By Garry Maddox
Before he made Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe directed a wild documentary about rising singer-songwriter Tom Petty and his band, The Heartbreakers.
Cameron Crowe, left, with Tom Petty in Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party.Credit: Trafalgar
It seemed so unhinged in 1983 that music channel MTV screened it only once at 2.30am then ditched it. But one scene in Crowe’s Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party inspired the makers of classic rock mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap.
After a performance in Germany, the band get lost backstage trying to find their dressing room, wandering into an indoor tennis court and asking directions from the bemused players.
“The guys making Spinal Tap saw an early version of our film and added a sequence where the band can’t find their way to [the stage from] their dressing room,” Crowe says over Zoom from California. “That came out of this film.”
For four decades since it screened, Heartbreakers Beach Party has been considered a ‘lost’ cult film for rock fans.
But with encouragement from Petty’s daughter Adria, who has directed music videos for Beyonce, Coldplay and Rihanna, Crowe has restored the documentary and added an introduction and 20 minutes of out-takes for a limited cinema release between October 17 and 20. October 20 would have been Petty’s 74th birthday.
After his death at 66 in 2017, from an overdose of pain medications, the rocker was lauded for hits such as American Girl, I Won’t Back Down, Refugee and Free Fallin’ before joining supergroup Traveling Wilburys.
“Having lost Tom way too young, here’s a snapshot of him as a young man, realising his potential,” Crowe says.
After going on the road with bands when writing for Rolling Stone when he was a teenager - an experience dramatised in the movie Almost Famous - Crowe was recruited to film Petty making the album Long After Dark.
“It’s kind of like we’re in the band and we’re just having hijinks together”: Tom Petty and band in Heartbreakers Beach Party.Credit: Trafalgar
He films him travelling around in a limo and on the set of an over-the-top music video that is a cross between a spaghetti western and a sci-fi movie.
“I’d never worked on camera before and, in the course of it, [Petty] had me pick up a camera and film him playing one of the songs,” Crowe says. “When I finished filming, he said ‘congratulations, you’re a director’.
“So I found Tom Petty ushering me into the idea of being a director, and I’ve been doing it ever since.”
While Crowe says MTV executives thought it was “not quite up to their newly established standard”, Heartbreakers Beach Party is a style of music documentary that is common now.
“[They thought] ‘there’s no talking heads telling us how to feel about anything’ and ‘it’s kind of like we’re in the band, and we’re just having hijinks together’,” he says.
“And, of course, that’s what a lot of people want to see. They want to feel what it’s like in the band, not somebody telling you what it’s like.”
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