Key West has a long history of drawing fishing luminaries. Novelist (and dentist) Zane Grey was among the first. Then, of course, came Ernest Hemingway and his band of miscreants, beggars and hangers on. Hot on Hemingway’s heels in the throes of a fly-fishing high when the sport was taking to the brine, the late-1960s guard was, from an angling perspective, the most prolific of them all.

Author Richard Brautigan, swinging in the hammock, holds court in Key West.

The impetus varied from one person (and moment) to the next, but the assemblage of Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, Guy de la Valdène, Jimmy Buffett and a bohemian retinue of writers, musicians and artists capitalizing on a laissez-faire city by the sea was largely due to an untapped tarpon fishery.

“As soon as I had some writing money, I went down there. It was 1969,” McGuane says of Key West in an interview for the retrospective, somewhat-behind-the-scenes Yeti documentary All That Is Sacred, about the soon-to-be-released 1973 film Tarpon. “The prime time, really, was when it was just Guy and I down there. And we were just there as serious fishermen.”

Shot in 16-millimeter film, Tarpon is a profile of a Shangri-La in a bygone, gilded era of fly-fishing. On the periphery was an array of predominantly non-angling literati and socialites, holdovers and peripatetics/flaneurs alike. Richard Brautigan, whose 1967 novella Trout Fishing in America had just landed him in the limelight of both the literary and fishing worlds, arrived on the scene shortly after Valdène, Harrison and McGuane.

The movie poster for the film Tarpon. Shot in Key West, the film was ahead of its time and quickly became a cult classic. An updated version of the film is set to be released in 2025. 

Eventually, this motley congregation caught the attention of Valdène’s brother-in-law, French cinematographer Christian Odasso. Odasso took interest in the enclave and the writers who’d decided to hold court in Key West; the fishing to him was secondary to the narrative. He wanted to see — and film — Brautigan candidly. While McGuane and Harrison were already notable, Brautigan was, at that point, one of the most famous literary figures of the counterculture. None of the film’s subjects-to-be made themselves terribly available during filming.

“We weren’t interested in making a movie at the time,” McGuane confesses in All That Is Sacred. As for what the film ultimately became? The title, Tarpon, says it all.

It may not have been what Odasso, who died in 2011, had hoped to shoot, but it took on a life of its own, and despite as of yet having no major, official release, it carries a cultural caché to the tune of Bob Dylan and The Band’s Basement Tapes, which sustained nearly a decade of hushed, under-the-table circulation before Columbia officially released it. Diana Odasso, Odasso’s daughter and a writer and filmmaker of her own accord, helped produce a DVD of Tarpon in 2008.

Tarpon was shot in 16-millimeter and captured incredible tarpon jumps and aerials as some of fly-fishing’s greatest anglers and writers battled big fish on the Key West flats.

The DVD sold well during its limited run, broadening and solidifying its status as a (fishing) cult classic. Director Scott Ballew got the idea to shoot a documentary about the making of Tarpon and approached Odasso for help bringing up the quality of the original film. Now the 1973 movie is due to hit streaming platforms in March 2025.

“We wanted to keep the documentary sort of exactly as it was,” Odasso told me from her Lake Worth, Florida, home. Recovering and digitizing those old reels — many of which were covered in rust — was a herculean chore. “I had huge crates being shipped from a barn in France. It’s been an interesting education in restoring old film,” she says. “We were not able to find better sound, so the sound is probably the least-restored of the things.” The audio track includes the original score for the film by an unpaid, largely yet-unknown singer-songwriter named Jimmy Buffett.

After filming in the Keys, Valdène invited Buffett, along with Harrison, to France for post-production scoring and narration. The weeks-long process was such a slog that Buffett recalled killing time by procuring a large bag of pot and a key to the wine cellar at the Valdène family castle outside of Paris. Three weeks into their sojourn, the time came for Buffett to work out the score, which, in his telling, was handled in a day.

“There’s always been a weird population of fishermen that have known about this film, that have watched crappy, grainy, bootleg copies forever,” Odasso says. “And I hear from these people literally every day; we get emails. They want the poster. They want T-shirts. Now, for fishermen, it’s sort of a lost period. It’s this high point in flats and tarpon fishing, and fly-fishing that doesn’t exist anymore, especially not in Key West.”

That’s not to say you can’t go to the Keys in the spring and find tarpon. They’re there, but there’s so much fishing pressure that the fish are as skittish as ever — save for those lackadaisically snatching food scraps around marina docks.

For a brief period of time, author Thomas McGuane had the only flats skiff in Key West.

“Tell me about the fish,” someone demands of a resplendent, hammock-lounging Brautigan during a segment in the original film. He cuts right in: “Massively lyrical. A very powerful, lyrical thing. Extraordinary. So extraordinary as to create immediate unreality upon contact with the fish.

“I don’t see how you could design anything or wish for anything more than a tarpon. … Shallow water, deep water, light tackle, heavy tackle — I mean, they do everything. I’m not a good authority ’cause I haven’t fished that many places, but I think a tarpon is just the best.”

Despite excesses of seemingly mythical proportions — and the collateral damage along the way — this close-knit cadre of gentlemen never lost sight of what they had in front of them, and judging by certain dialogues in the film, they didn’t allow themselves to become jaded, either. There’s a prescient discussion that takes place during what looks like an after-hours captain’s meeting of sorts, exchanging sobering realizations and predictions about the way things were going in the Keys. “Even back then, people could see the shift happening in South Florida,” Odasso says.

Valdène puts forth: “What happens, for example, if in six or seven years from now, you or I or Page or anybody here has to work, say, for three or four days before they can get their customers to jump two or three fish? In other words, is there anything physical that’s scaring the fish off the flats?”

Even in the 1970s, fishing pressure was beginning to mount, as recounted in the film Tarpon.

“I think it’s just motorboat pressure,” Woody Sexton, a senior tarpon guide answers curtly.

“There is no question that the traffic is going to have some great impact on these fish,” Ray Donnersberger, another guide, chimes in.

“I think we’re seeing the end of it,” blurts a weathered, discontented voice. The camera cuts to a series of tourism vignettes: cruise ships unloading pasty passengers in droves, a party boat full of ambitious anglers with mates gleefully bludgeoning everything from permit to sharks. This was not the culture of Valdène and McGuane, to be sure.

“There are probably 60 or 70 bonefish skiffs in Key West right now, guide skiffs,” McGuane says in an interview from his Montana home. “I had the only one. I had the only skiff in the whole place.”

There’s a scene in Tarpon, set on the flats, in which Valdène is poling backward from the bow of McGuane’s skiff while McGuane stands on the side-console dash, fly rod in hand, line coiled on the deck, ready to fire. These guys were doing this stuff before the boats were even outfitted for it. They were also practicing catch-and-release, a novel concept at the time.

Fishing aside, Tarpon is a feat in filmmaking. “You’re dealing with 16-millimeter film, doing slow-motion focus pulls on fish jumping, which is technically, as a filmmaker, very hard, and you cannot be on a moving boat,” Odasso says. “They had to create a sort of stable location.”

The film crew built platforms to capture fishing footage on the flats. 

Coming from outside of the fishing world, it’s something of a small miracle that Christian Odasso captured what a good many notables, including novelist Carl Hiaasen, distinguish as “some of the greatest tarpon footage that’s ever been shot.”

“It was in Guy’s basement for a quarter of a century or something before it got fished back out again,” McGuane recalls.

“I can’t remember. I know that we tried very hard to sell it,” Valdène says.

“My uncle wasn’t the best businessman,” Odasso answers, in tune with, though a little more gracious than, how Buffett recalls his late friend: “I don’t think it ever got shown. Guy was kind of a … his sense of business was nil.”

The same old story of fishermen and artists alike.