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€