has an exclusive premiere for a trailer for the film, which does not yet have distribution; check it out below. We also talked with McGuane and director Scott Ballew about how the subject of the film came into focus, harking back to a loose collective of wild but serious writers in Key West that also included men of letters like Jim Harrison, Richard Brautigan and Russell Chatham.
Is it a scene to get sentimental about, even though everyone involved was doing some wild living at the time? “I’m not sure sentimental is the right word,” McGuane says, “because most of these people have died or are dying I mean, it’s kind of a last look at the living, really, in some ways, or it was that for some of us who were involved with this thing, that gave it some power. Some people in it have died and others are in poor health.
McGuane explains it this way: “Scott wanted to do kind of a fishing movie with me, but I just had shoulder surgeries and I couldn’t fish. So we were scrambling about what to do next, and he brought a lot of creative energy to it. … My experience with writing is that it almost never goes where you think it was gonna go. As Cheever said a long time ago, ‘All narrative art is improvisatory.’ And I think this film was a little bit that way, but that doesn’t mean it was an accident.
“Even Jimmy was very literate. He read all the time; he fit right in with that,” McGuane says of the music star, whose sister he married. “Harrison and I were obsessive book guys from way back. And yeah, there was a little Algonquin element there.
One possible laugh line in the film comes when a woman is on screen talking about how awful Key West has become. It’s clearly from the newly restored “Tarpon” footage from the early ’70s.