The Screengrab : hearts of fire

Double Threats: Dylan in the Movies

Hayden Childs — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Here’s an idea I have for an ongoing series: Double Threats, in which I discuss the acting careers of people mostly known for other artistic endeavors. Or conversely, the other artistic endeavors of people primarily known as actors. Inspired by tonight’s debate between the quick-witted enigmatic younger man and the proverbial Mr. Jones who seemed unsure of what, exactly, was going on here, didn't he?... OK, I’m stretching at this point, aren’t I? Actually, I’ve just had Bob Dylan on the brain recently and thought he might be a good test subject for this idea.

The double-aughts have been pretty good for Dylan in the movies. The man who made a household phrase out of “the sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken” managed to baffle critics and audiences alike with 2003’s Masked And Anonymous, which (this may surprise you, unless you saw it) he wrote himself. Then Martin Scorsese made the epic 3+ hour documentary No Direction Home in 2005, which included footage that shocked and amazed rock fans, such as the famous “Judas” moment from the misnamed Royal Albert Hall Concert, Dylan at the March on Washington in 1963, or (and this blew my mind) contemporary gnomic-old-man Dylan cracking a smile. And then 2007 saw Todd Haynes’ brilliant I’m Not There, which created an alternate universe where all of Dylan’s mythologies sprang to life.

Masked And Anonymous wasn’t Dylan’s first acting role, of course. Prior to that movie, he appeared as a chauffeur in a 1999 movie called Paradise Cove. I confess that I’ve never seen it, and his role was apparently miniscule, so let’s move on. In 1989, he had an uncredited role in the Alan Smithee-directed Backtrack. The Smithee name is always a sign of quality -- and we’re all on the same page here, right? (“Quality” is my clever code word for “utter crap.”) Moving on. Two years before that was 1987’s Hearts of Fire, which starred Dylan as a rock star with the supernatural ability to bore everyone senseless. At least, that’s what my vague memory tells me. I also seem to recall that he turned into The Hulk at one point, so I’m willing to concede that I might have fallen asleep somewhere in there.

By now you’re wondering: has Dylan been in anything good? Well, there’s the four-hour Renaldo and Clara from 1978. I have a simple test to assess how much you’ll enjoy this movie: add up the number of Dylan albums you listen to regularly (and you’re free to define “regularly” as you and your maker see fit) and then divide that number by the total number of albums he’s released (32 studio albums, 13 live albums, 14 compilations, and a near-infinite number of bootlegs, but you don’t have to count them unless you feel so compelled). Should you hit somewhere around 40 percent, then you might like Renaldo and Clara. You’ve probably already seen it, though, so, uh, never mind. Finally, before Renaldo and Clara, Dylan was in Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 great-on-the-square Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid.

Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid is a masterpiece, but it’s a messy one. I guess you could say the same thing about some of Dylan’s 70s albums, too. In the movie, Dylan plays Alias, a mostly wordless guy who hangs around Billy The Kid looking shockingly similar to a rock star named Bob Dylan. It’s not a big stretch for the man. But it is a pleasant, unassuming role that complements his sometimes-powerful, mostly-pleasant and unassuming soundtrack for the movie.

According to movie lore (and, uh, Wikipedia), Peckinpah had never heard of Dylan before the movie and had to be talked into meeting him by Rudy Wurlitzer (who wrote it) and Kris Kristofferson (who played Billy). Dylan was a fan of Peckinpah’s movies, especially the elegaic Ride The High Country. So Dylan played Peckinpah a couple of songs he’d written after reading the script, and Peckinpah, sentimental cuss that he was, was blown away. Peckinpah brought in Jerry Fielding to help Dylan score the movie. Fielding despised Dylan and everything he stood for and was thoroughly unimpressed with the music Dylan wrote for the death scene of Sheriff Colin Baker (spoiler!).

Baker, who was played by Slim Pickens, has a quite moving death scene, one of the most poignant in any Peckinpah movie, and that’s saying something. Fielding pushed and prodded Dylan to come up with something better, and Dylan responded with that obscure ditty “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.” (Obscure? I kid, I kid.) Fielding, not exactly a man of the times, hated the song so much that he quit the production. Dylan toiled on without him. Later, as with so many Peckinpah movies, the studio took control away in editing, and the theatrical release chopped Dylan’s role down to not-much and cut his music into pieces. The 2005 DVD release restores the movie to its director’s cut and adds a different version that combines elements of the theatrical cut, the director’s cut, and previously unreleased scenes. None of these versions, however, expand Dylan’s role into anything major or even coherent, but they’re certainly worth a viewing. Apparently, most of Dylan's role was shot using a camera with a defective lens, so there wasn't much left for the movie. It’s a shame no one's brought his acting chops to cinema yet. That Dylan guy would have killed as the lead in Don’t Look Back.

Forgotten Films: Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Peter Smith — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Bob Dylan re-wrote the rules about what was allowed of a famous singer, songwriter, and public figure, but it turned out that he did have one normal thing about him: he liked the idea of being a movie star. Dylan was a movie star whenever he got to be himself in caught footage, as in D. A. Pennebaker's 1967 documentary Don't Look Back, but his first several attempts to pass for an actor, or to capture his magnificence himself, tended to be kind of, well, disastrous. The music he produced for the soundtrack of Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) yielded a triumph in "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," but Peckinpah's attempt to incorporate Dylan into the cast, as a mysterious, knife-throwing hombre known as "Alias", only resulted in a smirking blank space on the screen. Dylan's own 1978 Renaldo & Clara, a four-hour mixture of fantasy and documentary sequences threaded through with performance footage from the 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue, inspired print seminars, in places like the Village Voice, on the theme, "Dylan: What Happened?"; long unavailable in its complete form, the movie will probably be seen again around the time that Jerry Lewis's The Day the Clown Cried is released as part of the Criterion Collection. Then there's Hearts of Fire, a misguided 1987 rock-'n-roll love story with Dylan as the sage old music legend who plays smitten mentor to the uni-named cupcake Fiona. The barely-released film was the last work by its director, Richard Marquand (Eye of the Needle, Return of the Jedi), who had a fatal stroke before signing off on the final cut.

After a long lay-off from movies, Dylan re-emerged in 2003 as the star of Masked and Anonymous, directed by Larry Charles. (It was the first movie directed by Charles, who was then best known for his TV work, as a writer on Seinfeld and a director on Curb Your Enthusiasm. His second movie would be Borat.) Dylan and Charles co-wrote the script, under the pseudonyms "Sergei Petrov" and "Rene Fonatine." It was made fast — principal photography was reportedly completed in twenty days — and relatively cheap; a lot of well-known people agreed to be paid scale on it because, like the various celebrities who appeared in Renaldo & Clara, they just wanted to work with Dylan. The cast includes Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer, Mickey Rourke, Angela Bassett, Penelope Cruz, Giovanni Ribisi, Luke Wilson, Fred Ward, Bruce Dern, Cheech Marin, Tracey Walter, Robert Wisdom, Chris Penn, Christian Slater and Susan Tyrrell, as well as Dylan's longtime touring band (including guitarist Charlie Sexton and bassist Tony Garnier) and a little girl named Tinashe Kachingwe, who brings down the house with her a-cappella version of "The Times They Are A-Changin'." The reward they get for their participation is that they all get to be characters in a new Dylan song — one of the really long ones, like "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," full of imagery and puns and symbols and throwaway jokes. That's how the movie is conceived.

The setting is America as a junta-led dictatorship, with government-controlled media and street executions, and with Dylan as a legendary troubadour named "Jack Fate" who's spent the last several years locked away in prison. An Albert Grossman-like manager figure — Uncle Sweetheart, played by John Goodman — gets him sprung so he can perform at a big televised benefit concert, and he tours the back country on his way to the performance site, serving as witness to the perversion of the country's ideals, and playing straight man to a succession of ranters and weirdos. The movie has its dead spots and its puzzlements, and it rambles, as you might expect. But it's not just some vanity project. There's real pain and a lot of humor in it, and its vision of an entertainment-sated America in lockdown is politically sophisticated in a way that was guaranteed to go over like a lead balloon when it was released during the summer of "Mission Accomplished!" Part of the movie's strength, and part of what may cause many to regard it as dismissible, is that it pictures this nightmare of where we may be headed but doesn't have any ideas of how to slay the dragon once it plops its ass down in the seat of power. Dylan doesn't dismiss the power and value of music, but he knows damn well that it doesn't stop jackbooted thugs in their tracks.

The one message that does come through loud and clear is that the sixties have been over a long time, they aren't ever coming back, and they may not have been everything that nostalgic boomers and post-boomer dreamers want to think they were in the first place. In one of the movie's funniest and most pointed scenes, Goodman reads a long list of songs that the government would like Jack Fate to perform for the national television audience: it's a string of rebellious sixties classics ("Street Fighting Man", "Masters of War"), now toothless but still good for making the listener imagine that he must be a part of something daring. (Dylan's deadpan response: "I dunno, Sweetheart. It seems like a whole lot of songs.") And the movie's villain is a self-hating blowhard of a rock journalist (Jeff Bridges) who "interviews" the Dylan character by suggesting that he's a has-been and a sell-out while reeling off the names of rock heroes such as Hendrix who had the decency to die young. Dylan seems to hate this asshole more than the dying, dictatorial "president" (Richard C. Sarina) or his replacement — Mickey Rourke, who caresses the screen with his sweetest pussycat smile while promising, "We will empty the prisons, and fill the football stadiums!" Masked and Anonymous was part of a general comeback for Dylan that began with his 1997 album Time Out of Mind; since then, his autumnal renaissance has included a couple more albums (Love and Theft, Modern Times) and his memoir Chronicles, Volume One, as well as the belated official release Live 1966 and the Martin Scorsese documentary No Direction Home. (He also won an Academy Award for the song "Things Have Changed" from Wonder Boys.) In this unexpected surge of critically garlanded work, Masked and Anonymous (which also yielded a superb soundtrack album) may have gotten lost in the shuffle, but in its own eccentric way, it's as intriguing a statement about Dylan and his myth as any yet caught on film. At least, until the imminent release of Todd Haynes I'm Not There, which addresses the problem of summing up Dylan by dividing the part among six different actors. You can bet that Dylan is kicking himself for not having thought of that before.

— Phil Nugent