A Petty Obsession

When not ensconced in Christmas reverie and responsibilies, my guilty pleasure this past week has been indulging an obsession with Peter Bogdanovich's film about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers called "Runnin' Down a Dream."

This four-hour documentary came out about a year ago and it swept me up then. On this year's tour around the Sundance Channel, it held me even tighter, though I watched it in bits and pieces.

I could chalk the film's appeal up to timing, the fact that Petty's first hits occurred as I was graduated from high school and that his music, like oxygen, has been a part of every decade of my life without me making much of an effort to really appreciate or monitor it. Or I could say that I've always had a weakness for cowboys (even wannabe cowboys) with long hair. Maybe I love a musical narrative or Petty's early anti-corporate stance. Frankly, it could be any or all of these or none of them and who cares anyway, really?

Since I had had healthy dose of Bogdanovich's version of Petty, I decided to go looking elsewhere and found Terry Gross's most recent Fresh Air interview with him and one in Rolling Stone where he says it is his last interview for "very long time."

Here's the trailer for the film:



A couple random parts of Bogdanovich's doc:





A panel where Bogdanovich talks about Petty and the film:



And for those even more obsessed than I, here's a link to 125 Tom Petty videos. Oy!

[Update: 1602, the first documentary about an American music icon that caught my attention is "Tom Dowd and the Language of Music." Netflix has it I think.

[Update: (2220) Still on the jag and have to add this Soundstage version of "You Wreck Me"]