MC: Does it surprise you, in looking back, thirty years later, at what came out of that collection of people? Maybe you have other examples of how this has happened in your life, but very few people can look back and say “These guys and I just happened to end up here and two of them became highly esteemed writers and another one became a billionaire musician and another's landscapes are collected by art critics all over the world ... that's pretty remarkable.”

GDLV: It is remarkable. And I'm sure we all think about it. I certainly do. And as I said, we need to go back to Tom. Tom brought that whole group together, and then he brought that whole group together one more time in Livingston, Montana. Jim didn't live in Montana then, but he does now — he moved there about seven or eight years ago. But Chatham followed Tom to Livingston, and Richard Brautigan followed him there, and my wife and I, or just I, would go out there at least once or twice a year. That was just our little nucleus, our particular group. Tom was a magnet to a lot of other people as well.

MC: Didn't Brautigan have a ranch somewhere on Pine Creek?

GDLV: It was not a ranch, it was a house with about twenty acres of land and it was very nice. I stayed there a lot. Jim stayed there a lot. There was at times friction between Tom and Richard. They liked each other a great deal, but they both had pretty strong egos — it was the 'who could be the center of attention' type of thing. You know Tom went through a period in his life when he was drinking. And when people really have a problem, you kind of shy away.

And he finally said, “You know, if you want me in your movie — because I am who I am, you know — I'm going to have to jump a tarpon.” That was Richard [Brautigan]. He teased a lot.For about six or seven years after years after Tom made “92 in the Shade” in '74, he didn't fish much. He went from fishing a lot — fishing in Michigan before meeting me, fishing very, very hard for years — to getting into the movie life. And he became famous. We didn't see much of him for about five or six years because he just wasn't in Key West that often. Then we both got divorced. I remarried my wife a few years later, and he remarried once before he found Laurie, Jimmy's sister, and married her.

MC: Brautigan is quite a mystery to most of today's fly fishers. His appearance in the movie looks almost accidental. In fact the only footage of Brautigan ever taken — other than some brief appearance in a film from Haight-Ashbury days — is in “Tarpon.”

GDLV: The story of how Richard ended up in the film is actually quite entertaining. As I mentioned earlier, Jim and I both spent a lot of time at his house in Paradise Valley and both of us became very close to Richard — I think Richard ended up dedicating one of his books to us in friendship. So when “Tarpon” was going to be made, in '73, I was staying at Richard's house that summer. I said, “You know, why don't you come down to Key West next year? We're going to make a movie.” And he said, “Well I don't like movies.” And I said, “Well, that's OK. Come anyway.” And he said, “Well, I don't want to be in your movie. You know that. I really mean that.” And I said, “Just come, Richard, it's going to be a lot of fun.” And he said, “Well let me think about it.” That was typical Richard.

In about January, when we were getting ready to shoot, we talked on the phone and he said, “Well, I've never been down to Key West. I'd like to see it, and all the writers are down there,” including the playwrights who were still living at the time, and he said, “I'd like to come down, but I'm telling you I'm not going to be in your movie.” I said, “That's fine. I simply don't give a shit. Just come down and have a good time. We'll be there for a couple or three weeks in March.”

So he came down, and I knew Richard so well by then that I knew what he expected me to say, which was “Come on, Richard, be in my movie.” But I didn't say anything. At all. And we all just went about our business and had parties at night and I took Richard out on the boat a few times — not fishing so much as just showing him the lower Keys. And he finally said, “You know, if you want me in your movie — because I am who I am, you know — I'm going to have to jump a tarpon.” That was Richard. He teased a lot.

But as you may know, what Richard loved to do was catch tiny fish on the littlest rods, on the smallest creeks he could find. And he would creep along, all 6'4" of him, under the brush, and cast into six inches of water and catch these miniature fish, tiny brookies and stuff. He just adored it. So I knew there was just no way in hell that he was going to be able to pick up a tarpon rod and catch a tarpon. So I said, “Well how about if I cast and hook the fish for you and hand you the rod?” And he said, “That'll do.”

So one day, we left early in the morning and went into Pearl Basin on the right tide and we staked there — the two camera boats and myself with Richard. Half an hour or so went by and I saw a school of fish coming in through a cut, maybe four or five fish. And so off we went, and I poled from the beginning of that basin all the way to the ship channel, which must have been half a mile, poling my ass off, and Richard was in the front of the boat just beaming with delight, thinking this is hilarious, the funniest thing he's ever seen. Right at the end of the basin, where it made a little U, I was able to cut the fish off and stop the boat. I grabbed the rod, cast the fly, got about a 70- or 80-pounder to eat, pulled on the darn thing and handed the rod to Richard even before the fish jumped. And then that thing came out of the water and just went nuts, just jumped and jumped and jumped. And when it broke off, Richard just stood there, for once in his life absolutely and totally speechless; he could not say a word. That's night he gave us the interview with him lying in the hammock.

It's really a cute story because Richard never, ever allowed his picture to be taken. So that was it for Richard. He never went out again, because he knew he couldn't catch one of those things by himself. He stayed on the island and partied. Hard.

But to answer your earlier question, it is remarkable about the four guys. I mean Chatham hasn't reached financially what he should have reached, but I know Russell will be remembered as a great, great American landscapist.

MC: With Russell I think it is just a matter of recognition, don't you think?

GDLV: I think so. And then Harrison is just an exquisite poet. But he couldn't have made any money writing just poetry, and so he produced some great novels and novellas. It is a great group of characters, a fabulous group of characters

MC: From the moment I first saw “Tarpon” I thought to myself, “No one is ever going to do anything like this again.” We all have had this sort of impending — as the movie says as well — this impending sense that it was all going to be gone before we really knew how good it was.

GDLV: Right, right.

MC: And fortunately that hasn't happened, and the idea that something could take birth in Key West in 1974 and in some ways be even more compelling now than it was then — it's just a remarkable thing. I think it had something to do with the people involved but I think it had something to do with the intent. Whether that was accidental or not I don't know.

GDLV: No, that part of the movie was pretty well thought out. It was what the French call cinéma vérité, which was a big thing in Europe at that time, so there was a lot of off-the-cuff shooting, but we didn't just leave in the morning saying “Oh, let's go see if we can jump a fish.” There was always a plan, which included releasing the fish.

MC: It's also remarkable that at that time you demonstrated how a tarpon should be treated when it was caught.

GDLV: Well we felt pretty strongly about that. Both Gil and I had killed tarpon before, for the sake of taking pictures, and we never wanted to it again. And neither did Woody. Because there was a lot of killing of tarpon going on back in the early '70s. I'm pretty sure most of the tournaments up in Islamorada were kill tournaments. Even way back then we had all jumped enough fish and seen enough fish in the air that we really didn't see the point. And I'm not blowing anybody's horn, it's just that it didn't make any sense.

It was what the French call cinéma vérité, which was a big thing in Europe at that time, so there was a lot of off-the-cuff shooting, but we didn't just leave in the morning saying “Oh, let's go see if we can jump a fish.”Now to be really honest, back then, in the '70s, had I hooked a 200-pound fish, or a 180-pound fish — I did carry a big gaff in the boat — yeah, I probably would have had somebody kill it for me. And I would have felt like shit afterwards, but I probably would have done it. In fact, I think I may have told you, Woody Sexton and I, back in '72-73, were in Coupon Bight, and he hooked an absolutely enormous fish. Woody was very modest about size but this was a 200-pounder. I mean it was the biggest goddamn thing either one of us had seen come out of the water and it jumped seven times and it rolled over. We had actually forgotten to put the kill gaff on board that day and all I had was a lip gaff. I tried to lip-gaff the fish, and of course in those days we were using a 12-pound tippet, and it broke. Even for the movie we used 14-pound test, which was in hindsight kind of stupid. We should have just used 30-pound. And you know if I could have killed that fish for Woody, I would have done so in a heartbeat. But, as the years went on, of course, killing tarpon became more and more absurd.

At the time of making of the movie, we didn't carry a gaff on board. It would have been inconceivable, to kill a fish for the movie. Neither I, nor Gil, nor Christian would have had it. It wasn't a big deal; it was just something we weren't going to do.

MC: The film also included a very stark message.

GDLV: It did. That was my brother-in-law's doing. And that was the only thing I think should be slightly cut in the movie, the offshore fishing with the tourists. I actually had nothing to do with it. As you know from guiding, you do this forty, fifty, sixty days in a row and you're just spent. So I went out one night and just got howling drunk and said “Boys, I'm not going to see you until 2 o'clock or 3 or maybe even 5.” Meanwhile Christian and the sound guy said, “We're gonna go offshore.” Christian is the one, I know, who as a serious cinematographer knew what was going to happen on the head boat. He could see the contrast between that and what he was seeing on the flats — what we were doing catching and releasing fish. So they went on board and shot this sequence. Really, other than the actual fishing stuff, that movie is really all to Christian Odasso's credit. He was a complete professional filmmaker, and what he could see, what he envisioned, would sometimes drive me absolutely f-$#@!-ing crazy, “No, no, no. We've gotta wait for this shot,” he'd say. I'd say “Come on, come on, come on.” He'd say “We gotta wait for the shot.” Then he would say, “Now I have the shot, I need the cut. You can't go away until I get the cut. The cut has to be this way. The movement of the action has to allow the editor to cut the film correctly.” And so I learned in six or seven weeks a tremendous amount — everything I know, basically.

All the underwater work was done by Gil Drake. Gil and I had been taking pictures underwater since the mid-'50s at Deep Water Key. And the other day actually I found some pictures that I took of Gil with a Nikonos 1 way back in 1959 when he was a really young kid.

So I bought a 16-millimeter Bolex — the one you crank up — with an underwater case, and when we went to France after filming “Tarpon” I left it with Gil. Come about the end of July he sent a couple of reels over — 200-footers or 400-footers, I can't remember — and much to our delight he had captured the tarpon underwater, the little funny horseshoe crab marching around, and all that stuff. He and Linda would catch and film tarpon underwater. Often when you see a fish released it's actually Linda's hand holding its jaw.

So everybody kind of worked toward one goal but in every which direction, and it all came kind of nicely together. I have two regrets. One was that Christian was pushing very hard to do more interviews with Tom and Jim and Richard. Richard would not do them. Tom and Jim I'm sure would have, but I didn't want to impose on them. We were very close friends, and I said “No, we're not going to do it.” It's just a pain in the ass, as you know from being around filming. You've got to set it up, you've got to get everything just right, the lighting, the sound .... It's just a goddamn awful pain in the ass. And we were having too much fun to do interviews. I was very wrong.

Photographically the one thing we really should have done was rented a helicopter. Had we had a helicopter in those days — just for a day, and if we had been lucky — I can't tell you the pictures we would have taken with those cameramen. The slow-motion shit, would have been something. And still, to this day, if I had all the money in the world, I would love to shoot another tarpon movie — and I could shoot eighty percent of it out of a helicopter from about five hundred yards away, like what they do in that beautiful series “Planet Earth,” if you think about all that footage following coyotes across the tundra with a steady-cam from 500 yards away. Just think what you could do with tarpon. It would be unbelievable.

MC: You did have a plane at one point.

GDLV: We had a plane. It required great timing, because I was supposed to leave very early in the morning and get to the Marquesas. I knew there were a lot of fish there and the plane was coming over at 9:15. My thing was to get in position. And maybe you can't actually tell, but I was jumping a fish when the plane went over.

MC: Yes, you can see the whole thing. That's one of the wonderful results of the re-mastering, is that you can actually see that, and you couldn't see it in the bootleg.

GDLV: So anyway, it was a great time. And what made it really great was that we were thirty years old, and we had lots to drink, and there were lots of pretty girls and armfuls of fish.

MC: I'm sure you've seen some of the result of the modern fascination with video and film and fishing.

GDLV: You know, I've only seen one or two and I'm not really in the position to say anything about any of them. I think there were two tarpon films made in the last couple of years. But I didn't finish watching them.

MC: What do you think is missing?

Some people who are hardcore anglers say “What is all this crap about Key West and who cares about these goddamn hippies and the sunset and these guys that aren't even fishing.”GDLV: You know, probably the only thing that “Tarpon” had, and it's been criticized for it, was a lot of film shot without fish in it. Some people who are hardcore anglers say, “What is all this crap about Key West and who cares about these goddamn hippies and the sunset and these guys that aren't even fishing.” Because Tom doesn't fish, Harrison doesn't fish, Richard doesn't fish. But then, on the flip side of the coin, some have said, “Jeez, you've got too much fishing. Why didn't you shoot more of the Keys, do more interviews with these guys? It's so interesting.” Well I think the blend is what it is. With hindsight I would love to change a few things, but it is what we made and I stand by it. What I did see, with the two or three recent movies that I have watched or when I flick on the TV, is not-very-interesting visuals and conversations that are always using the same words, the same descriptions of the fish. They use these funny acronyms and odd phrases, you know. And to me, that's not human. It doesn't sound human to me, but it apparently it sounds human to everybody else because a lot of people watch those fishing shows and they love them, you know?

MC: As a well-respected producer said to me recently, there doesn't seem to be a story in lot of new productions. There's no beginning, middle and end. They pick up the fish, smile, put them back in the water, mimic what they've heard someone else say. It's mostly rinse-and-repeat.

GDLV: Right. But I don't want to have anyone take what I am saying as pejorative. I've really seen very little of the newer work. Once in a while I'll flip on the bass thing, just because I am deeply amused by these guys. But I'm an idiot when it comes to this stuff. I don't read Field & Stream or the other hook and bullet magazines anymore, and I don't read the how-to articles. I'd just rather read something else. But I'm sure I could learn some good stuff. For example, as you said just the other day, and it's true: What you do, and how you cast and hook, feed and fight tarpon nowadays is very different. Sandy Moret can tell you, because Sandy is from my generation. [Tommy] Robinson, when he fished with him a few years ago said: "What the hell are you doing? You're hitting a fish like Valdene.” And Sandy replied, “Well, we grew up at the same time, and that's how you hit fish.” Of course now you tighten up on the line and you let the fish swim away and then tighten up some more — I mean, I couldn't do that for a thousand dollars!

I think I told you just the other day I had a huge tarpon, probably the biggest fish I had ever hooked in my life. And it was BAM, BAM, BAM! And of course the fish swims away and then dropped the fly and Tommy screams “Jesus, there you go again!”

MC: So you don't think wistfully about the days of fiberglass rods and wire leaders?

GDLV: No, but you know the wire leader thing is hilarious. The only reason I used it was because neither Chatham nor Harrison were going to sit around and tie Bimini Twists and Albrights. I mean they hated it. And what was I going to do? Instead of going partying was I going to sit there and tie these goddamn things all night long? So I figured it out: No. 2 leader wire and a small swivel, I could tie about 15 of those in ten minutes! And they worked great.

No, but you know the wire leader thing is hilarious. The only reason I used it was because neither Chatham nor Harrison were going to sit around and tie Bimini Twists and Albrights. I mean they hated it.But we were always keen to pick up on what everyone was doing with innovations. While we never talked about how many fish we caught or how big they were back then — it was kind of like talking about politics, we did talk about rods, and flies and skiffs, especially. Stuff like “How do we get a skiff that rides well and poles well and can get in six inches of water?” That was an all-consuming question. In those early days you couldn't have that.  There was the Fibercraft in the beginning. Those boats were great platforms, but they would just beat the living bejeezus out of you when running in any kind of rough water. I remember Tom had one with the steering up front and in my entire life I've never been beaten up so badly. So the talk was all about the boats we could turn into fishing skiffs — the Roberts, the Nova Scotia, for example.

Of course reels were a big challenge back then. Stan Bogdan made reels but of course they weighed 17 pounds or something — you could use them as an anchor for your skiff. I remember talking him into building me a reel, which had holes in it, as they do now. It couldn't really hold enough backing, but it was a marvelous reel that would be worth a fortune now. I traded it for a .22-calibre revolver or something absurd like that. And of course there was Captain Mac [Bob McChristian] and all of his reels. He and I would get in these arguments, because I didn't like his first reels, which were anti-reverse. He was stubborn as a mule, and it took him years before he made the direct-drive models. But other than that he was a wonderful character and even when we argued we were really trying to improve the sport.

But to get quickly back to the skiffs: I don't remember how I heard about Wally Cole, who was the original builder of the Maverick skiffs. But we heard about this guy up in Miami building these 250cc race boats. I had also heard that he had built one or two boats with the idea that his son could use them to go flats fishing. McGuane and I drove up to his store in '71 and met Wally, who was a big old wonderful character, and he showed us this boat that was barely rigged that he said was going to be his son's. I asked if he minded if we took it out and poled it. Well it was blowing 25 knots in Biscayne Bay that day, so nothing would have poled well in that wind, but I loved the way the boat looked and took a chance on it and had one built. I went back up there two or three times and designed it just the way I wanted it — very simple — and that little boat came down and turned out to be a wonder. It's the boat we used in the movie, of course. But the story goes on from there. When I stopped fishing as much, Buffet wanted the boat, and he bought it from me and used it for a few years. Tommy Robinson guided Jimmy out of it. About that time Lenny Berg asked if he could make a mold off of it. And Mark Castlow built those original boats for him in the early '80s. All these years later Castlow came back recently and asked Jimmy if he could take the boat out of the museum in Miami and pop another mold off of it. And I was just in that boat last week with Jimbo Meador and Tommy and it was such a great pleasure. It was such a wonderful-running boat, and it rekindled some fond memories.

Jim and Chatham and I stayed fishing down there until 1982, and I do know that date because at the end of that tarpon season we looked at each other and said “If we ever do this again, we will f-#@!*-ing die.”Anyway, Jim and Chatham and I stayed fishing down there until 1982, and I do know that date because at the end of that tarpon season we looked at each other and said “If we ever do this again, we will f-#@!*-ing die.” We didn't do a lot of fishing, but we did do a lot of partying. I mean we had had houses down there for years, and we'd come back from fishing at four or five o'clock in the afternoon and we had no idea who was going to be in the house. There could be two people or there could be 75 people. We went out every day, because you had to get out on the water just to get the hell out of town and clear your head a little bit. And we did jump fish — that was not a problem. But the partying in '82 was so heavy that we just said, “That's it.” And then from then on when we went back, it wasn't for five or six weeks at a time.

I kept going down to Key West every so often through '80s and so did Jim, but not very often. By the '90s I had moved up here to the Panhandle, and the only times I'd went back was to fish with Gil, particularly in the summertime, when there was nobody there. The last five or six years I haven't been down to Key West at all — since before 9/11, so it's been a long time. I sent Gil a copy of “Tarpon” last month with a little note that read, “By the way, you do know that this is the year that we met fifty years ago. We are our fathers.” Neither one of us liked that!

But really what I remember most are the close friends, a great deal of fishing, and then, off to the side, the partying.

Watch the video trailer for "Tarpon."

Buy "Tarpon" on DVD. Then there was Key West, and as I've told a lot of people, you know, my Key West was different from Hemingway's Key West, and Hemingway's Key West was different from the guy before him, and these things change every twenty years or so. People now live in Key West in a place I think is tacky but that they find intriguing. What I loved about Key West in '74, the guys who were there in '54 probably would think was the shits. So it's just a natural progression, but it was a wonderful time to be alive. And as you say, there were three or four guys who went on to do awfully well. They will all be remembered.