From today's Variety... By MICHAEL FLEMING Martin Scorsese will direct a documentary about Bob Dylan and the impact his early music had on the cultural and political landscape. Scorsese, who featured Dylan in his screen version of the Band's "The Last Waltz," will have full cooperation from the singer, who'll give his first filmed interview in 20 years. Project is being financed by Guy East and Nigel Sinclair's Spitfire Pictures, along with Thirteen/WNET New York and BBC Television. The film will debut on WNET's "American Masters" series and BBC's "Arena." It will be shopped for theatrical or TV distribution in other territories by Sinclair, who's producing with Jeff Rosen of Greywater Park, WNET's Susan Lacy and BBC's Anthony Wall. Scorsese's Cappa Prods. will also produce. The docu will begin in 1963, when Dylan began his rise to socially conscious folk hero status with songs like "Blowin' in the Wind" and "Like a Rolling Stone." It stops at 1966, after he shocked his audience by going electric. He had a motorcycle accident that year and didn't tour again for another eight years. Dylan's last filmed interview was for a "20/20" segment in 1985; he has never spoken this extensively about his early career. "I had been a great fan for many years when I had the privilege to film Bob Dylan for 'The Last Waltz,' " said Scorsese. "I've admired and enjoyed his many musical transformations. For me, there is no other musical artist who weaves his influences so densely to create something so personal and unique. This project gives me a chance to explore one of the most exciting artists and icons of the past 50 years." Sinclair and East's first film since they left Intermedia to form Spitfire was "Masked and Anonymous," which features the acting and music of Dylan. This docu is, in part, an outgrowth of that film. Sinclair has always wanted to make a Dylan project on the order of the highly successful "Beatles Anthology." When he met Dylan, they got into discussions about "Masked and Anonymous," which Sony Pictures Classics will release July 26, and delayed the bio. "Imagine the chance to have Bob looking back at those years, with an exhaustive catalog of concert and other footage that has never been seen, and Martin Scorsese to interpret it and make it his authored story," said Sinclair. The footage includes plenty of concert material through those years, including Dylan's first-ever performance on the electric guitar. WNET's Lacy had been imagining it for a decade, and her continued calling paid off when Dylan became ready to tell his story. "Was there a more important artist helping us deal with our collective angst back then?" asked Lacy. She said footage is being catalogued and delivered to Scorsese, who'll begin to make choices and then do the editing on the project when he completes production on "The Aviator," the Howard Hughes film that stars Leonardo DiCaprio. The Dylan pic will be ready in late 2004 or early 2005.
I suppose that Bob couldn't secure the services of legendary rockumentary film maker Marty DiBergi, so Martin Scorsese will just have to do instead.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=entertainmentNews&storyID=7374565 LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - The more Bob Dylan reveals, the more he conceals. Lately, the singer-songwriter has been much in the public eye. His memoir "Chronicles Vol. 1" has been perched on the New York Times bestseller list for 14 weeks. Late last year he sat for an infrequent TV interview, with Ed Bradley on "60 Minutes." Despite that current high profile, Dylan remains a cryptic figure. Though it's a delightful read, "Chronicles" often obfuscates about the facts, and he was as gnomic as ever in his CBS sit-down. Now Martin Scorsese is taking on the Dylan mythos. The director's three-hour feature "No Direction Home" will premiere on PBS's "American Masters" series in two parts on July 13-14. "It's nonfiction -- maybe," Scorsese said candidly at a Television Critics Assn. session at the Universal Hilton on Saturday. "With Bob Dylan, you never know." The film will focus on the five years from Dylan's arrival in New York in January 1961 to the July 1966 motorcycle crash that sidelined him. During that time, the protean musician underwent a hurtling artistic metamorphosis -- from Woody Guthrie acolyte to protest-song icon, from impressionist folk poet to surrealist rock dandy. "You're constantly in a state of becoming," Dylan says in a clip drawn from 10 hours of fresh interview footage shot by Dylan's aide de camp Jeff Rosen, who takes a co-producer credit on the project. (Scorsese said he has not conducted any interviews himself, though it's still a possibility.) The feature will also offer testimony from such familiars as onetime paramours Suze Rotolo and Joan Baez, musicians Dave Van Ronk and Pete Seeger and poet Allen Ginsburg. "American Masters" executive producer Susan Lacy said the show pursued Dylan for 10 years. Judging from the five-minute reel screened for critics, the payoff for that quest should be breathtaking. "No Direction Home" will tap a glittering lode of hitherto unseen footage. The promo reel included what may be the earliest film of Dylan, taken in 1962 by John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers on his New York rooftop. The film will unearth performances from the '63 and '64 Newport Folk Festivals, and outtakes from D.A. Pennebaker's "Don't Look Back" and "Eat the Document," shot respectively on Dylan's '65 and '66 tours of England. Even some Dylan home movies will be aired. The most unexpected clip unspooled for the writers shows Dylan -- on stage in Manchester, England, on May 17, 1966, during his confrontational first electric tour -- reacting as outraged folkie Keith Butler yells "Judas!" from the audience. It's a legendary moment in rock history, and now we can see it. In conjunction with the PBS airing, Columbia Legacy will issue a two-CD set of unreleased Dylan music. Paramount Home Video will release a DVD, with additional footage, in late summer or early fall. It remains to be seen if Scorsese -- who filmed a balky Dylan for his 1978 documentary on the Band, "The Last Waltz" -- can capture the essence of this guarded, endlessly morphing musician. As the director noted, "He's constantly trying not to be pinned down ... Tomorrow, he may be something else."
One of my favorite directors and one of my favorite musicians. This will be great! I guess I have until July to figure out a good way of making DVD-Rs from TV broadcasts!
Of course, what we REALLY need is for someone to edit the Pennebaker from the 1966 tour into a concert film. I've actually seen Eat the Document (it was shown at the Museum of Radio & Television a few years ago), and the concert footage is AMAZING, but there are only snippets here and there. I can't understand why Sony and Dylan passed up the opportunity to create a DVD to go with bootleg series release of the Royal Albert Hall.
I am really looking forward to this. The "AM" series is typical PBS top notch and with Scorsese on board, well, you know it will be interesting.
Thanks for posting this information! I am very excited to see this and am happy to hear about a DVD of the film in addition to Sony's planned 2 discs of unreleased material. I'm just finishing "Chronicles Vol. 1" now and am very pleasantly surprised at how Bob managed to pull me in and keep me wondering what was going to happen next. My favorite chapter is the lengthy description about his life during the "Oh Mercy" sessions--in addition to the segment on how he nearly "threw it all away" after the 18 month Dylan/Petty tour until a fortuitous moment while rehearsing with The Grateful Dead. Any word on a publication date for Volume 2?
That would be terrific, wouldn't it? There is a complete 1966 performance circulating of "Ballad of a Thin Man", and it's mesmerizing to watch.
wHOoooh..this looks exceedingly tasty..can you imagine some of the footage that must be hanging around?
Wow! This could be one of the Holy Grails of music history, the type of footage that we dream of being unearthed someday. And I, too, would LOVE to see more concert footage from the '66 tour, which may be the most famous rock tour ever--and listening to the Manchester concert, lives up to the hype.
The Judas segment is probably likfed from Micky Jones (the drummer on the tour) 'World Tour 1966: The Home Movies' DVD where he discusses the incident at length.
Sorry, I'm going to "squat" on this thread-- it's inevitable and someone will start it so why not me? My exscuse is that it's in the interest of alerting people here who weren't already aware that it was coming soon to a TV near them. Don't know about you, but I've been waiting for this for the last year since I first heard about it. Very excited. Anyone else totally psyched about this? PBS rules, IMO, and American Masters is one of their best series, too. And do I really need to sell anyone on Scorsese? For all music lovers here, even those who think they aren't into Dylan (yet), this should be a real treat. This is the first of many forthcoming Dylan films, I've read about another surrealist bio-pic in the works that features several actors portraying Dylan, including women and African Americans. Not sure what that's all about, but let's chat about the Scorsese doc here. Cheers. Mark
Doh! Really? Oh well, this is for folks like me who need to see it for free, consider this a heads-up, FWIW.
What interested me is how Bob was getting booed in what turned out to be the most important era of his career. It just goes to show you how subjective tastes are.
"Judas!" http://www.mtv.com/news/512709/fan-who-called-dylan-judas-breaks-33-years-of-silence/ Second shouter theory: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-e...i-found-the-man-who-shouted-judas-314340.html
