Tarpon

The first of the modern fishing films, Tarpon, was shot in the wild panorama of 1970s Key West. Colorful scenes of Key West from another era—with treasure hunters, smugglers, hippies, and eccentrics—are background to stunning cinematography and tarpon fishing at its finest. Authors Richard Brautigan, Tom McGuane, and Jim Harrison join with legendary flats guides, Woody Sexton, Gil Drake, and Steve Huff as they pose questions about life, art, nature, and catch-and-release fishing. Jimmy Buffet composed original music for the film and Jim Harrison narrated his own text.

In 2008, the film was rescued from a barn in Normandy where it had been for 30 years. In 2022, the A/B negative rolls were used to create a 4K scan with image and sound restoration work by Goldcrest Post Production in NYC. The restoration premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in 2023.

Richard Brautigan (1935-1984) was a pivotal 1960s cult author and poet. A prolific writer, he published ten novels, two collections of short stories, and four books of poetry. He is best known for Trout Fishing in America (1967) and In Watermelon Sugar (1968). A strong part of the 1960s counterculture, Brautigan was reticent to be either photographed or filmed. He spent a large portion of the film shoot refusing to be interviewed, though he enthusiastically participates by the end. The footage from Tarpon is some of the only known extant film clips of him.

Jim Harrison (1937-2016) was an American poet, novelist, and essayist. He published over three dozen books in several genres including poetry, fiction, memoir, children’s literature and wrote screenplays, book reviews, literary criticism, and essays on food, travel, and sport. He is best known for the novella, Legends of the Fall. He appears in Tarpon early in his novel-writer career, though already established as a poet. Harrison’s work often engages with the recurring encounter between man, soceity and nature, a theme he explores in his voice-over in Tarpon.

Thomas McGuane is an American writer whose work includes ten novels, short fiction and screenplays, as well as three collections of essays devoted to his life in the outdoors. Perhaps his best-known novel is Ninety-Two in Shade (1973), a tale of a fringe character barely surviving as a skiff guide on the flats in Key West.