It recently emerged that Bob Dylan once tried to start up a band featuring both the Beatles and the Stones. And now there’s news of an equally half-baked endeavour: an attempt to make a slapstick comedy with celebrated US TV network HBO.
According to Larry Charles, a one-time writer on Seinfeld who went on to direct Borat and Curb Your Enthusiasm, Dylan approached him “back in the 90s” for a meeting to discuss a potential slapstick comedy TV series, after getting “deeply into Jerry Lewis”.
Charles and Dylan worked up a “very elaborate treatment for this slapstick comedy which was filled with surrealism and all kinds of things from his songs”, collaged from scraps of ideas that Dylan presented to him. The pair then went to HBO to pitch it. “We say to Bob, ‘if you come to HBO with us, we’ll definitely sell the project because they won’t have the balls to say no to your face,’ and he agrees,” Charles remembered on the You Made It Weird podcast.
“We go into the meeting and Chris Albrecht who was the president of HBO says ‘Bob, oh, so great to meet you, look I have the original tickets from Woodstock,’ and Bob goes ‘I didn’t play Woodstock,’ and then he walks over to the other side of the office which has floor to ceiling windows overlooking the city, and proceeds to have his back turned to us for the entire meeting ... Gavin Polone was there, who was my manager at the time, and he was like ‘he’s like a retarded child.’ So I would go ‘Bob’s going to do this, right Bob?’ and at the end, ironically, despite all this discomfort, they bought the project.”
But no sooner are they in the elevator to head out of the building, Dylan changed his mind and said he no longer wanted to do it, calling it “too slapsticky”. Charles stayed with the project though, turning it into “kinda like a serious movie”, Masked and Anonymous, which starred Dylan alongside Jeff Bridges, Penelope Cruz and John Goodman – though which tanked at the box office on release in 2003, scraping together half a million dollars.
Dylan is known for his extra-musical activities – he has published a book of prose poetry as well as his memoirs, and has had numerous exhibitions of his drawing and painting. As well as Masked and Anonymous, he starred in the indulgent four-hour 1978 concert tour film Renaldo and Clara which he also wrote and directed during a US tour, and appeared in little-seen failures like Paradise Cove and Hearts of Fire.
The Basement Tapes, his fabled lost sessions with the Band, were finally released in a comprehensive format this month, while a cache of lost lyrics from the same period have had music written to them by the likes of Elvis Costello and Marcus Mumford, and released as Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes.
