Editor's Note: I'm seriously wondering what became of this.

Scene
By Bill DeYoung
Gainesville Sun - June 10, 1983

Gainesville's hometown hero Tom Petty is about to have his life story immortalized on film. Kevin Bruce Productions of El Segundo, California, a distributor of scripts and documentaries for PBS, is in the process of developing a script on the Hogtown hi-jinks of the Florida rocker-made-good.

Cheryl Fox, a Bruce associate handling the Petty project, says the idea came about during research for the company's upcoming film "Rock College." "Somebody said, 'Let's use Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' and when we started looking into them, we discovered that Tom had a pretty interesting background.

"We'd like to base te story on his growing-up, leading up to his success. I really want to be able to use the parts about him fighting the record business."

Fox says her company has a tentative go-ahead from the Petty camp but, she adds, anything they do will be subject to final approval from Petty himself. "We could change the story around, call the character something else," she says, "but it wouldn't be the same."

If the project comes off as planned, according to Fox, the final film will feature all Petty music and (gulp) actors as TP, the Heartbreakers and their Gainesville cohorts.