Bleecker Street

It's not like I can put dibs on this one, but Good Lord, is there ever a movie (or two or three or six) in the Bob Dylan story -- not a documentary, like Scorsese's definitive No Direction Home, the first part of which premiered on PBS Monday night and finishes up Tuesday -- but a feature.  There's almost too many angles to come at it from, but of course you know what channel you've tuned into here. 

I'm thinking romantic comedy/dramedy, and even in this neck of the woods, the possibilities are myriad.  Do you do the Bob and Joan Baez storyline?  Or their darkly absurd counter-cultural counterpart to Bob & Ted & Carol & Alice, featuring Joan's sister and Mr. Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me: call it Bob & Joan & Richard & Mimi?  Let's not forget Suze Rotolo (who was one of the most savvily articulate of Scorsese's interviewees) -- I'm seeing Cameron Diaz with long hair, or a chubbier Tilda Swinton, for Suze's "girl who was with him when it all changed/ coming-of-age" version.  And hovering behind all these romances, the original narcissistic love story, in the pairing of Bob Dylan and Robert Zimmerman.

But among the ones I have in mind -- some screenplay ideas I'm actually tempted to start playing around with, inspired by watching all that footage shot on my old home turf --  is a story that would have The Big D as more of an off-screen presence; maybe he'd have a cameo part, but front and center would be a guy loosely/somewhat based on me, and his relationship with a girl loosely/somewhat based on someone I loved, back in the Bleecker Street day. 

See, she and me and Bob crossed paths on those old Village stomping grounds.  And I got one scene -- the real-life nugget that could seed a fictional film -- I can share with you, though it'll have to wait until tomorrow, on account of I'll have to actually do some thinking and then write the sucker, as opposed to spitballing it here in the midnight hour.  But here's the teaser: you know the Rolling Thunder Revue -- that famous traveling musical circus that Dylan and Ginsberg and Baez and a busload of luminaries took on the road in 1975? 

I started it.

Tune in next time, and all will be told. 

Comments

[Dean]

Interesting.

I'm bummed I missed the Dylan doc. I had even planned to see it.

I'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts on "Bob & Carol& Ted & Alice." I loved that movie when I was younger, but haven't though about it in years.

[uhjim]

i always saw 'the hour when the ship comes in" as an old fashoned cartoon which showed the little rocks standing proud with their arms akimbo, on que, etc etc. maybe you could toss that into the mix. or you could just show the receptionist and manager getting run over by a bus a few hours after bob and joan checked out of the hotel. i never dreamed i would know the story behind that song.

[mernitman]

Uh-jim: and the additional story, not voiced in the documentary, is that the song is clearly an homage to (i.e. kind of a rip-off of) Kurt Weill's "Pirate Jenny" song, with its "ship, the black freighter" that mows down Jenny's adversaries -- which Dylan acknowledges as an influence, in "Chronicles."

[Clair Lamb]

You could write a whole movie out of the song "Diamonds & Rust."