Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Runnin’ Down A Dream
(Warner Bros., 2007)

Pop music’s relationship with film and television has been a tenuous one. At times they have been crucial to its development, but in the case of MTV and now in the age of American Idol they have also had an adverse effect. Oddly enough, at the same time that American Idol and its ilk have placed more emphasis on the looks and personality of people wanting to make it in music, the film world has been using music in movies better than ever before. The music biopic is in a rich period and the standard “rockumentary” has, for the most part, become more ubiquitous than ever before.

Perhaps the greatest factor to strengthen the quality of music documentaries and music films is the larger-than-ever number of bona fide film directors who are making films about music. While the MTV age launched many directors of videos into the world of feature filmmaking, the trend has since reversed itself: many feature film directors are now making movies about music.

While directors like Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, and a few others have made frequent, successful forays into music films, recently many more directors have taken the plunge. The latest to take on a musical project is Peter Bogdanovich. His new film, Runnin’ Down a Dream, is about the history of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The box set includes a four-hour “director’s cut” of the title film documentary, on two discs; the group’s 30th anniversary concert, which took place in 2006 in Gainesville, Florida on the third DVD; and a fourth CD disc, which includes nine previously unreleased live concert selections, television performances, and other assorted tracks.

The choice of Bogdanovich as director of this project may surprise some. Bogdanovich’s film career has been an odd one. Like many of the celebrated film auteurs of French new wave, such as François Truffaut, Bogdanovich began his film career writing about movies. He then emerged during the American film renaissance of the 1970s, with The Last Picture Show being his signature film of the era. For many years, though, Bogdanovich’s iconoclastic approach to filmmaking fell out of favor and he became more known as a film scholar and a historian, writing books, appearing in films on movie history, and teaching.

Despite the fact that Bogdanovich has never really been associated with rock music in the past and chose to make a four-hour film, Runnin’ Down A Dream is about as good a film about music as one is likely to see. Considering the length of the film and Bogdanovich’s love of the slow, widescreen stillness of Westerns by John Ford, Howard Hawks and others, Runnin’ Down A Dream is surprisingly a fast-paced, straightforward, and honest history of one of America’s best-loved and most enduring rock bands. There are interviews with all the individuals who are or have been members of the band and many who played with Petty in Gainesville bands also. Producers Denny Cordell and Jimmy Iovine are also included. Roger McGuinn, Stevie Nicks, Jeff Lynne, George Harrison, Eddie Vedder, Dave Grohl, Jackson Browne, Warren Zanes, and even Johnny Depp, among many others, are also interviewed. Bogdanovich does use the stark, monochromatic black-and-white palette of the early Western during some of the interview segments, but for the most part he avoids any flat film ideas or documentary tricks. Naturally, the world of Los Angeles and its surrounding environs is a familiar place for Bogdanovich, which works well in that much of Petty’s musical career has evolved there.

It was wise to take four hours to tell the story of the group—and this is clearly the story of a group and not just of Petty. From its humble beginnings in Gainesville, Florida, the film traces the band’s evolution from the hippie swamp-rock stew of its earlier incarnation as Mudcrutch through the group’s latest studio album, Highway Companion. The consistency of the group’s music and Petty’s ability to maintain his stance as one of the premier songwriters in rock music are vividly clear throughout the film. There is a story here, though. While the usual rockumentary clichés—dictatorial fathers, drugs, divorce, death, drummers leaving—can’t be avoided, the film’s main point is how Petty and his band have displayed a constant sense of integrity and fortitude. They fought and won a battle with their record label over a bad deal prior to the release of their breakthrough third album, Damn the Torpedo’s, and fought them and won again when MCA wanted to launch a new, higher list price of their LPs starting with Petty’s next album, Hard Promises. They also lost original bassist Ron Blair (who returned after the death-by-heroin overdose of replacement Howie Epstein) and drummer Stan Lynch. Petty himself nearly lost the ability to play guitar when he slammed his left hand against a wall after a recording wasn’t going well, and he lost almost all of his personal effects and memorabilia when his house was set on fire.

The band has also had its fair share of triumphs, including many hit singles, sold-out tours, backing Bob Dylan on a world tour, and Petty’s own personal role in the Traveling Wilburys. The film makes it clear that through it all, Petty has maintained a sense of humor, refused to compromise, and never lost his passion for the music nor his edge as a songwriter. There are few groups or artists who emerged after the ‘60s who deserve a four-hour documentary about their career. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers is clearly one of them.

Watch: “Runnin’ Down a Dream” trailer [at youtube.com]