“Tarpon”: a Lost Movie Starring Jim Harrison (of all people) & Friends

Here’s a clip/trailer from a lost 1972 movie called “Tarpon,” found in a barn in France, starring Jim Harrison, McGuane, Brautigan, featuring the music of a young Jimmy B.

(Ya know, there’s no reason why hot outdoor dudes can’t be partying like this today. I mean, locally and with beer. It’s unlikely they’d be able to hook up with a French Count like those guys did, but then some of them went to Yale anyway, so it’s a different scene. But how different? We can have our own big times! Even now they have their Salon of the Rockies. We can have ours of Williamston!)

Anyway, Key West is a different place today. This movie shows the last of the good old hippy days, fishing wild’n’free.

Here’s a blogger who says it was blurbed in the WSJ, but I don’t see where. His blog is informative though: maybe that’s the WSJ piece:

The 53-minute documentary opens with a trolley-car ride in Key West and then segues into a narrative that features lots of salt water fly-fishing, and scenes that aim to capture the flavor of life among outsiders in Key West during the period. The movie also offers brief but entertaining views of a trio of writers who would later become well-known. Mr. Harrison, for example, is the author of the novella “Legends of the Fall”; the 1994 film version starred Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins.

The producers of “Tarpon” failed to land a commercial distributor, and soon pirated editions began to circulate. “I was a fly fishing guide in Key West in the 1980s and 1990s, and it was something you had to see,” says Marshall Cutchin, publisher of MidCurrent.com, a popular Web site for fly fishing. The movie gathered dust for more than 30 years before its co-director, Guy de la Valdene, decided to restore it and then issue it as a DVD. “It’s exactly as it was when we made it,” says Mr. de la Valdene, who is the author of “For a Handful of Feathers,” a hunting book.

flyfinatic.wordpress.com/2008/10/17/tarpon-in-the-wall-street-journal/

Here’s a link to the Amazon listing:

Here’s the nifty vid: