The early-’80s documentary “Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party,” which had a one-weekend-only release in cinemas as a theatrical event in October, is set to have its streaming premiere exclusively on Paramount+ beginning March 11 in the U.S. and Canada, the service announced Tuesday.
The Cameron Crowe-directed film will debut the follow day, March 12, in the U.K., Australia, Latin America, France, Italy and Germany.
When the film rolled out on big screens last fall, it was touted as being the first time this subject of Petty (and Crowe) lore was being seen — at least legitimately — by audiences since it first premiered, with little fanfare at the time, on MTV in February 1983. Originally shot around the time of the release of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “Long After Darl” album, the film was restored from its 16mm source and augmented by about 20 minutes of previously unseen bonus content, including outtakes and a newly filmed interview with Crowe and the late rocker’s daughter, Adria Petty.
“’Heartbreakers Beach Party’ occupies a special place in my heart,” Crowe said in a statement, announcing the Paramount+ streaming deal. “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, we’re bringing it back in all its reckless glory. I’m especially happy to add a postscript with the never-seen outtake footage I always treasured. The fact that the original film was yanked from MTV after only one airing shows that it was, and still is, an outlandish feast for fans in the best ways. Turn it up!!”
At the time of the film’s release in theaters in October, both Crowe and Adria Petty talked with Variety about what the very belated re-release of the film after more than 40 years meant to them.
Crowe said then that he truly considers the film his first directorial effort. “I do,” he told Variety. “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.’” Still, originally, he had only been committed as a writer and interviewer on the project.
“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 new 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,” Crowe added, “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.”
In a separate interview, Adria Petty told Variety, “We have this great archivist that’s been testing film for vinegar syndrome, and she found a bunch of the raw film reels for ‘Heartbreakers Beach Party,’ which we didn’t realize we had in our possession. They weren’t labeled. We took them to Cameron and we got really excited about restoring his film. And then we thought maybe we should put a record out with it. What do we have from this era?” — which resulted in a deluxe edition of the “Long After Dark” album that came out last fall.
“It’s very interesting to see my dad, with this very weird Cameron Crowe movie with the most misleading title ever, to market something as a beach party! You know, that’s so unhip. I love that he thought the whole world would understand that reference to ‘Beach Blanket Bingo’ — and, like, we’re still trying to explain it 30, 40 years later!” She cherishes the interviews Crowe did with her father for the film. “It still holds kind of a special place because of that. For Tom to give more than an hour-long interview to someone and consistently give them access to his home and his life and his band, that never happened again. I mean, during ‘Full Moon Fever,’ there was a lot of promo and a lot of stuff like that, but it would always be very controlled. This was not controlled at all.”
Noted Crowe, “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 (scene of getting lost backstage) 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.”
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