria being who she is, there was a good chance she would follow up on it, and she did.

She, in the finest tradition of being a Petty fan, put the thing together, and we kept the rough edges in and watched it again and realized how Tom was ahead of his time, really. Because when he saw the first cut of this, he said, “You know, it’s a little too traditional. Let’s just make it like a joint passed among friends.” And he went to Europe with a camera, and filmed some extra stuff himself —including the sequence where they’re led into all these different dressing rooms after they performed, and one of them is an underground tennis court and is just a ridiculous parade of the wrong dressing rooms. That was seen by Christopher Guest and Rob Reiner before “Spinal Tap” came out, and they put a version of that into “Spinal Tap.” So Tom really had the vision of a documentary that cut out the middleman, which is the way I’ve always wanted to make the documentaries I’ve been lucky enough to make since, in that tradition: cut out the middleman, make it feel like you’re right there with them, and their sense of humor.

Thank you for mentioning the backstage thing and Spinal Tap. Because that scene with them getting lost backstage seemed almost too coincidental to be true, until you hear it was an actual inspiration for the spoof.

Yeah, there’s a laserdisc where Christopher Guest acknowledges it, from what I’ve heard. So there’s documentation.

There is something unusually eternal about Tom Petty, as rock stars go, where seems to have been the same age his whole life. Having interviewed him late in his life, I would’ve been hard to pressed to say he was a different guy than the guy I interviewed decades earlier.

I think you’re absolutely right. I mean, he talks about it a little bit when he says, “The character who is Tom Petty and me, they’re the same guy. I didn’t leave the room so that Tom Petty could speak, you know — it’s me. I’m the guy.” And he’s saying that in a time (not long after) Ziggy Stardust, where, you know, you play a character. I remember at the time thinking that was really cool that he was saying that, that he’s really that guy from Gainesville; he has transplanted to L.A. in a world that he did not grow up in, and he’s still finding his way, and maybe the stuff might turn out to be remembered.

You close the outtakes section now with him saying, “I’d love to get old and still hear these records on the radio.” He’s not saying that it would happen for certain, but here we are with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers maybe being the most-covered band in either rock or country, so he’s being a little prophetic there.

Do you know what’s cool, also: I think he’s still a little shy about his lyrics, and from that point on, he kind of owns the lyrics and his own desire to stretch out and write about “Southern Accents” and stuff like that. That was all coming. But at the time, there’s a piece in there that always cracks me up, when he’s doing a seminar at UCLA and one of the kids stands up and wants to know one of the lines in “American Girl.” And you can tell that Tom is self-conscious about the words, though the kid doesn’t give up and he wants to hear exactly what the lyrics were. … This isn’t like a Bruce Springsteen owning what he’s writing. It’s a guy who’s shyly kind of stretching out. And then by the end you can see that this stuff is all coming.

There’s another moment where he is going through his souvenirs in his little rumpus room — all of that stuff that burned up later when the house burned. He’s got this box of souvenirs, and he’s got the different versions of some of the singles, foreign versions of “I Need to Know” and things like that, going through ’em. I love this one moment where he finds a single of “American Girl,” and they’ve got this picture sleeve of an Angelyne-type woman with sunglasses who’s the American girl. And he says, “That’s not what I had in mind when I wrote the song” — like, it wasn’t that girl. That made me know that he was writing about something that wasn’t so much about “Look at me, I’m a tough rock guy and this is my American girl.” He’s writing about real shit, to him.

I love the little crumbs that are in the film, the trail that’s gonna lead him to all the other stuff that we know and love. I think he was earnest and looking to not make mistakes and be true to his band in what was looking to be an inauthentic decade. Because here comes MTV. Here comes all that stuff that didn’t feel exactly like it was leading to the place that he came to L.A. to occupy. So he’s finding the answer in the songs. I think that’s what we capture. And the band, they’re telepathic and they’ve got the brotherhood going. There’s a real unity. And a friend of mine was saying this too… W were talking about the Bob Dylan trailer for “A Complete Unknown,” and he was saying, ”Oh, I like the way this looks. It looks like we’re gonna see how it was kind of fun for him.” Because you never see the people that you’re interested in having fun! Usually, they’ve got a heavy weight on their shoulders. They’re fighting some issue. They’ve got an obstacle they’ve gotta deal with, and they overcome it, and the movie’s over. I was happy at the prospect of getting to see Bob Dylan having fun, and I thought later, “Well, this is Tom Petty having fun.” We did catch that here.

And there is no disco album from that era. Here it is, as the ‘80s are coming on strong, and Tom is still — as you can tell from the outtakes on the deluxe album that they’re releasing now — writing songs that are true to that band. It was a fruitful time with no kowtowing to the trends… and no Pepsi commercial that they did. This (the documentary) was probably the closest they came to self-promotion — it’s kind of hilarious.

Safe to say you are happy the deluxe “Long After Dark” is coming out concurrent with this?

I am, I am. You’re honored to be a fan of the band with the way the material is being dealt with, and it doesn’t feel like the wrong decisions are being made or the wrong people are getting that music to use to sell products. It’s just kind of like, if you love Tom Petty, he’s still speaking to us. He lives — Tom Petty lives. And he was always so kind whenever we asked for his music for one of our movies. I know he was picky about who got to use his songs, and he was always great, giving us “Square One” for “Elizabethtown” and stuff like that, and separated tracks. I was always really proud that only two movies got to use “American Girl”: “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and “The Silence of the Lambs.”