BY HANK REINEKE
Director/co-writer Larry
Charles acknowledges it was an employer - the curmudgeon-comedian Larry David, who
unwittingly served as the midwife of the Masked
and Anonymous project. David’s disinterest
in popular music – and rock n’ roll music specifically - was no secret. Cornered and trapped in a one-sided
conversation with the passionate and gregarious television writer and music fan
Eddie Gorodetsky, the co-creator of Seinfeld
and Curb Your Enthusiasm was anxious
to escape the conversation. He suggested
to Gorodetsky his interest in discussing the vagaries of Bob Dylan’s mercurial career
- and the rock n’ roll world in general - would be better served by engaging in
a chat with Curb writer-director Charles. Gorodetsky did just that. He soon discovered both he and Charles were
huge Dylan fans, the two discussing the often mysterious singer-songwriter’s
career at length.
Although an ardent admirer of Dylan’s music, Charles admitted
to sharing no personal relationship with the artist. So it came as some surprise when some time
later he would receive a call from one Dylan’s representatives. He was told that the peripatetic troubadour
was interested in involving himself with a potential TV project and would he be
willing to discuss? Dylan was no
stranger to the film business, though the films in which the bard exercised
control tended to be artsy mish-mashes of varying interest. Only the D.A. Pennebaker-ministered and celebrated
documentary of Dylan’s 1965 tour of England, Dont Look Back (1967), had received any measure of critical and
commercial success.
Just as Dylan had subverted Tin Pan Alley song-craft with
his folk-song homilies, Dylan’s unreleased television film Eat the Document (1972) and his big screen epic Renaldo & Clara (1978) would
playfully toy with the film medium’s editing and writing processes and his own
self-created mythos. Charles would describe
Dylan as a “protean personality,†someone who realized early on in his life the
notion of “self is a construction.†He
suggests “Bob Dylan†is simply a self-invented character, one that the singer
(born Robert Allen Zimmerman) would shed in personal social interactions.
Charles eagerly agreed to a meeting with Dylan. When the two decided to sit down together to
hash out ideas and write, Charles was a bit surprised by Dylan’s interest in
conceiving what he described as a “Buster Keaton-style†series of slapstick
television programs. As the notorious
road-warrior rock legend was playing in excess of one hundred concerts a year
between 2000 and 2002, Charles allowed that his interest was not as unusual as
it might sound: Dylan would pass a lot of his travel time on his private coach
by watching old Jerry Lewis films on the buses’ VHS player. But the idea that Masked and Anonymous was originally conceived as a “Bob Dylan
slapstick comedy,†is an interesting one given the singer’s somewhat dour and
humorless public persona.
In any event it was this premise that Charles and Dylan
would bring to Chris Albrecht, the Chairman of the Board at HBO. Though Albrecht would green-light the project
with a measure of enthusiasm – having someone of Bob Dylan’s stature associated
with your brand guaranteed a measure of residual hip prestige - the notoriously
capricious Dylan almost immediately deferred. Dylan informed Charles that his interest in the slapstick series had passed. He instead offered an idea for a
feature-length film project that he suggested they instead write together. Charles was game, acknowledging that anyone
deigned to “ride the Bob Dylan train,†was sure to encounter ups and downs due
to the songwriter’s mercurial creative shifts. When the pair finally finished their screenplay for Masked and Anonymous, the aforementioned titular masks went on from
the very onset. For starters, the pair had to convince the Writer’s Guild to
permit the masking of their scripting authorships: Dylan chose the pseudonym “Rene Fontaine,â€
Charles choosing “Sergei Petrov.â€
This new Shout! Factory Blu ray set of Masked and Anonymous generously features
a number of Special Features. The most
interesting of these are the insights shared by Charles in the 2020 featurette,
Behind the Mask: a Look Back at Masked
and Anonymous with Director and Co-writer Larry Charles. The passing of time has allowed Charles to
ruminate and assess the impact of the often-critically savaged film from a less
defensive –well, perhaps a better descriptive would be “protectiveâ€
–posturing. Charles would describe Masked and Anonymous, not unreasonably,
as “an apocalyptic, sci-fi, spaghetti-western, musical-comedy.†In his reminiscence, Charles allows that the
script’s “formal language†and portrayal of a future dystopian America might
have been too challenging a plow for general audiences. When the film was first released in 2003, the notion
of an economy-wrecked U.S.A. on the brink of collapse and in police-state mode
seemed wildly fanciful. Sadly, in 2020,
this premise sadly seems a more plausible concept.
Mostly ravaged by critics upon its release, the occasionally
self-indulgent Masked and Anonymous
nevertheless has its moments. There’s
little doubt that obsessive Bob Dylan fans will better relate to the anarchic, choppy,
and occasionally ponderous circus-atmosphere of the film. In many circumstances, the film serves as a type
of celluloid mirror to Dylan’s often bleak song settings and dystopian worldview. Charles believes we can see many of Dylan’s
fabled “masks fall†in the course of the film, and some level this is
true. But as one critic from Vanity Fair once astutely noted, “Bob
Dylan rigs every performance, no matter how direct, with decoys and trip
wires. His welcome mat is set above a
trapdoor.â€
Dylan’s tendency toward subversion is no less apparent
here than it was with those we’ve experienced in the musician’s earlier and occasional
brushes with heavily symbolic, mosaic-edited filmmaking. Nearly every Dylan or Dylan-associated
production from his own Renaldo and Clara
to Todd Hayne’s I’m Not There (2007) to
Martin Scorsese’s recent co-conspiratorial Netflix special Rolling Thunder Revue: a Bob Dylan Story (2019) is threaded with
outright falsifications of facts and playfully annoying red herrings. Dylan always leaves behind a sprinkling of
breadcrumbs to lead both his fans and his critics off trail. But every so often
the curtains part wide enough to glean a morsel or two of honest insight into
the man’s personal worldview.
As an admitted Dylan obsessive, I gamely trooped off in
July 2003 to sit through a sparsely attended art-house screening of the Masked and Anonymous at Manhattan’s
Angelika Film Center. I have to admit to
having being somewhat nonplussed by the film, both then and now. There are several profound moments and scenes
worthy of celebration, but I found the enterprise - as a whole- to be a
seat-twitching experience. Several
Dylan-minded friends of mine are more supportive of the film’s value, but I can’t
help but find the allegorical - and meandering - storyline far less interesting
than the riveting, dynamic musical performances sprinkled throughout. It’s inarguable that the music captured here is
great.
In 2002, Dylan was still performing with a backing band
that many consider one of his finest, and that’s the ensemble we see gathered
together on screen. While there’s an
almost continuous stream of Dylan songs playing throughout the film’s
background (with performances by the songwriter himself as well as others),
it’s Dylan’s own front and center “live†and hard-driving performances of “Down
in the Flood,†“Diamond Joe,†“Dixie,†“Drifter’s Escape†and “Cold Irons Boundâ€
that command attention and rescue the film from its occasional dalliances with pomposity. The one benefit of holding on to the
previously issued DVD of the film is that it offered no fewer than twenty-eight
chapter selections. This allowed one to
isolate and more easily choose to revisit the wonderful musical
performances. This Shout! Factory Blu-ray
sadly allows only twelve scene selections, making such navigation more
challenging.
Charles informs there’s actually a three and a half hour
cut of Masked and Anonymous sitting
in the vault – one that contains twenty-two Dylan songs in full performance. Perhaps a reconsidered M&A soundtrack should be considered as a future Bootleg Series release by
Sony/Columbia. Such a release would surely
put more of my money into their corporate pocketbook, perhaps even allowing
them to recoup some of the money they lost at the box-office on this project. Charles sighs that Masked and Anonymous was never put into general release and too
many people – including some friends of his - are surprised to learn that the
film even exists. This is too bad as
Charles sees the film as an extension of Dylan’s work in his then-contemporary
“Old America idiom†phase with such album releases of Time Out of Mind (1997) and Love
and Theft (2001).
Charles’s
direction in Masked and Anonymous is
carried on in the cinéma vérité style he employed on
the earliest episodes of Curb Your
Enthusiasm. There is, apparently, also
no shortage of unused footage in the vault. Charles confirms that his cameras rolled almost continuously, even capturing
directorial cues barked between “takes†so to keep the rushed production moving
along at breakneck speed. It was, for
all intents and purposes, a low-budget movie: the entire film was shot in all
of twenty-days with a budget of four million dollars.
This budget figure is pretty remarkable considering the
ensemble cast. The closing credits of
the film demonstrate no shortage of accumulate Hollywood star-power in both
starring and walk-on roles: Angela
Bassett, Jeff Bridges, Penelope Cruz, Bruce Dern, John Goodman, Ed Harris, Val
Kilmer, Jessica Lange, Cheech Marin, Mickey Rourke, Christian Slater, Fred
Ward, and Luke Wilson all signed on. Charles recalls that everyone approached
wanted to be involved, even if that meant losing money on better paying-gigs,
as all were attracted to the idea of working with the iconic and mysterious Dylan. The casting might have been even more
interesting. The principal Uncle
Sweetheart character (as played by John Goodman) was originally written with
Dylan’s friend Jack Nicholson in mind. Johnny Depp was also eager to participate. But unlike the rest of the cast with more
flexible schedules, Nicholson and Depp were already committed to other film work
and unable to extricate themselves.
As for the film’s star himself, Bob Dylan never moves out
of character as the stone-faced, emotionally blunt Jack Fate… or, to be more
precise, as the stone-faced, emotionally blunt Bob Dylan. During the writing process, Charles admitted
to being occasionally mystified by an inscrutable line of dialogue or soliloquy
that Dylan had woven into their screenplay. As it had always been with his often opaque song lyrics, Charles mused
that Dylan “never speaks about the meaning or significance of things†of things
he has written. Interpretations of
intent or meaning are left to those looking in from the outside.
Charles did recall one particular instance when he
thought a script component of Dylan’s was just too odd and opaque… and dared to question its inclusion. He suggested to his co-writer that he thought
it would be best if words were clarified or else might possibly be
misunderstood. Dylan’s response was typical:
“What’s so bad about misunderstanding?†The twenty-one year old Dylan suggested in 1962 that solving answers to
the world’s failings were, essentially, unanswerable and merely “Blowin’ in the
Wind.†His sullen worldview apparently hadn’t changed significantly in the
intervening years, as he suggests much the same some forty-years later. In the closing lines of Masked and Anonymous, Dylan’s character muses, “Things fall apart…
The way we look at the world is the way we really are. Seen from a fair garden, everything seems
cheerful. But climb to a higher plateau,
you’ll see plunder and murder. Truth and
beauty are in the eye of the beholder. I
stopped trying to figure everything out a long time ago.†It might be best going into Masked and Anonymous with that same
open-mindedness.
This Shout! Factory “Shout Select†Blu-ray of Masked and Anonymous is presented in a HD widescreen ratio of 1.85:1
and in 1080p with DTS-HD Master Audio Sound (offering both 5.1 Surround Sound
and 2.0 Stereo choices). Bonus features
include Masked and Anonymous Exposed: the
Making of Masked and Anonymous (ported over from the 2003 DVD release), a
reel of deleted scenes (most offered in HD but also few off a fuzzy video
feed), the 2020 featurette, Behind the
Mask: a Look Back at Masked and Anonymous with Director and Co-writer Larry
Charles, an audio commentary by Charles, the film’s original theatrical trailer,
and removable English sub-titles.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON