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I’d never given Las Vegas a moment’s thought in my life. I checked in with some cultural colleagues I’ve been jamming the arts with for 40+ years and none of us can remember the city ever coming up for any reason. In fact, it was kind of looked down upon as this superficial wasteland of has-beens trying to prop themselves up one last time in front of drunk white-trash tourists with free tickets.
The one thing that made me even consider the place was Cirque du Soleil doing The BeatlesLOVE show there starting in 2006. Every account of it was an over-the-top rave, and the video snippets made it look like the Sgt Pepper cover come to life with every character morphing into a flying acrobat. The show was created at George Harrison’s instigation and the music put together by George & Giles Martin blending 120 songs and outtakes into an audio-visual orgy. But even THAT couldn’t get me to Vegas thru 18 years of it blowing people’s minds!
Being a concert venue and architecture guy, I’d been reading about the Sphere since before it ever broke ground. It sounded too fantastic to be true, and I remember salivating at the thought, “IMAGINE seeing a Dead show show there!! They are just MADE for this place!!”
Then BOOM! It finally opens (at a cost of two billion dollars!) and sure as shit the Dead are one of the first acts booked to make use of the arena-sized screen in 16k and 167,000 speakers creating a literal surround-sound.
Thus began my deep dive into a town I knew nothing about and its gems have kept revealing themselves like an endlessly-opening lotus.
Heading back in 2025 for my second 9-day residency I figured I’d put some of my findings on a webpage that I’ll add to as new discoveries are uncovered.
These are all things that you can ONLY do in Las Vegas, and this is only scratching the surface, but it’ll give you some good leads for one-of-a-kind mind-blowing fun.
Pro tip — anything you’re considering experiencing in Vegas will have multiple videos of it on YouTube so you can check it out to decide if you want to do it or not.
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Photo Credit: Alive Coverage — and note: there *is* a band on a stage in this photo 🙂
Roughly in order of must-dos . . . [prices & deets as of April 2025]
The Sphere – at a cost of 2.3 billion dollars this is the most technologically advanced venue ever built — with a 16k (!) immersive screen surrounding you — 75-times larger than your average IMAX screen — and 167,000 speakers built in so the volume does not need to be loud but is crystal-clear wherever you are. If any band you remotely like is playing there – GO! Plus there are two specially made films for the Sphere that play there — Darren Aronofsky’s Postcards From Earth and U2’s V-U2 An Immersive Concert Film. Or here’s my Facebook photo album from my first visit there in 2024.
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Cirque du Soleil in Cirque City, as I like to call Vegas. Cirque is to theater what the Sphere is to concert venues. There’s nothing else like it in the world. And in Vegas they’re performing in custom-built theaters — unlike when you may see them touring in a town near you. THIS is the place to experience a Cirque show. Tickets might seem expensive at first blush, but they’re less than half (and maybe a quarter) of what you pay at the Sphere. There’s nothing else like these shows staged anywhere else on the planet. To my eyes, the gymnastics I see at a Cirque show makes me wonder how anyone takes the Olympics seriously. 😅
As of 2025 they have five shows running. Sadly their crown-jewel Beatles LOVE show closed (after 18 years) during the Dead’s first residency in 2024, after which its home at the Mirage was taken over to make way for the next super-resort.
But you can still experience KÀ at the MGM Grand which is to staging what the Sphere is to the screen with a multiple moving platform stages that span 15 stories in height (!)
“O“, the water Cirque, takes place in a 1.5 million-gallon pool in a custom-built theater at the Bellagio with 85 acrobats. It’s also been a hit in Vegas since it first premiered in 1998.
Mystère features multi-genre music played live by a killer jazz-level 10-piece band, and is staged in their first custom-build theater — at the Sphere-near Treasure Island. It’s so stunning it’s been playing nonstop for 30+ years.
If you like Michael Jackson, there’s their One show with 25 of his songs set to actors & acrobatics at Mandalay Bay.
Cirque’s newest show, Mad Apple opened in the New York New York resort in 2022 and brings to life a night out in Manhattan including music (played by a huge super-diverse crackerjack band, as befitting New York standards), comedy, dancing, street performers, sports, magic and the downtown bar scene. We saw it the night before our Sphere run this year and loved the funny magician, the risqué comedian, the guy balancing on about ten rollers twenty feet high, and the climactic ‘wheel of death.’
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The Eiffel Tower 46th-floor observation deck — I find it very helpful to have a firsthand aerial perspective of the landscape I’m living in. The Strip is roughly 4 miles long — from Mandalay Bay to the south to the Strat on the north end — with the Eiffel Tower basically in the middle. You ride up in a glass-walled elevator thru the center of the tower to an outdoor deck with a metal grill screen which has nice holes for taking pictures. Tickets are $25 in the lobby gift shop.
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Arte Museum at Aria is the greatest art space you can experience in Vegas. It’s a dozen rooms with 360º aural & visual sensory immersion of different natural spaces from forests to oceanfronts. Then they have a main “great room” that fills with various installations from Impressionist paintings to playful tributes to Vegas. It uses cutting-edge technology to create moving imagery that’s projected on the floor and all the walls. This is the only place you can experience it outside of Asia. On the oceanfront the water from the waves washes across the floor, and in the forest psychedelic animals appear and disappear. I walked thru the whole thing three times when I first went! Here’s my Facebook photo album with a bunch of images. Tickets are $40 for the early bird entry (10–11:30AM) and $50 from noon to 9PM. You need to buy them in advance here.
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Meow Wolf (aka Omega Mart) is the super-trippy sculpted indoor playground over an acre in size with multiple levels and things to play with. There’s cave holes you can crawl through to new spaces, and wild visual light shows going on everywhere designed for people who clearly see colors vividly. It’s like a surrealdream you had but manifested as a physical place. It’s located in a massive complex called Area 15 (a play on Nevada’s Area 51) which includes all sorts of other trippy attractions like The Illuminarium which is currently featuring a new 50-minute 360º immersive history of rock movie called “Amplified,” plus there’s a big outdoor sculpture garden, numerous restaurants and one-of-a-kind indoor sculptures. It’s open daily 11AM to 11PM and you can/should buy timed entry tickets in advance here for $54. I would plan for a minimum of a couple hours to do this right.
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Fremont Street aka “The Fremont Street Experience” is the original strip in downtown Vegas and the place where the locals celebrate, leaving the regular Strip near the Sphere to the tourists. This is my go-to after Dead at the Sphere shows because the circus is in full swing on weekend nights. It has the largest LED screen in the world covering fully four city blocks — so it’s sorta the closest thing to the Sphere — and on weekend nights they have full bands playing non-stop on 3 different stages, plus buskers and street performers of all sorts from one end to the other. It also has the oldest continuously operating casino in Vegas, the El Cortez (opened in 1941), as well as the original Golden Nugget casino and the famous original Vegas Vic neon sign — the giant cowboy beckoning people into the old Pioneer Club. Put up in 1951 — the year Kerouac first wrote the On The Road scroll and before rock n roll was even invented (!) — it was sort of Vegas’s first Sphere in that it was a pioneering cutting-edge light creation that changed the world sparking the neon signage we take for granted today. There’s also the Golden Gate — the oldest continuously-functioning hotel in Vegas [dating from 1906] which has a bunch of historic artifacts including century-old slot machines and Vegas’s first telephone! Across the street, at the terminus of Fremont, is Vegas’s Plaza Hotel which has a Sand Dollar Lounge with live bands most nights and is always free to get in. Plus there’s a zip-line so you can fly the length of the street for $50 if you’re so inclined. Tickets here. Of course walking the street is free, but it’s a bit like the old Times Square so be mindful of hustlers and pickpockets.
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And don’t miss the largest glass sculpture in the world in Bellagio’s lobby ceiling and their flower conservatorythat’s completely done anew four times a year and features massive sculptures made out of living flowers. Both are open 24-hours and are you-can’t-believe-it kind of things. I have a Facebook photo album on the two spaces here.
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Absinthe is a take-off on Cirque du Soleil but is more of a comic risqué burlesque and adult-oriented show. It’s been playing since 2011 in-the-round in a big 750-capacity tent in front of Caesar’s Palace. It’s sort of a low-budget Cirque show — modeled after a traveling circus, without Cirque’s elaborate sets, music, costumes or death-defying acrobatics. All sorts of interesting people have done cameos in it over the years from Daniel Radcliffe to Olivia Newton-John. You can get tickets here.
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The Cirque shows and Absinthe were born and raised in Las Vegas, but a psychedelic cousin of theirs moved to town and into the Luxor in 2000, Blue Man Group. If you’re into drumming and improvisation and performance theater, this is eye and ear candy for the soul. They do two shows a night seven days a week with lots of tix for $37 n the intimate 800-seat theater.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vchYQ6aJwgs
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The rollercoaster atop New York New York. When was the last time you rode a rollercoaster? Right? Why not do it on the roof of the New York building with all of Las Vegas around you as you whirl past the Statue of Liberty and other New York landmarks? It’s $25, and you get tickets at the site.
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The Neon Sign Boneyard Museum is the home to over 800 neon signs from throughout Vegas history, 250 of which are on display in “the boneyard.” The La Concha Motel donated their entire shell-shaped lobby which became the visitor’s center. You can walk among prime historic pieces (dating back to the 1930s) of hand-blown light-as-art which eventually evolved into the Sphere and the 4-block LED screen covering Fremont St. There’s also a 40-min. 360º audiovisual show called “Brilliant” that re-animates the old signs and history of Vegas using 3D-sound and 3D photogrammetry to bring everything to life. This started as just a ‘graveyard’ of old neon signs, but people kept wanting to come and see them, so it grew slowly and organically into a ‘museum’ for visitors which now number 200,000 per year. It’s open from 3PM till 11PM and tickets are $35 after 6PM when you want to see it with the signs lit up. You can get the tickets here.
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A photo-op at the iconic “Welcome To Fabulous Las Vegas” sign is a cab/ride-share away in the median of Las Vegas Blvd South at the southern tip of the Strip just past Mandalay Bay. Erected in 1959, it was designed by Betty Willis who also did the famous Moulin Rouge lettering marquee that’s now in the Neon Sign Boneyard. And in more cool news, all the bulbs on the sign are lit by solar power. 💖 There’s a parking lot right there in the median where you can be dropped off & picked up. And if there’s a line to take pictures there’s often a photographer who’ll take your pic unnoticeably off-center for a tip and you can skip the line. It’s another one of the cool Free things to do in town — except for the cab rides and the tip. Also — always have cash to pay for the cabs/ride-shares. There’s an automatic $3 surcharge (that tourists don’t know about) if you use plastic.
Red Rock Canyon — time & distance: 30 mins / 20 miles West. Can be both a driving and/or hiking experience. Timed reservations are required – one-hour entry time-slots — available here. $20 per car.
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Valley of Fire — time & distance: 45 mins / 45 miles. Kind like Bryce Canyon in Utah with Aztec sandstone outcroppings and 2,000 year old petroglyphs. It’s free to go to the State Park, but many of the trails are closed from May 15th to Sept 30th due to the desert heat.
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The Seven Magic Mountains — time & distance: 15 mins / 10 miles South — large free outdoor art installation by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone — seven large cool colorful 30-foot-high monoliths in the desert just south of town.
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Restaurants:
Peppermill Restaurant & Lounge has got a lush, surreal, positively psychedelic interior design. It’s become an institution in Vegas in its 50 years for huge helpings of great food, and is a setting for lots of movies & TV shows. When Jerry Seinfeld met up with his old friend George Wallace in Vegas, the Peppermill is where they chose to go. Scenes in The Cotton Club,Casino and Showgirls were shot there, and is where Penn Jillette & Paul Provenza “thought out, laid out, planned, budgeted and scheduled” their movie The Aristocrats. It’s on the strip one mile north of Treasure Island / the Palazzo.
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Blueberry Hill FamilyRestaurant — A family-owned and operated Las Vegas institution known for its great home-cooked food. The main location is just a little bit east of the Strip at 1505 East Flamingo Rd — and is open 24 hours! Here’s the menu.
In-N-Out Burger — The famous family-owned California burger chain has a location on the fun & active pedestrian promenade in between the LINQ and the Flamingo.
I’ve heard there’ great Chinese food in Chinatown but I’ve yet to hit it. If anybody has any specific tips, lemme know.
This is a scene-by-scene breakdown ofthe Dylan biopic masterpiece A Complete Unknown co-written and directed by James Mangold. Besides being one of the best living filmmakers, Mangold was undoubtably tapped because of how well he handled the Oscar-winning Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line.
After Jeff Rosen and Bob’s management team optioned the Elijah Wald book Dylan Goes Electric in 2017, the movie was in development for a couple years when Covid hit. Just prior to the lockdown, Mangold and Bob’s team were at an impasse. Mangold and his cowriter Jay Cocks (who’d helped Scorsese with his No Direction Home documentary about the same period) had written the script that basically became the movie we know. But Bob’s management team were saying they didn’t like how it focused on his personal life and wanted it more about his songwriting. Mangold maintained that a movie is about people and relationships. Neither side was backing down.
Then Dylan’s 2020 tour got canceled due to the lockdown. Suddenly Bob was unexpectedly sitting around, and asked his office to send him the script. To their surprise (and embarrassment) he loved it. Of Mangold, Bob told his office, “He doesn’t have an agenda.” And added they should ask the director if he wants to meet up.
Thus began a series of five full afternoons they spent together. As Mangold tells it, the first meeting, he was expecting it to last maybe an hour, but Bob just wanted to keep talking movies and filmmaking all day.
They went over the script line-by-line multiple times, with Bob adding lines and context and background. They even did a table read together with Bob reading all the lines we heard Timothée Chalamet deliver, and Mangold performing all the other parts.
The movie turned out to be a biopic masterpiece — and it’s gotta be the only one in history that the subject had such a direct hand in creating. And . . . it’s Bob frickin’ Dylan’s hand!
I created this breakdown because I wanted to understand how they did it. It gave me cause to look up some of the songs we only hear briefly in passing. I transcribed a bunch of the dialog so I’d have a record of what exactly was said on screen. And I time-coded it so I could go directly to any scene I wanted to re-investigate.
I also did this in an even more detailed way for Peter Jackson’s historic The Beatles: Get Back. That’s turned out to be one of the most popular pieces on my website which has nearly 300 stories on it. Many people read that piece every single day, and I’ve heard from both college professors and high school teachers in both the U.S. and the U.K. who’ve told me they’ve used it in their classrooms. So I figured this might be something others would find useful.
2:25 – inside the Kettle of Fish Bob asks the bartender where Greystone Hospital is (where Woody is a patient). Dave Van Ronk walks up to the bar and tells him it’s in New Jersey.
3:10 – Pete Seeger in court – actor and Kerouac aficionado Peter Gerety as the one-eyed judge.
9:30 – Bob sings Song For Woody– masterful – every song in the movie is played live on camera. The long note he holds at the end was unplanned and caught everyone by surprise including Chalamet.
12:00 – Bob riding in car with Pete. Bob asks to play the radio, identifies Little Richard’s Slippin’ and Slidin’ as the flip side on Long Tall Sally.
Bob: “If you’re talkin about rock n roll specifically, you gotta be talkin about Buddy Holly.” Pete doesn’t care for it, and Bob says “Yeah, but sometimes they sound good.”
13:30 – Arrive at Pete’s house, meets his wife Toshi. They set him up on bed in the living room. Pete to Toshi in bed: “He played us a hell of a song.”
14:15 – Bob next morning playing what he’s written so far of Girl From The North Country – Pete & the family listen. “Good start,” says his daughter, cutely. 😀
16:15 – Pete Seeger on stage at a Town Hall type venue, Bob watching admiringly from the wings.
Pete comes off stage and promises Bob: “I’m gonna get you out there. I am.”
17:25 – Joan Baez seen from behind walking along the sidewalk to Folk City. She goes into the dressing room, Albert Grossman is waiting, she tells him to leave.
21:30 – Pete Seeger introduces Bob – “A month or so ago Woody and I met a young man. He kinda just dropped in on us, and he sang us a song. Well, it fairly struck us to the ground. And Woody and I felt that maybe we were gettin’ a glimpse of a new road. This young man has been playing around town a bit, but I thought it was high time he took the stage at Folk City. So, I want you to give a warm welcome to Bob Dylan.” Bob on stage: “How ’bout that Joan Baez, folks? She’s pretty good. And she’s pretty. Sings pretty. Maybe a little too pretty.” then laughs at his own comment.
24:50 – Bob shows up late for his recording session. Albert reads him the Robert Shelton New York Times review in the elevator. Bob doesn’t like it until Albert reads, “… but when he works his guitar, there’s no doubt he is bursting at the seams with talent.” Bob: “Hey! What?” and he grabs the paper from Albert. 😀
25:40 — Bob in the Columbia Studio A recording studio. John Hammond at the mixing console. Bob plays Fixin’ To Die (by Booker T. Washington/Bukka White) 26:35 – Albert to John Hammond: “He has originals, too, you know. And they’re really good.” Hammond: “Traditional repertoire for now, Albert. We’re putting a younger face on folk.”
30:50 – Bob & Sylvie in diner after seeing movie. Sylvie: “What do you want to be?” Bob: “A musician. Who eats.” Sylvie: “Well, I like your songs.” Bob: “My record comes out in a couple weeks.” Sylvie: “Some of the songs you played today on your record?” Bob: “It’s mostly covers. It’s traditional stuff. Y’know, folk songs are supposed to stand the test of time, like Shakespeare or something. They say no one wants to hear what a kid wrote last month.” Sylvie: “Who’s ‘they’?” Bob: “The record company. My manager.” Sylvie: “I’m sorry, but, Where Have All The Flowers Gone? is not Shakespeare. There was a time when the old songs were new, right? Someone at some point had to give the songs a chance. I mean, there’s a civil war going on down south. The biggest military buildup in history. Nuclear bombs hanging over us. It’s not all about the Dust Bowl and Johnny Appleseed anymore.”
32:35 – They walk on nighttime sidewalk to Sylvie’s subway stop, talk of CORE, she gives him a (writer & Partisan Review editor) Dwight Macdonald article. “He’s contrarian, like you.” She gives him her number.
33:40 – Bob in a neighborhood record store, Joan Baez’s Silver Dagger is playing, he sees her albums selling out of the bins.
34:15 – Sylvie takes Bob to a Black protest rally.
34:35 – Bob & Sylvie arrive at their apt. Mailman catches them. “Package for Zimmerman.”
34:50 – Bob up in the middle of the night writing songs.
35:10 – Bob at Woody’s room in the hospital singing him Blowin’ In The Wind. An orderly comes in and tells him to stop singing – Bob bolder now – speaks up. Orderly: “There’s another gentleman in this room and he’s trying to rest.” Bob: “Yeah, he’s been resting for six months. I don’t think it’s working.” 😀 Pete arrives, “Well, I guess every deck come with two jokers, don’t it?” 😀
36:30 – party in Bob & Sylvie’s apartment. Dave Van Ronk talking to Bob & others: “You can call it country or blues or rock ‘n’ roll – we all keep rewriting the same songs.”
37:25 – Bob watching Johnny Cash on TV (singing Folsom Prison Blues) while Sylvie is packing for her 12 week trip to Rome. Sylvie says she wants to get to know the real Bob. Sylvie as she’s leaving: “You’re ambitious. I think that scares you.” She tells him to write his own songs. Of his debut album, “It’s all other people’s music.”
42:20 – Joan walks down sidewalk – the city in panic, people trying to evacuate. She hears Bob playing Masters of War in the Gaslight. Bob & Joan make out at the top of the stairs.
44:45 – Joan wakes up the morning after in Bob’s apartment. Turns on TV, Cuban Missile Crisis averted. She looks at his desk, there’s a copy of On The Road and lots of lyrics.
46:30 – conversation about how Bob learned guitar. Joan: “Who taught you to play?” Bob: “I taught myself, really. Picked up a few licks at the carnival.” Joan: [in disbelief] “At the carnival?” Bob: “Oh yeah, there was singing cowboys that come through teach me all sorts of funny chords. They’d pass through doin’ shows in Kansas or Dakotas. These chords I learned from a cowboy named Wigglefoot.” Joan: “You were in a carnival? (pause) You are so completely full of shit.” 😀
Bob: “You try too hard. To write. Sunsets and seagulls, smell of buttercups. Your songs are like an oil painting at the dentist office.” Joan: “You’re kind of an asshole, Bob.” Bob: “Yeah, I guess.” 🙂
52:35 – outdoor Village street photo shoot of Bob & Sylvie for Freewheelin cover.
52:55 – Joan in a theater singing Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright. The camera pans over to recording / broadcasting equipment & engineers.
53:30 – photo shoot in Bob & Sylvie’s apartment. Bob preparing to fly to the west coast. The audio of Joan singing Don’t Think Twice in concert (above) is continuing in the apartment on the radio. Sylvie senses the connection between Bob & Joan.
54:55 – Bob on motorcycle to Joan’s house in the country. Warm reception. Joan: “The new record is beautiful.” (Freewheelin’)
56:10 – Monterey Folk Festival 1963 (May 17-19) Dylan’s first ever performance on the west coast. (Jerry Garcia also played at it with The Wildwood Boys, including Robert Hunter on upright bass (!), David Nelson on guitar & Ken Frankle on fiddle. Janis also sang solo on a second stage!) Bob & Joan lovely smiling duet on Girl From The North Country.
57:30 – Bob picks up fan mail at Columbia Records He gets check for $10,000 and a letter from Johnny Cash. Success is happening. Johnny voiceover from his letter: “Your Freewheelin’ album is my most prized possession.”
58:55 – Bob walking on a Village street reading the April 13, 1963, NY Times positive review of his Town Hall performance.
59:05 – Bob gets recognized and chased by fans in the Village — fame happening – conveyed in 2 mins.
59:10 – Bob plays at the March on Washington – August 28, 1963. Sylvie sad in apt. watching it on TV realizing Bob is getting bigger than them in the Village.
59:30 – Bob leaves a gig, mobbed, gets in back of car, homage to Don’t Look Back scene.
59:45 – Bob on plane writes to Johnny Cash. Cash writes him back — first time we see Johnny – on a plane writing letter. (According to director Mangold they used the text of the actual letters from the Dylan archive.) Bob: [in voiceover reading the letter he’s writing to Johnny on the airplane] “Dear Johnny, Thanks for that letter. I am now famous — famous by the rules of public famiosity. It snuck up on me and pulverized me. To quote Mr. Freud, I get quite paranoid.” Johnny Cash: [in voiceover reading the letter he’s writing back to Dylan on a plane.] “Bob — Got your letter. Tonight I sit in the wake of one more hard rain. I was in New York last week. Saw a bunch of folk singers that couldn’t hold a chigger on your ass. Well, I’ll see you in Newport come spring. Until then, track mud on somebody’s carpet.”
1:00:35 – Bob playing A Hard Rain’s A’Gonna Fall in a Town Hall type theater. Albert says to Pete – “This is your dream — folk music reaching everybody.”
1:01:20 – Pete at Woody’s bedside, saying he’s going to go on a world tour. Woody wants Pete to give Bob his harmonica. The one scene in the movie I think is tonally off – too slow, somber for this point in the flow.
1:02:40 – JFK is killed – Nov 22nd, 1963 Bob & Sylvie sad in apartment taking in the news.
1:06:40 – Johnny introduces Bob as his pen pal. “Sometimes when I read his letters I think I can see his brain.”
1:07:15 – Bob says, “Here’s a new one” – sings The Times They Are a’ Changin’ Pete, Toshi, Johnny, Leventhal, Grossman, Lomax, Peter Yarrow, Odetta in the wings in awe and smiling. Joan is reserved – perhaps in awe, seeing the future. Sylvie’s sad – that he’s moved to some realm beyond them – we see her thinking he’s singing about their relationship & future – “The present now will later be past.”
At the end Pete goes “Phew!” and looks up to the heavens like he can’t believe what’s happening. * GREAT final long powerful stare by Bob into the audience – almost menacing – a man in complete control – with the conviction and power to change things.
screen goes black
1:10:08 — “1965” — title card — the movie TOTALLY changes This begins the second half with a different tone and pace and new rock ‘n’ roll conviction.
1:10:15 – Bob bursts out of the Kettle of Fish, walks down MacDougal Street – shades and full head of tussled hair.
1:11:20 – Harold Leventhal‘s fancy fundraising party. Bob arrives with Becka (Black, British girlfriend of the moment) Allen Ginsberg character seen in the background of several shots also a Peter, Paul & Mary trio Alan Lomax – “The word on the street is you’re making quite a noise down there at Studio A. Listen Bob, you don’t have to compete with the Beatles, okay? You’re better than that shit.” Harold Leventhal pressures Bob to play at the party. Pete brings guitar for Bob to play.
Bob: “Two hundred people in that room and each one wants me to be somebody else. They should just fuck off and let me be.” Bobby Neuwirth: “Be what?” Bob: “Excuse me?” Neuwirth: “They should fuck off and let you be what?” Bob: “I don’t know. Whatever it is they don’t want me to be.” Neuwirth: “Y’know, I’m not a horse, so … I don’t like carrying other people’s weight.” Bob: “Yeah, well, I got a hundred pounds on me that don’t show on the scale.” Neuwirth: “How do you sing then?” Bob: “I put myself in another place. But I’m a stranger there.”
1:15:05 – Bob asks Neuwirth’s name on the sidewalk. “Bobby. Like you, man.” He says he’s going to play a gig at McCann’s in the East Village.
1:15:30 – Bob & Becka scene on sidewalk Becka: “I love you. Is that scary to you?” Bob: “I just met you. So, yeah.”
1:16:10 – Neuwirth in bar playing Irish Rover with Irish band Bob gets recognized. When he tries to leave a girl says she wants to see his eyes and grabs his glasses off his face. When Bob grabs them back and says “Get off,” her boyfriend punches Bob in the eye and he falls to the ground. Neuwirth helps him up & out of the bar.
1:17:15 – Bob goes to Sylvie’s apartment 4AM because of the punch to face. Great confessional moment to his old love: Bob: “Everyone asks where these songs come from, Sylvie. But then you watch their faces, and they’re not asking where the songs come from. They’re asking why the songs didn’t come to them.”
1:18:45 – Bob in recording studio at upright piano working on I’ll Keep It With Mine (not released until The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 in 1991) Bob writing at typewriter Bob blowing new whistle in bathtub * Bob rushes in apartment with Like A Rolling Stone lyrics
1:19:30 – Bob on phone with Albert demanding Mike Bloomfield. Bob: “Not Mike Bloom*feld*, Albert, Mike Bloom*field*, he’s a Chicago blues guitar player.” Albert: “Okay, I can’t get him tomorrow. I can get another guitar player.” Bob: “No! I don’t want any of your old session musicians, man. I want young guys with hair on their heads. A guitar player, and a bass player, an organ player and a drum player.” Albert: “I’m gonna try my best but I can’t guarantee that we’re gonna get him tomorrow.” Bob: “I don’t wanna hear it. Get it done.” Bob slams down receiver.
1:19:55 – Bob and new band in recording studio playing Subterranean Homesick Blues John Hammond: “Well, this is gonna piss some people off.” 😀
1:20:15 – tense Archive meeting – planning Newport ’65. Theodore Bikel at planning table. He lists the players for Saturday night: Ian & Sylvia, Odetta, Donovan, Johnny Cash, Jim Kweskin & his Jug Band . . . Peter Yarrow advocates for the Paul Butterfield Blues Band – cites Mike Bloomfield Alan Lomax being a jerk – dismissing Butterfield and insulting Peter Yarrow. Pete tries to make peace among the organizers. “We don’t need to be dogmatic.” … “We can work it out.”
1:21:50 – Bob and band recording Highway 61 with whistle
1:22:55 – abrupt cut to — Pete’s local B&W TV show at NJU with old black blues guy Jesse Moffette (the only purely fictional character in the movie) Jesse starts playing original blues tune Down In My Heart
1:24:35 – Bob & Neuwirth show up
1:25:30 – Bob joins Jesse on the TV set Jesse: “Look here, how close were you watching me?” Bob: “I was watchin real close, Jesse. I got these special binoculars, right? And they allow me to see into your soul.” Jesse: [laughing] “Really?” Bob: “I could see exactly what you were playing. It’s like a tiny little microscope, right?”
1:27:45 – Bob goes to the Chelsea Hotel to find Joan, knocks on various doors (can’t remember her exact room) 1:28:40 – Joan opens hotel room door Joan: “Do you want me to catch up with you or something?” Bob: “Yeah.” and slips past her into the room Bob in hotel room in dark writing It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) Joan throws Bob out.
1:31:45 – Bob & Joan on stage in a theater – acoustic duet – All I Really Want To Do Bob wanders away from the mic singing Gates of Eden to himself. He and Joan clash – Bob won’t play Blowin’ In The Wind Bob: “It’s not a request type concert. If you want that, go see Donovan.” 🙂 Bob says his guitar is broken and won’t play. Joan starts singing Blowin’ solo.
1:32:25 – Neuwirth arrives at recording studio with Bob’s new electric guitar he bought in London. He starts playing & singing the traditional Railroad Bill. Dylan appears out of the darkness playing harmonica . . . then switches to the upright piano.
1:36:05 – Mike Bloomfield arrives 1:36:15 – Al Kooper arrives … Bob: “We already have a guitar player, man, Mike Bloomfield. And he’s really good. To be better than him you’d have to be Blind Willie McTell.”
1:37:45 – Bob & Al Kooper in Village clothing store, sees Pete Seeger thru the window. Bob groans.
1:38:00 – outside store, Neuwirth & band loading trunk of car. Pete & Bob talk outside store – Pete wants to know how Bob’s gonna close Newport Sunday night. Bob kinda blows him off, saying “Let’s talk at Newport. I’m sorta living day-to-day these days, y’know?”
Pete looks dejected … that his former protégé has moved on.
1:38:30 – Bob arrives on motorcycle at Sylvie’s apt, calls up, asks her to come to Newport. Sylvie seen pondering the question while in her painting smock in apartment. They ride off on motorcycle together to the sounds of Mr. Tambourine Man.
1:40:00 – arrive at the artists’ motel in Newport Bob sees Jesse the blues player Bob & Sylvie check into their motel room Dylan does the light two cigarettes routine from Now, Voyager Neuwirth brings in guitars – “Choose your weapon, general. You got this guesting with Joan in a half-hour.” Sylvie says she wants catch Bob sitting in with Joan.
1:41:30 – arrive at stage, Joan on stage singing Bob’s Farewell, Angelina Joan gives Bob the finger.
1:43:00 – Joan brings Bob out – “Just fuck off and sing.” Beautiful duet on It Ain’t Me Babe. “It ain’t me you’re looking for, babe” and “I’m not the one you want, babe, I’ll only let you down” seems to resonate with Sylvie. She realizes they’ve lost each other.
1:45:15 – Sylvie freaks out, runs from stage, Neuwirth runs after her, catches her by taxi. She wants to go home – Neuwirth tells her she has to go to the ferry. Bob & Joan are duetting on Bob’s Mama, You’ve Been on My Mind (written & recorded in 1964, but not officially released until The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 in 1991)
1:46:09 – in motel room Bob tells Al Kooper to take off the polka dot shirt they just bought, “Take that shirt off. You look like a god-damn clown.” Bob asks where Sylvie went, Neuwirth says she went to the ferry and “if you hurry you could catch her.”
1:46:26 – “The posse of purity” (Alan Lomax, Harold Leventhal & Theodore Bikel) come in the motel room door to talk to Bob.
The Kinks’ All Day and All of The Night is playing in the room.
Bob: “Where’s Pete? He’s not in on this?”
Lomax: “In on what exactly?”
Bob: “This posse of purity.”
Lomax: “Alright let’s just cut the crap, Bob. Are you gonna be playing noise like this?”
Bob: [disgusted & dismissive] “This is The Kinks.” 😀 Alan Lomax verbally attacks Bob: “It was the Newport Folk Festival then, Bob, and it still is the Newport *Folk* Festival! Not the teen dream, Brill Building, Top Forty British Invasion Festival – a *Folk* festival. Do you even remember folk music, Bob?” Bob: “No, what’s that? Maybe you could sing me something.”
1:47:30 – Bob rushes on the motorcycle to the ferry to catch Sylvie. Climactic scene btwn Bob & Sylvie at the ferry fence — Sylvia: “It was fun to be on the carnival train with you, Bobby, but I think I gotta step off. I feel like one of those plates, you know, that the French guy spins on those sticks on the Sullivan show.” Bob: “Oh, I kinda like that guy.” Sylvie: “I’m sure it’s fun to *be* the guy, Bob. But I was a plate.”
Bob lights a cigarette and passes it to her through the fence and asks her to stay. Sylvie quotes Now, Voyager: “Don’t ask for the moon. We have the stars.”
The final day of Newport ’65:
1:50:00 – Pete Seeger annoyingly comes in Bob’s motel room at 7AM! Tells the parable of the teaspoon brigade. Pete: “More and more people have been showing up, and they’re bringing their teaspoons. Teaspoons for justice, and teaspoons for peace, and teaspoons for love, and that’s what we do. And, gosh, you showed up, Bobby, and damn it, if you didn’t bring a shovel.” Pete: “And tonight if you could just get up there one more time and use your shovel in the right way, you could level things out.” Bob: “Use it in the right way?” Pete: “You could level things out, Bob.” Bob: “I sent you an advance of my new record. Did you listen to the music you’re asking me not to play?”
Albert to Pete: “You’re pushing candles and he’s selling light bulbs.” Bob walks out.
1:54:30 – Bob bumps into Johnny Cash at his car, blocking in Bob’s motorcycle. Bob: “I’m not sure they wanna hear what I wanna play, Johnny.” Johnny: “Who’s ‘they’?” Bob: “You know, the men who decide what folk music is.” Johnny tells Bob – “Well, fuck them. [whispers in his ear for emphasis] I wanna hear it. Make some noise, B.D. Track some mud on the carpet.“
1:56:40 – Bob, Neuwirth, Albert & band leave motel.
1:57:05 – Hammer Ring by black gospel group chopping wood on stage
1:58:15 – Lomax on stage introduces Dylan: “You want him, you can have him – Bob Dylan.”
1:58:55 – Bob & band start (I ain’t gonna play on) Maggies Farmno more — his declaration of independence song angry audience reaction Pete & Joan frowning in the wings Albert smiling
2:00:15 – Alan Lomex gets really angry — goes to soundboard to force them to turn it down Neuwirth stops him Albert & Lomax have fistfight (really happened)
2:01:15 – It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry audience continues hostile reaction, throwing stuff Pete says, “It’s enough. Enough.” 2:02:10 – Pete goes to soundboard to tell them to turn it down. Temporarily causes sound feedback distortion. Pete looks at power cables and axes. Toshi stops him.
2:03:00 – audience member yells, “Judas! You’re Judas!” Bob: “I don’t believe you.” (famous from the British bootleg)
2:03:15 – “Play it loud.” Like A Rolling Stone – Kooper’s phat B3 riff. Audience throws stuff at the stage.
Johnny Cash congratulates him: “Bobby! You broke it down and blew my mind!” Peter Yarrow goes out to microphone. Albert to Bob: “Maybe you wanna go back out there and let out a little steam.” Bob doesn’t want to. “We just ended the show. It’s done. Pack up.”
* 2:05:40 – Johnny Cash holds up acoustic guitar for Bob to take it. Says to Bob after he takes and heads back to the stage, “Go get ’em, killer.”
2:06:45 – Pete to Lomax: “We’ll pull this back together.” Lomax: “Together’s done, Pete. Your boy just tore it down.”
2:07:05 – Albert to Neuwirth: “How fast can we get him out of here?” Neuwirth: “Like he was never here.” Albert: (pause) “Not that fast.” 🙂
2:08:00 – song ends, audience applauds, Bob leaves stage. Bob & Neuwirth leave in car.
2:08:30 – Pete & Toshi arrive back at motel – huge balcony-filling party underway.
2:09:01 – Maria Muldaur moment. She tells Pete, “I loved the show.” Pete sees Bob in motel room all alone and somber while big party’s raging outside; he decides to leave him be.
2:09:35 – the morning after: Joan comes to her motel room door, sees Bob leaving.
2:10:00 – Bob gets on his motorcycle Joan approaches: “Let go of it Bobby, you won.” Bob: “What did I win, Joan?” Joan: “Freedom from all of us and our shit. Isn’t that what you wanted.”
2:10:40 – Bob pauses to watch Pete folding up chairs. As motorcycle starts to roar away, Pete looks up to see him driving off.
2:11:05 – Bob in Woody’s hospital room – Dusty Old Dust (So Long, It’s Been Good To Know Yuh) – the song that opened the movie – is playing on the record player – Bob plays harmonica to it. Bob tries to give the harmonica back to Woody, but he pushes it back to Bob – somber solemn moment between the two. Bob walks out to “So long, it’s been good to know yuh” playing. Woody looks out his window to see Bob driving off.
2:13:05 – Bob seen riding motorcycle down the highway.
If you want more background on the movie, there’s a feature story on my site that goes into how it got made with lotsa production details, quotes and videos.
On this weekend 17 years ago — in the heat of the Democratic primary of 2008 between Hillary & Obama — I started BrianHassett.com.
Every month since then for 17 years I’ve written at least one new piece for the site.
“17” has been a weird number that’s followed me around my whole life from my hockey team jersey as a kid through the books I’ve written to today’s anniversary – a date I never think about, except this year I did . . . on the 17th year!
From my book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac . . .
Strangely enough, the piece more people click on year after year is Famous People Who Don’t Have Kids! This page was started back in 2010 when someone made a smart-aleck comment that anyone who had kids was superior to anyone who didn’t. I thought it was so ridiculous/repulsive that I jotted down a list of some influential folks who didn’t have kids. It’s continued to grow over the years and is now over 500 people from Jesus to Janis, and is still read by people every single day.
Crazily enough the second most popular piece in the site’s history was last year’s Why I Love Joe Biden because it went viral when not that many people were coming out and saying it.
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The third most read is one I’m particularly proud of because it took a lot of work — The Beatles: Get Back – Time-Coded and Annotated. When Peter Jackson’s epic documentary came out in 2021, it was so overwhelming that I started my own cheat-sheet to be able to find songs and quotes and stuff within its 7½ hour span. That just kept growing with each time I’d watch it, and I realized this would be valuable to others, so I really filled it in with every deet from every scene and transcribed whole passages to get the quotes in print. Over the years I’ve heard from both college professors and high school teachers in both the U.K. and the U.S. thanking me for doing it because they use it in their classes.
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Six & seven were also both recent but maybe not as surprising — Taylor Swift, The Grateful Dead and The Beat Generation, and Taylor Swift from a Deadhead’s Perspective. They both got another huge bounce in readers this past weekend when Bob Weir & Taylor were photographed together at the Grammys and it went viral and all these Deadhead Swifties came out of the closet. I thought the connection between the two artists and their fan bases was obvious from the get-go, but it’s nice that it’s now a bit more of an accepted fact.
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The tenth is something that keeps coming up so keeps getting read — Beat versus Beatnik. It was written after years of having to beat back (ha-ha) self-appointed know-it-all-wannabes saying that if someone ever used the word ‘beatnik’ they were either doing it as an insult or because they were uneducated about the Beats. I had to correct this nonsense so many times I decided to just write one piece that could be used as needed. Turned out to be a super popular idea.
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There’s now nearly 300 pieces on the site — articles, features, reviews, book excerpts, firsthand Adventure Tales, some fiction & poetry — but those are the Top Ten most read. .
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Here’s some that didn’t make the Top Ten but were close and maybe shoulda . . .
The Northport Reportabout the Big Sur reading on Long Island in 2001 with the Cassadys and a cast of thousands.
One of the nice things about living in Manhattan — you often bump into and sometimes get to talk to really smart people on the sidewalk. When they’re famous, mostly you just nod acknowledgment and smile — like seeing Robin Williams walking and playing with his son on Fifth Avenue, or Timothy Leary in line at a street vender, or Colin Powell walking on the double military-straight in his uniform near the U.N.
But one of my favorites was seeing Arthur Miller crossing Third Avenue near my apartment on 70th Street. I was going one way and he was coming the other and I looked up and, “Oh my gawd, that’s Arthur Miller!” He was kinda looking at the ground and seemed lost in thought, so as usual I respected his space and didn’t bother him. But I stopped on the other side of the avenue and turned back to soak in what was happening.
I’d studied the hell out of Death of a Salesman. Maybe it’s obvious and too-often stated, but it’s the greatest American play ever written. What Huckleberry Finn is to American novels.
I saw a production of Salesman back when I was a teenager in Winnipeg. It was one of those moments when the lightbulb went on and you suddenly appreciated some great work of art that adults always praised but you’d been too young to understand.
When I moved to Washington Square North in Greenwich Village, I started going to plays and reading them. The legendary actress Uta Hagen & her theater school founder husband Herbert Berghof lived in the apartment next door, and Phyllis & Eddie Condon’s apartment where I lived was a library of the greatest books ever written. I went deep down rabbit holes of Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill and bought and saw a ton of Sam Shepard. But Salesman was always in a class of its own.
I was in the orchestra for the Broadway production with Dustin Hoffman, John Malkovich, Kate Reid, Stephen Lang & David Huddleston, and they made a televised version for CBS which I taped on VHS and played over and over again, unconsciously memorizing whole passages. Different lines have come back to me over the decades in all sorts of situations.
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I stood there looking at him from the other side of the avenue thinking about all this stuff and how much his art meant to me. He’d stopped and was looking in the window of one of the little stores on the Upper East Side back when there were still places like shoe repair shops and hardware stores. It was still a little neighborhood like any Main Street in any little town in America.
I thought of the story Kerouac tells of his architect friend Ed White suggesting he carry a notebook like architects do to sketch things he sees, and Jack stopping at a storefront and sketching in words what he saw. And there was the wordsmith Arthur Miller mentally sketching a little old-world storefront on a quiet summer afternoon in Manhattan. He was in no hurry. He was already on Mount Rushmore. He had nuthin left to do in this lifetime but enjoy the view.
After the light changed back to green I thought, “There’s Arthur Miller. I gotta go talk to him and thank him.” So I crossed back over the avenue and he was still standing on the empty sidewalk in the quiet afternoon sunshine looking into this small storefront window. I walked up, and said hi, and he was a tallish fellow, and there was Arthur Miller’s big bald head above me, looking exactly like every picture I’d ever seen. .
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My dad had recently passed, and sadly he was something of a Willie Loman, and we’d never really gotten along. But when he was getting near the end, I remembered the Salesman’s mother’s impassioned admonition — “Attention must be paid.” .
It comes in her powerful Act One monologue — “I don’t say he’s a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.“
That passage about respecting a low-man’s passing guided me through the final scenes of my father’s drama — and it was this very playwright a million miles away from the Canadian prairies who wrote the motivation for how we played out our final act. .
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So I told the smiling gentle face, “I just thought you should know how your words helped my family through a difficult time before it was too late.”
“Well . . . you’re welcome,” he smiled in his giant Buddhistic beatific way. “Thank you for saying that,”
It’s not all that often that an artist changes the life your family lives — and it’s even rarer that you get to thank them. I’m forever grateful to the Great Spirits that this moment happened, and that he stood there appreciating a simple storefront so I could tell him how much I appreciated him wrapping up my relationship with my father with respect.
Here’s what I riffed to social media after I got home from the advance screening on December 18th . . .
Caught the sold-out “A Complete Unknown” IMAX screening in Toronto last night — and boy was it GREAT to see it on a giant screen with loud crystal-clear 360º sound! During the concert & club scenes, the applause was behind you as though you were sitting in the front of the audience at the show.
Everybody’s talking about Timothée Chalamet’s performance or Bob Dylan being the subject, but my takeaway was James Mangold, the director and co-screenwriter, which I believe the French call an “auteur.”
This is *fantastic* cinematic storytelling.
Besides Chalamet and Edward Norton being shoe-in Oscar nominations, does Mangold get a Best Screenplay nod? And Best Director and Picture? And it probably also deserves one for both Production Design and Sound Mixing.
But the main takeaway is how expertly Mangold tells in 2¼ hours a tale that spanned 4½ event-filled years — from “a complete unknown” arriving in New York City … to becoming the most influential musical artist on the planet.
This could be effectively done devoting an hour to each year — but as it is, it moves at a lightning pace — and not in a bad way, but in a the-story-never-drags way. It’s a domino tumble of scenes with a rapidly changing protagonist.
And it’s massively fictionalized — in a good way. It’s still a helluva lot more factual than any account Dylan ever told of his life — and it’s a master class in dramatic cinematic storytelling.
There was a taped Q&A with the main cast afterward and Mangold said Timothée plays 26 different Bob songs in the movie (!) and as you may have heard they’re all performed live on camera.
And nobody’s talkin about Monica Barbaro who plays Joan Baez. I gotta think she’s gonna become more of a household name after this.
And Edward Norton as Pete Seeger — fugetaboutit!
Oh and it’s *funny*! Probably a dozen times the entire theater burst out laughing!
And in notoriously reserved Canada, the audience broke into spontaneous applause as soon as it ended! And then again after the credit roll wrapped. (!)
If you love movies and music and cultural history you’ll wanna be makin plans to see this in a theater at your earliest.
This film has now joined a pretty cool sub-genre in movie history — biopics of musicians — telling the story of giants of music … made by giants of film . . .
Rhapsody in Blue, Young Man With A Horn, The Glenn Miller Story, The Benny Goodman Story, The Gene Krupa Story, St. Louis Blues, Lady Sings The Blues, Bound For Glory, Leadbelly, The Buddy Holly Story, The Rose, Coal Miner’s Daughter, Amadeus, Sid and Nancy, La Bamba, Bird, The Doors, Great Balls of Fire! What’s Love Got To Do With It, Selena, The Pianist, Ray, Walk The Line, Control, Nowhere Boy, Miles Ahead, Love & Mercy, Born To Be Blue, Straight Outta Compton, Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman, Respect, Elvis, Maestro . . . movies that racked up scores of Oscar wins & nominations over the decades.
I love that right out of the gate the ads for this movie use the phrase “*inspired by* the true story of Bob Dylan,” and that Timothée Chalamet said in his first interview for the film (with Zane Lowe at Apple Music), “This is interpretive. This is not definitive. This is not fact. This is not how it happened. This is a fable.” Director Mangold referred to the arc of the real story as “Shakespearian” and “like a fairy tale” and that it’s so naturally dramatic “it sounds like a movie pitch.”
The film is like a Dylan song — a poetic interpretation inspired by something that happened. Sadly some Bob ‘purists’ don’t grasp the concept and are booing an electric guitar they haven’t even seen yet.
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It was Bob’s own management company who optioned the book Dylan Goes Electric!according toits author Elijah Wald, and Bob’s longtime manager Jeff Rosen is a producer, just as he was on Masked & Anonymous, No Direction Home, The Other Side of The Mirror (Newport ’63-’65), Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue, and the 2021 Odds & Ends. Before they even had a script or director, it was Bob’s team who first enlisted Timothée Chalamet — who was Oscar nominated for Best Lead Actor at the ripe old age of 22 (for Call Me By Your Name).
. Dylan’s team were intalks with both HBO and Amazon but ultimately went with Searchlight because they wanted a full theatrical release. They first approached the Coen brothers to adapt it since they’d already made the Oscar-nominated Inside Llewyn Davis about a folk singer in Greenwich Village in the same early-’60s period, but as Chalamet tells it, “Joel Coen, before we had Mangold involved, I asked him ‘Why don’t you direct the Bob Dylan movie?’ And he said, ‘It’s impossible.’ And I asked, ‘Why is it impossible?’ And he goes, ‘Because it’s not about a singular moment. How do you, in a two-hour movie, encompass the miracle that is the breadth of what he wrote and how much he got out. It’s like watching paint dry, cuz how do you make lyric writing interesting, basically.'”
And that’s why I maintain that what James Mangold has achieved is so extraordinary. Even Joel Coen thought it was “impossible.”
It’s just an observation / theory of mine, but, as we all know, in the main, Dylan goes his own way. However, when it came time to create a public home for his archives, he went to Tulsa because the Woody Guthrie Center had planted the flag there. I think that he (and his team) went to James Mangold because he had written & directed the Johnny Cash / June Carter Oscar-winning biopic Walk The Line(2005) — about a musician Bob knew well and respected. They went to where the flag was planted.
And Dylan didn’t just sign off on this — he spent five full days with the director one-on-one, including performing the entire script together with Dylan reading all the Bob parts and offering insights and even new lines that made it into the finished film. I’m betting a couple of them were, “These chords I learned from a cowboy named Wigglefoot,” and the Neuwirth-delivered, “I’m not a horse, so … I don’t like carrying other people’s weight.” 😅
Bob’s a longtime cinephile having loved movies since he was a kid. He’s mentions them in his lyrics, stars in them, writes songs for them, made his own a couple times, and proudly displays his Oscar on stage with him.
He has a well-thought-out understanding of what makes a good film, and he’s embraced and blessed this particular auteur. According to Mangold, the first thing Bob said upon meeting was how much he loved his Cop Land movie (1997). And he certainly knew that the musical performances in Walk The Line were the actors singing live — something the director repeated on camera with all the performances in A Complete Unknown.
When Mangold first explained his vision to Bob, “I knew he didn’t want a 20-minute pitch. I said: ‘It’s about a young guy in Minnesota who’s suffocating and feeling desperate and who leaves everything – friends, family – behind and, with just a few dollars in his pocket, makes his way across the country and creates a new identity and makes new friends, finds a new family and blossoms, becomes successful, then starts to suffocate again and runs away.’” Then Mangold says, “He smiled and that was all. He didn’t have anything more to say, but I knew that meant, to me, that he didn’t take issue.”
Mangold has also talked about how much he likes making films about artists, and that he considers his other Oscar-winning biopic masterpiece Ford vs Ferrari to be about two artists — a race car designer and driver. He has a history of successfully bringing real artists to life on screen.
Something else writer-director Mangold said in a recent interview that I’ll never forget and applies to the pacing I mentioned in my first-viewing riff (above). You can hear the whole 5-minutes here, but he says — “The best advice I can ever give is advice that was given to me which is to write like you’re sitting next to a blind person at the movie theater and you’re describing the film, and if you take too long to describe what’s happening you’ll fall behind because the movie’s still moving.“
He’s made a 2¼ hour film about a story that took place over 4½ event-packed years. The guy understands audiences and how to keep them engaged and the story flowing. Funnily enough, there were several scenes that I would have enjoyed going on longer — like Bob and Joan bantering and bickering about songwriting in a small Greenwich Village apartment circa 1962, or when he finally gets in the studio with Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper to cut Highway 61 — I coulda watched a whole movie about either of those scenarios! — but Mangold always has the big picture in mind and keeps the bluegrass-pickin’-pace rollicking along.
For a complete scene-by-scene breakdown of how he did it including lots of the rich fast dialog transcribed you can check out the companion piece to this story here.
After writing a great script and choosing the right director, the most important thing in filmmaking is casting, and, boy, Mangold nailed that, too.
As I mentioned, Chalamet was the first person Team Bob approached. We know they’re smart, but this was brilliant. Timmy (as he’s known to those around him) was the same age as Bob in ’64 when this was first set in motion, but then the Covid shutdown and the SAG/writers strike delayed production for five years, during which time he immersed himself in “the church of Bob” (as he calls it).
People wonder why movie stars sometimes get such ridiculously high paydays but it’s in part because everything is riding on their ability to pull it off. It doesn’t matter how good a supporting actor is or the cinematography or the soundtrack . . . if the audience doesn’t believe and love the lead, the movie ain’t gonna work. And this kid, now age 28, delivers the goods.
In tales reminiscent of Daniel Day-Lewis, Chalamet would stay in character all day on set, was listed as “Bob Dylan” on the call sheets, and for the first time on any of his 20+ films, he shut off his phone and had no communication with friends or family. As he explained to Rolling Stone for their cover story, “I had three months of my life to play Bob Dylan after five years of preparing. So, while I was in it, that was my exclusive focus. He deserved that and more.”
The smartest foundational choice Mangold made was to pull back the camera from a songwriter writing lyrics and include the other people in the room — namely Pete Seeger (and his wife Toshi), Joan Baez, and his Freewheelin’ girlfriend Suze Rotolo (whose memoir was also used as source material, and her name changed in the film at Bob’s request because she wasn’t a public figure).
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This is no longer a loner iconoclast’s story but one that’s experienced by the audience as a series of relatable conflicts — where “everybody wants you to be just like them,” when a person’s torn between two lovers … two directions … two loyalties. The real story is historic (and well known) but the drama is made personal.
And this idea of having to pare down the story to just a few key characters is why historic figures like Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Allen Ginsberg — both very much in Bob’s life during this time — got left on the screenwriting floor. As Mangold said, “If you have all these people, you end up with a parade. Let’s say 40 percent of the movie is music, right? Now you only have 75 minutes left to tell the story. It’s incredible how fast you have to pick and choose what you investigate.” And boy does he make effective use of lyrics to help tell the story in that 40 percent!
The casting of these elevated characters was essential to the film’s success — and number one was Pete Seeger who has the second most screen time in the film. Originally it was going to be the appropriately tall & lanky master thespian Benedict Cumberbatch, but with all the rescheduling he wasn’t available when the time came, and with just three months to prepare Edward Norton jumped in. He so moves, sounds & looks like Seeger this viewer forgot it wasn’t really him.
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All these actors had to learn to sing live on the reels like the real people they were playing, and obviously no one was going to have a higher mountain to climb than to reach Joan Baez’s soprano vibrato. The casting of Monica Barbaro, who only had four film credits to her name before this, was the boldest casting leap Mangold made, and, boy, did he get it right. Sure, she’s got the acting chops to bring the character to life, but wait’ll you hear her sing! Baez herself eventually saw the movie and joined Bob in praise of her actor’s portrayal. “I love what she did in the film. She looked enough like me and had my gestures down. Kudos to her for taking the role on.”
The actress and her role model in San Francisco, Feb 8, 2025. .
Bob’s pre-fame girlfriend, named Sylvie here and played by Elle Fanning, made me choked up when she got choked up, so she was transmitting the emotion from the screen to the seats. And she was the favorite part of the movie for the 21-yr-old female film student / Dylan fan I happened to sit beside.
Boyd Holbrook has the unenviable task of playing Johnny Cash in a movie made by the same guy who directed Joaquin Phoenix to his Oscar-nominated performance in Walk The Line (who only didn’t win because Philip Seymour Hoffman played Capote the same year). Holbrook (no relation to Hal) has a really well drawn character written for him, and he delivers the mannerisms, intensity & gravitas that the real father figure had.
Two other supporting performances worth noting are Dan Folger as Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman, who Mangold has written as comic relief. I’m sure The Screenwriter’s Handbook doesn’t suggest turning a famously tough & gruff manager into a lovable Oliver Hardy — but it happened! The other is an actor who speaks zero lines but has lots of screen time, Scoot McNairy as Woody Guthrie, who was bedridden with Huntington’s disease by the time Dylan showed up in 1961. Actors spend their whole lives learning how to deliver lines and move around a stage, and this person brings vividly to life the tortured soul of a singer unable to speak or “walk that ribbon of highway” any longer.
P.J. Byrne, who played great frazzled frantic characters in both Babylon and The Wolf of Wall Street is wonderfully similarly cast as panicky promoter Harold Leventhal. And I was happy to see a guy I did a number of Kerouac shows with back in the day, Peter Gerety, as the one-eyed half-blind judge in the first Pete Seeger scene.
The film echoes Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood in how it features real-life legends of the ’60s played by A-list actors placed in dramatic settings with some artistic license and all with an incredible soundtrack and Cinemascope framing. Both films also share masterful production design bringing that decade to life. Once Upon a Time won the Oscar for it, and there’s no question this’ll at least get nominated, as it did by the industry branch, The Art Directors Guild. They also both enlisted the same consummate costume designer, Arianne Phillips, who was Oscar-nominated for Hollywood and may well be again here. Besides the 67 costumes for Bob alone, and all the other leads, she dressed 4,500 background actors!
Curio – Sharon Tate carrying a promotional bag for
Bob’s Tarantula in 1966. The book’s release was held
off after the motorcycle accident,
but the publisher was ready to run with it. .
Like most of us, I love eye-candy cinematography — swooping cameras from wide to tight, flying thru windows and such — but this is wisely shot no-frills because they didn’t want to distract from the story.
Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael said it was 90% location shooting with very few sets. They would dress whole blocks of streets and interiors, and there were no marks the actors were expected to hit — they could use the spaces instinctually as their characters saw fit in the moment.
Not only were all of the songs performed live on camera but they were performed in full takes as you see them in the film, and Bob’s climactic three-song electric set was filmed in its entirety without breaks.
But I’ll tell ya, that’s one shitty downside about this film — you can never watch a movie with music being lip-synched again!
And something your average filmgoer may not notice much, but the sound mixing is something else I reckon they’ll be Oscar nominated for. All the sounds of walking around the Village streets, and the chaos of all the club and concert scenes — what you need to hear, you hear — but it’s all within a real-world cacophony of life. Plus during the concert scenes they mix the surround-sound so the clapping is behind you and beside you as though you’re sitting in the audience. I thought this might’ve just been an IMAX feature but it also happened in the little 1914 art house theater I saw it in as well.
And of course any Dylan story wouldn’t be complete without the Beats. In his memoir Chronicles, Bob mentions Jack Kerouac as often as he does Woody Guthrie. As he’s widely quoted as saying, “I read On The Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everybody else’s.”
Not only are legendary Beat haunts like the Kettle of Fish and the Gaslight featured prominently, but when Joan looks at Bob’s desk for the first time, sure enough there’s a 1958 Signet copy of On The Road on top of a pile!
And when Bob goes to a fancy party at promoter Harold Leventhal’s apartment in 1965, a bearded bald bespectacled Allen Ginsberg can be seen frolicking in the background, including standing next to Alan Lomax when Bob & Pete sing When The Ship Comes In.
This also gives you a feel for the Cinemascope framing.
And not fer nuthin, but this whole movie is like one big Kerouac novel. Pretty much everybody in it is a real person, and it’s all based on slightly fictionalized real events put into a dramatic structure. Somewhere Sal Paradise is smiling.
Just as Walk The Line builds to Cash’s career-changing performance at Folsom Prison, Complete Unknown builds to Dylan’s career-changing performance at Newport. But whereas Walk The Line ends with a conventional resolution scene, Complete Unknown simply ends with an evocative image that foreshadows another major event to shortly occur in Dylan’s life. And not fer nuthin, but I prefer a movie that climaxes with a triumphant musical performance rather than a shootout.
It got Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Lead Actor, Supporting Actor for Norton as Seeger and Barbaro as Baez, Costumes and Sound. It was BAFTA nominated for Best Picture, Screenplay, Lead, Supporting, Casting & Costumes. The Producers Guild picked it as one of the 10 best of the year; the Directors Guild nominated Mangold for Best Feature, the Writer’s Guild for Best Adapted, the Screen Actors Guild for Best Lead, and Supporting for both Norton & Barbaro, plus Ensemble. The Cinematographers Society nominated it for Best Feature, the Art Directors Guild nominated for Best Production Design, as did the Set Directors Society. The Casting Society said it was one of the five best of the year, as did both of the Sound Editing Organizations.
Besides all these cinematic triumphs — this is just plain FUN. And funny. In both the big and small theaters, people were getting the humor and laughing out loud.
And I’ve never known of a movie in my lifetime that was experienced as intergenerationally as this has been. An inordinately high percentage of the online comments are from people who saw the it with their children or grandchildren or parents. And in almost all the comments they say something like “I’ve tried to turn my kids (or spouse) onto Dylan for years, and this movie did it in two hours.”
This is as close as we’re ever going to get to Bob making his own life story as a movie. It doesn’t have the flashy pizazz of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, or the creative cinematography of Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, but what it has is good old-fashioned storytelling. And that’s something I’m sure both its subject and his fans will appreciate. . .
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Here’s my scene-by-scene breakdown of the movie including transcriptions of a lot of the best dialog.
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Here’s the first time Chalamet talked on camera about playing Dylan (a month before its release). It’s super insightful for anyone wanting to know how this creation happened. And this 20-something is an intelligent, articulate, self-aware, honest, dedicated, focused artist. (51:06) .
Here’s a fascinating conversation between director Mangold and his Oscar-winning & nominated sound team talking about how they recorded & mixed the music and sounds in the movie. (1:11:10)
Here’s director Mangold talking about how ‘writer’s block’ doesn’t exist and how he writes screenplays. (5:31)
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Here’s a great conversation with director about how he created the movie. (30:54)
Here’s an inspiring conversation with Mangold for Minnesota radio about Bob’s roots, and the director’s tips on living a creative life. (15:10)
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Here’s he is talking about writing the script and facts vs storytelling, and about Milos Foreman being his mentor and teacher. (12:10)
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Here’s a pretty amazing mini-doc about the Production Design & Set Decoration including how they created Bob’s apartment, the Columbia recording studio, Pete’s cabin, Woody’s hospital, Folk City, the record store, MacDougal Street, Newport, the musician’s hotel . . . my Gawd what a passionate precision labor of love made by masters of their profession! (39:51)
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Here’s a great interview with Edward Norton talking about the concept behind the film, Chalamet’s historic performance, and the idea of portraying iconic virtuosos. (8:58)
This is a great clip you’ll be happy you listened to — the priceless story wonderfully depicted in the movie of a young Prankster and how he walked into a room … and into the pages of history. Kooper’s shared this story many times, but this is the most complete and fun version I’ve ever heard. (8:37)
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Here you can see the great Beat & culture historian Douglas Brinkley’s smart & cool summary of Dylan’s long love affair with the movies — on the “CBS Sunday Morning” show from December 22nd, 2024.
Here’s my Master Movie list with mini reviews of nearly 900 films conveniently broken down into genres . . . like the best Music Movies . . . the best Biopics . . . the best filmmakers by Auteur and other categories.
Another cinematic masterpiece interpretation of Dylan — I’m Not There — in an article I titled “Tarantula meets Chronicles in a Masked & Anonymous Prequel.”
Here’s something I wrote in preparation for seeing A Complete Unknown — “The Benefits of Biopics“
I was just living in Taylor world for the ten days she was in Toronto doing six sold out stadium shows — something no other artist has ever come close to doing here.
Six stadium shows … and you couldn’t get a ticket.
Well, you could if you wanted to pay $4000 for one on the resale market and trusted people and electronic ticketing, but there were scams going on all over the place.
I haven’t watched a single minute of American news since the election but watched live-streams of her entire 3½ hour shows two of the last three nights.
Her fan base is unlike anything I’ve ever known to exist with the possible exception of Deadheads (which I and others have compared them to).
At the 2025 Grammy Awards.
A ton of Swifties connect with a handful of different streamers who then function like live television directors flipping between different camera angles to broadcast the entire show.
Fans who attend spend the whole night holding up their phones so they can share the show with those who can’t be there, like Dead tapers would forgo their own dancing pleasure in order to share the music with others.
This is the most spectacular, complex show ever staged by humans.
Theatrical rock was invented 50 years ago by Alice & Bowie & company, and Madonna & Beyoncé & others expanded it with dancers & sets & costume changes, but nobody has created entire worlds for 10 different ‘eras’ and for each song within them.
A friend groused recently about the price of Beatles tickets in the ’60s versus Taylor today, but that’s comparing a bicycle to a spaceship.
It’s no wonder Paul McCartney is a friend and fan of hers. He’s the only composer who comes to mind whose mind wrote as many different catchy melodies.
And then there’s the lyrics. I had cause to listen to a couple Shania Twain albums on a recent Road trip — the (Canadian) woman who was the relative equivalent to Taylor 20-something years ago — and after soaking my ears in Taylor’s poetic universe for the last year, my gawd were those before-times lyrics insipid.
This woman is doing so much good for the world — giving these now multiple generations of particularly young women something to aspire to in their own lives. Not only is she a kind and generous person, but she’s creating art that inspires others the way Bob Dylan raised the bar. A rising tide lifts all boats.
This biggest global tour in the history of human culture wraps up in a couple weeks in Vancouver. I won the lottery for tickets to the Dead’s Fare Thee Well shows in Chicago, cuz maybe if there’s karma I was meant to. I didn’t feel bad that this 60-yr-old grey-haired dude wasn’t picked for this similarly historic event. This is meant for another generation and another gender. I’m so sad for those who couldn’t go, but so happy for all those who did.
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Whether you like her music or not, this is somebody who’s doing a helluva lot of good for a helluva lot of people. While we all grieve for a woman who didn’t get a chance to do the same thing in another field in America recently, be Grateful that this woman is out there inspiring millions of souls to be smart, creative, gracious, joyous, playful and kind.
The ideas didn’t work, the policies didn’t work, the empathy didn’t work, the life story didn’t work, the billion dollars in fundraising didn’t work, the millions of volunteers didn’t work, the field offices didn’t work, the phone banking didn’t work, the door knocking didn’t work, the huge rallies didn’t work, the inspiring speeches didn’t work, the debate didn’t work, the flawless convention didn’t work, the perfect V.P. pick didn’t work, the all-star campaign team didn’t work, Barack and Michelle on the trail didn’t work, the banning of abortion and referendums on ballots didn’t work, the publishing of “Project 2025” didn’t work, the stacking of the Supreme Court with extremists didn’t work, the January 6th hearings didn’t work, the jury convictions didn’t work, the dementia and racism on display every day didn’t work, the millions of TikTok videos & viewers didn’t work, the group Zoom calls didn’t work, the endorsements didn’t work, the interviews didn’t work, the late-night talk shows didn’t work, the joy didn’t work . . .
In America, you could do all of that, and lose to a sociopathic pathologically lying lifelong racist and proud rapist.
Kamala Harris is an Empath — Donald Trump is a Sociopath
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One candidate is trying to scare bitter people into voting out of fear and resentment toward the world.
The other is appealing to “the better angels of our nature” as Abraham Lincoln so poetically put it 150 years ago.
One candidate sees beauty in the world and in the diversity of humanity — and the other sees evil in others — a projection of himself.
One candidate wants to lift people up — as in, a rising tide lifts all boats.
The other, for purely personal gain, exploits the weak’s resentments and feeling of not fitting in or getting a fair shake in life — just like every cult leader in history has done. He’s preying on the weak, the lonely and the vulnerable — straight from page one of the dictator’s playbook.
One candidate spent their entire adult life as a civil servant — the other his entire adult life trying to take as much as he could from as many as he could.
One is an empath who feels others’ pain and wants to help. The other is a sociopath — also known as a psychopath or antisocial personality disorder — unable to feel empathy or remorse, or to tell right from wrong. You can read the Mayo Clinic’s full description, but here’s the first paragraphs:
“Antisocial personality disorder, sometimes called sociopathy, is a mental health condition in which a person consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others. People with antisocial personality disorder tend to purposely make others angry or upset and manipulate or treat others harshly or with cruel indifference. They lack remorse or do not regret their behavior.
“People with antisocial personality disorder often violate the law, becoming criminals. They may lie, behave violently or impulsively. They have difficulty consistently meeting responsibilities related to family, work or school.
“Symptoms of antisocial personality disorder include repeatedly:
Ignoring right and wrong.
Telling lies to take advantage of others.
Not being sensitive to or respectful of others.
Using charm or wit to manipulate others for personal gain or pleasure.
Having a sense of superiority and being extremely opinionated.
Having problems with the law, including criminal behavior.
Being hostile, aggressive, violent or threatening to others.
Feeling no guilt about harming others.
Doing dangerous things with no regard for the safety of self or others.
Being irresponsible and failing to fulfill work or financial responsibilities.”
This ^ is the person nearly half the country has been conned into supporting — probably the biggest cult the world has ever known.
By contrast, Kamala Harris is an empath.
WebMD defines empath: “While it’s not an official psychological term, empaths are generally understood to be people who are extremely attuned to the feelings and emotions of others. The term stems from the word ’empathy,’ which is the ability to understand another person from their point of view rather than your own — in other words, to put yourself in their shoes. It’s not quite the same as sympathy, which means you feel concern for someone who’s going through a hard time. People with high levels of empathy tend to have strong social, communication, and leadership skills.”
One — and only one — of these two types of people will be in charge of the United States for the next four years
There’s never been a person as mentally unfit this close to the job of President in the history of the country.
It seems like every presidential election we hear the phrase — “the most important election of our lifetime.”
At least in the 50 years I’ve been involved in these things, there’s never been as extreme a fork in the road as there is this time. I hope this is the last election that I hear that phrase.
America’s character and future is on the line. And if we unite and choose the empath, the cult leader will not be an option again in four years at age 82 with a long list of criminal convictions and judgements against him.
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Here’s my electoral college prediction — unchanged since Sept 14th. I may still flip PA & NC before Nov 5th — but I may not. 😉
This is the original Merry Prankster Bus Trip footage finally turned into a theatrically released film.
This is a GREAT movie —
I first saw it at its premiere at TIFF — the Toronto International Film Festival
and also watched it with Carolyn Cassady at her house.
Made by Alex Gibney — who WON the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2008 for Taxi to the Dark Side (about U.S. interrogation techniques in Afghanistan)
and co-directed by Alison Ellwood — Gibney’s long-time editor who was kicked up to director.
* This is a MASTERPIECE of editing — both video and audio. Watch for it. Blending of historical footage with Prankster footage.
Interestingly — the guy who made the greatest Beat doc The Source
made by Chuck Workman who is an editor so
the best Beat doc and the best Prankster both made by Master editors
Great directors often have editors they work with and create together on every film.
Gibney also made — * Gonzo (2008 Hunter Thompson doc)
Kerouac was to the ’50s — what Kesey was to the ’60s — Thompson was to the ’70s
Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room — nominated for Best Documentary Feature
TheRolling Stones: Stories From The Edge
narrated byStanley Tucci — friends with Alex Gibney
Point #1 — the movie includes footage of the last time Jack & Neal ever saw each other — Sunday, June 28th, 1964 — thanks to Neal’s friends The Merry Pranksters. It appears 1 hour into the movie.
Tonight you’re going to see more film footage of Neal Cassady than you’ve ever seen in your life.
There’s actually even more live footage of Neal synched to his audio in the Prankster version — “North To Madhattan” — including a couple more mins from the NY party with Jack.
Three Keseys on the Bus — Ken, his brother Chuck and his musician cousin Dale.
#2 — both Kesey and the filmmakers point out how important Jack Kerouac was to what they were doing — including going On The Road.
Fun Tip — at around 34 mins — when they’re talking about Sometimes a Great Notion — they show the back cover — and there’s Kerouac’s quote!
“This guy Ken Kesey is really very good! A great new American novelist.” (!)
They went to NY in part to do press for Notion but he did none!
#3 — Original Prankster George Walker is going to join us via Zoom after the movie if his internet is working.
There’s TONS of George in this film — from beginning to end.
When they show somebody leaning over into the Bus engine — that’s George.
Prankster saying “On the Bus or off the Bus.”
Kesey said of George “He’s either On the Bus or Under the Bus.”
When they introduce Jerry Garcia late in the movie — he standing right beside George.
When they show somebody leaning over into the Bus engine — that’s George.
* Clue in early to what he looks like – his blond-ish hair — clean shaven, great smile, movie star handsome face — and his voice — he’s in virtually every scene —
and his voice — TONS of him narrating the action
and you can ask him questions when it’s over
George & I did “Jack & Neal Ride Again” at LCK in 2017.
George’s Prankster name was HARDLY Visible — but he’s HIGHLY visible in this film!
George was the only mechanic on the Bus. Without him they wouldn’t have gotten out of California.
Cassady couldn’t fix anything to save his life. Tell story about broken down cars at Bancroft house in Los Gatos.
And speaking of names — don’t miss the sign “NEAL GETS THINGS DONE” on the front windshield.
The Pranksters said and wrote that about Neal in 1964 . . . and his wife Carolyn say that about me in 1994.
Funny story of me seeing it on the screen at TIFF — and “Did I just see that?!” got to Carolyn’s, watched it, hit pause — “That’s what it says!!”
Neither of us could believe it.
#4— I’m gonna talk more about the film than the Pranksters cuz this is a film event —
but they were the first band of counter-culture experimental Life-as-art people who spawned the Grateful Dead — and things like The Living Theater and the bright colors of a just a few years later.
Because of The Bus — The Who wrote Magic Bus, The Beatles did their Magical Mystery Tour, and when network TV tried to capitalize on the idea of a family of musicians called The Partridge Family in 1970 — they put them in a painted school bus!
Made from 30 hours of 16mm film like Pull My Daisy was shot 5 years earlier.
with no sound, which had to be painstakingly matched up from original audio tapes.
Stanley Tucci will explain some of this in the opening of the movie.
It took 6 years to restore and synch up footage.
The Scorsese-led Film Foundation funded the repair the footage using technicians from UCLA.
Kesey & Babbs’ Intrepid Trips finally made their version of this in the ’90s
2 parts — “Journey To The East”
and “North To Madhattan”
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SUPER Psychedelic Graphics
Watch for the different psychedelic graphics — used many times in the film — particularly BEAUTIFULLY — the opening graphics you’ll soon see —
and over the recording of Kesey’s acid trip when he first took it under medical supervision
— and the acid trip when stuck in mud in Wikieup
— and the crumpled postcards unfolding into title-card locations.
Artwork in the film was directly inspired from Ken Kesey’s Jail Journals.
The directors hired Imaginary Forces animation house to create acid effects.
They do the graphic effects for the Paris Olympics, the Emmy Awards, the movies Dune, Mission Impossible, the Transformers movies, and Mad Men and Boardwalk Empire
and they succeed in creating acid trip-like visuals better than pretty much anything else I’ve seen in a film.
Got approval of Pranksters at private screening in Eugene.
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Narration by Actors
Four of the narrations you’ll hear are read from the John Teton interview transcripts done in the mid-’70s by actors — particularly for Gretchen Fetchin, Zonker, Stark Naked and Jane Burton — because the original audio was either lost or useable — but they had the typed transcripts.
all top voice actors — Veronica Taylor (Jane Burton) 229 film credits
But all the other voices are real — Kesey, Cassady, Babbs, George Walker
Ethan Hawke did this with his 2022 Paul Newman documentary “The Last Movie Stars” using different actors’ reading interview transcripts.
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Larry McMurtry
50 mins into the movie they get to Houston —
same advanced writing class at Stanford 1960 – Malcom Cowley teaching!
around the time he was writing The Last Picture Show — made into a hit movie by Peter Bogdanovich — Timothy Buttons — and Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd’s first films
— and years before he would write Lonesome Dove and Terms of Endearment etc.
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Robert Stone’s voice appears when they get to NY an hour in.
Friend of Kesey’s from early days — visited in Mexico when Kesey hiding out.
That’s him in the white shirt playing a drum at the NY party.
He wrote Dog Soldiers which won the National Book Award for Fiction
He wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation Who’ll Stop The Rain
features Nick Nolte in a very Neal Cassady-like role —
in fact it was the role he played immediately before playing Cassady in Heart Beat.
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Also, watch for Gene Wilder’s name playing Billy Bibbit in the credits for Cuckoo’s Nest on Broadway along with Kirk Douglas as McMurphy.
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Some of the Kesey interview clips you hear are from a 1989 interview with Terry Gross for Fresh Air on NPR.
Probably the best interviewer we have in America these last many decades — and here’s Exhibit A
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The Grateful Dead / Warlocks
Neat little tidbit — when the Dead appear during the Acid Test segments late in the film — it’s mid-1965 when they were still The Warlocks — didn’t become the Dead until November — and the filmmakers wanted to stay accurate — so they use Warlocks pre-Dead live recordings. “Mindbender” and “Can’t Come Down“
You also get nice Morning Dew,Brokedown Palace and Truckin.
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* Birth of Documentary Films
Important to know the context of the filmmaking time —
George talks about waves —
This was a wave of filmmaking innovation that changed documentary filmmaking forever.
The was The Birth of modern documentary filmmaking.
Robert Drew — Alfred & David Maysles — D.A. Pennebaker — and friend of Jack’s Robert Frank & others — all of them in Manhattan.
Pull My Daisy was shot silent — all the audio was in a recording studio. Shot Jan thru April — first screen at MOMA in May ’59
Robert Drew & the Maysles shot Primary about the Kennedy campaign in April 1960 — first documentary film to use audio connected to the camera. Pennebaker also worked on it.
Penny & the Maysles understood the problem of synching up live sound to footage shot in the field — and they each independently invented ways of hooking up a reel-to-reel to a camera.
Problem was reel-to-reels were huge machines at the time — you’ll see a couple of them inside the bus — these were not mobile units.
Then some were made for remote audio recordings — but they were never intended to be hooked up to cameras.
Great picture of Pennebaker filming Don’t Look Back wearing a top hat looking thru the lens of a 16mm camera on his shoulder with probably the smallest reel-to-reel he could find hanging on his other shoulder.
Penny’s homemade cameras were like black square metal breadboxes — he take part from other cameras to build in the metal box.
And these cutting-edge filmmakers were capturing the cutting edge of society — Maysles making doc of The Beatles arrive and 1964 tour — Penny filming Dylan’s tour in England in 1965 that became Don’t Look Back.
And here’s the Pranksters filming their own cutting edge.
But didn’t know the first thing about filmmaking.
The directors said on the commentary that in all the 20-30 hours of footage they used a clapper-board to synch things up ONCE. 🙂
And then they immediately stopped shooting right after. 😀
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Here’s the evening’s special guest George Walker recounting how Kesey would cite the bus as his greatest work and how they came to buy it
One thing to remember about 2020 vs 2024 numbers — 4 yrs of old trump voters have died off and 4 yrs of young pro-Roe liberal-leaning voters have come onto the rolls. Trump’s rallies are significantly smaller & fewer than 2016 & 2020; there’s far less yard signs up around the country; and there’s a lot of evidence (on-the-ground interviews, focus groups, polling) that show a significant diminution of his non-cult Republican support.
David Plouffe said on Wed (10/30) that he expects all seven battleground states to each be decided by 1% or less.
Here are the seven states that will decide who the next president will be:
Pennsylvania — 19 electoral college votes (270 needed to win) 2016: trump by 0.7% (44,000 vote difference) 2020: Biden by 1.1% (81,000)
Voter registration deadline: Oct. 21st
Popular Dem Governor Josh Shapiro laid down barnburner of an endorsement at the Harris–Walz launch in Philly (Aug 6th). Senate: incumbent Dem Bob Casey vs David McCormick.
PA & GA are the only swing states trump has reserved ad time in.
Democratic Governor — so trump cultists won’t be able to thwart certification. Jill Stein is on the ballot in two swing states — here and in Michigan.
Michigan — 15 2016: trump by 0.2% (10,700) 2020: Biden by 2.8% (155,000)
Voter registration deadline: Oct. 21st
Governor Whitmer & the Dems improved the ease of voting, including by mail; plus there’s nine days of early voting; and same-day voter registration; and no-hassle absentee voting. RFK Jr. is still on the ballot — draws votes from Trump. Senate open seat: Dem Debbie Stabenow stepping down. Dem Elissa Slotkin vs Rep Mike Rogers. Repub state party chair ousted and they’re fractured and in disarray.
Democratic governor.
Jill Stein is on the ballot in two swing states — here and in Pennsylvania. Allows voter registration up to & including election day.
Wisconsin — 10 2016: trump by 0.7% (22,000) Hillary infamously never went there once during her entire campaign. 2020: Biden by 0.6%(20,000)
Voter registration deadline: Oct. 16th
The second closest of the swing states (after Georgia). Senate: Dem incumbent Tammy Baldwin vs Eric Hovde.
Democratic governor.
RFK is still on the ballot — draws votes from Trump.
Allows voter registration up to & including election day.
If Harris holds “the blue wall” ^ — these three states get her to 270.
North Carolina — 16 — the closest of the 7 swing states that trump won 2016: trump by 3.6% (173,000) 2020: trump by 1.3% (74,000) — the narrowest win for trump
Voter registration deadline: Oct. 11th (or in person during early voting Oct 17 – Nov 2) The closest state that Dems lost in the last Presidential. They have a Democratic Governor so bullshit manipulations by Maggots won’t float. Plus there’s a bat-shit crazy GOP Governor candidate on the ballot (Mark Robinson) – which will cause some Republican voters to stay home.
Plus migration to the state over the last many years (including the last four) is professionals moving to the booming urban markets. The older rural voters are dying off and being outnumbered by a newer more liberal electorate. Plus, like most of the country, there are not trump signs all over like there were the last two cycles.
NYT poll released Aug 17th has Harris up by 2%. (!)
There is a new completely rebuilt & energized Democratic party in the state that has never existed before.
New voter registrations are up by hundreds of thousands since Kamala got in the race and the debate happened.
Maybe THE key vote to watch on election night. Polls close at 7:30 Eastern, and they can begin processing the mail-in votes in advance, so this will give us the earliest indication of results election night. If Kamala wins North Carolina, she’s going to be the next President.
Georgia — 16 2016: trump by 5% (211,000) 2020: Biden by 0.23% (11,779 — trump on tape saying “We just need 11,780 votes.”)
Voter registration deadline: Oct. 7th
Massive voter repression laws passed since 2020. Dems really well organized; Stacey Abrams secret weapon.
32% Black population — largest of the swing states.
Trump has been insulting popular Repub Governor Brian Kemp at rallies prompting multiple local Republican strategists to say, “He just lost Georgia.”
GA & PA are the only swing states trump has reserved television ad time.
Arizona — 11 2016: trump by 3.5% (91,000) 2020: Biden by 0.3% (10,000)
Voter registration deadline: Oct. 7th Abortion on the ballot — will drive women & pro-women voters to the polls — and women are favoring Kamala by 15% — and as of Oct 30th, women nationally are outvoting men 53% to 45%. Trump campaign has absolutely no ground game — no door knocking or GOTV of any kind.
Senate race: Ruben Gallego vs crazy Kari Lake — who will, like in NC, drive blue votes to the polls. He’s up by a solid 7% in mid October. Former GOP party chair facing felony charges for election interference in 2020.
Nevada — 6 2016: Hillary by 2.4% (27,000) 2020: Biden by 2.4% (33,000)
Voter registration deadline: Oct 8 by mail; online or in person until election day Abortion on the ballot.
Universal mail-in voting.
New polling stations & drop boxes on Native reservations.
Allows voter registration up to & including election day. Senate: incumbent Dem Jacky Rosen vs Rep Sam Brown.
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. And I’m still keeping an eye on:
Texas — 40
2016: trump by 9% (814,000)
2020: trump by 5.6%. (631,000)
Voter registration deadline: Oct. 7th Margins have gone from 16 to 9 to 5 in the last three Presidentials. RFK Jr. is on the ballot. Senate: incumbent Republican Ted Cruz vs Colin Allred.
Florida — 30 2016: trump by 1.2% (113,000) 2020: trump by 3.3% (371,000)
Voter registration deadline: Oct. 7th Abortion referendum on the ballot — could make a big difference as it has every time it’s been on a ballot ever since Roe was overturned.
Also marijuana legalization on the ballot — both will drive single-issue voters to the polls — and they won’t be trump supporters.
Florida has the largest Haitian population in the country — and trump’s racist demonization stemming from non-reality has not played well Haitian ex-pats around the nation.
Republican party chair ousted after allegations of rape and video voyeurism. (!)
Senate: Dem candidate Debbie Mucarsel-Powell is amazing and can put Rick Scott in the trashcan of history.
Ohio — 17 2016: trump by 8% (447,000) 2020: trump by 8% (475,000)
Voter registration deadline: Oct. 7th Senate: Dem incumbent Sherrod Brown vs Repub Bernie Moreno.
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National General Election Results
2016 Electoral college: trump: 306 — Hillary: 232 Total votes: Hillary: 65.8 million — trump: 63 million Percentage: Hillary: 48% — trump: 45.9%
2020 Electoral college: Biden: 306 — trump: 232 Total votes: Biden: 81.3 million — trump: 74.2 million Percentage: Biden: 51.3% — trump: 46.8% (4.5% difference) .
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Here’s my 2024 electoral college calls (as of Sept 14th — when I flipped NC blue) . . .
