Cameron Crowe's forgotten 1983 Tom Petty doc running to theaters

Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party will have a limited engagement on October 17th and 20th, Petty’s birthday.

The waiting really is the hardest part. Four decades after it was made, Cameron Crowe’s debut film, Heartbreakers Beach Party – which looks at Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers less than a decade into their career – will return to the public eye. Long missing from availability, the documentary aired just once on MTV back in 1983.

As per Sacks & Co., Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party has a new 4K remaster coming from Crowe’s 16mm source. For the film – which Crowe filmed in 1982, the same year his debut script was made into a little movie called Fast Times at Ridgemont High – the director looked at the band and rock and roll through the lens of the first part of the decade as they worked on and toured their Long After Dark album, which featured singles “You Got Lucky” and “Change of Heart.” The presentation will also feature a new intro by Crowe and a 20-minute cut of unreleased outtakes.

As Crowe noted, “Heartbreakers Beach Party occupies a special place in my heart. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers leaned into the making of the film with a kind of hilarious music-filled honesty that still feels fresh forty years later. It was also my first experience as a director. Thanks to Adria Petty and the Petty Estate, along with our co-filmmakers Danny Bramson, Phil Savenick, Doug Dowdle and Greg Mariotti, I’m so happy we’re bringing it back in all its reckless glory. The fact that it was yanked from MTV after only one airing at 2:00 A.M. just shows that it was indeed an outlandish feast for fans in all the best ways. Let that sucker blast!”

Crowe is one of the most well-versed music lovers out there. That he made a feature-length documentary as his first project – especially one on Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – shouldn’t be a surprise, but since the film has been hidden for so long, it is. As a fan of both the band and the director, I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of it. So you better believe I’ll be there on October 17th or 20th, which would have marked Petty’s 74th birthday. Petty sadly passed away in October 2017.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were most notably documented in Peter Bogdanovich’s Runnin’ Down a Dream, which chronicled the history of the band over the course of four hours – pretty good coming from a director who had no interest in Tom Petty going into the project.