Scorsese on Dylan, and beating back the blockbuster
NEW YORK — A recent multiplex marquee is haunting Martin Scorsese. Twelve screens and 11 of them were showing one movie: “Avengers: Endgame.”
“Now, that's not fair,” Scorsese said. “We have to fight back at this practice of overwhelming the market with the blockbuster. The — how should I put it? — the regular film, that's being edged out. It's got to go someplace. It has to go someplace because you know why? There are people that are going to continue to make them.”
Scorsese, 76, is still making them, though there's little “regular” about his latest film. “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story By Martin Scorsese” is a blistering semi-fictional documentary that chronicles Dylan's mythic 1975-76 rambling cavalcade across a post-Vietnam America. Scorsese has also inserted fictional characters to amplify the folklore and embrace Dylan's own trickery; “Rolling Thunder Revue” merrily prints the legend.
The film, which premiered Wednesday on Netflix and in select theaters, includes restored performance footage from the tour, scenes of the backstage circus (much of which was shot for the Dylan-directed, Sam Shepard-scripted four-hour 1978 film “Renaldo and Clara”) and contemporary interviews with many of the participants, including Joan Baez and, in his first on-camera interview in a decade, Dylan.
It can feel like eons ago. Dylan himself says Rolling Thunder happened so long ago “I wasn't even born.” But for Scorsese, the movie is largely about what remains from that freewheeling extravaganza, when Dylan drove a Winnebago-led caravan of musicians, artists and poets (among them Allen Ginsberg, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Joni Mitchell, Bob Neuwirth) on a nationwide storm. In white face and with blazing eyes, Dylan unleashed ferocious performances of “A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall,” “Isis,” Hurricane” and “When I Paint My Masterpiece.”
What's left of that musical moment? “Ashes” Dylan resolutely states in the film. Ginsberg, in a speech at the tour's conclusion captured on camera by Dylan, provides a counterpoint that Scorsese favors. The poet implores all to “take from us some example” and “go out and make it for your own eternity.” Scorsese was so moved by Ginsberg's words that he used them last year in his commencement address at his daughter's high-school graduation.
“What we were going for was to say: What survives from these ashes?” Scorsese said in a phone interview. “That spirit has to be remembered and it has to be re-experienced, especially in the climate of today around the world. It's not enough to say the world changes and it doesn't mean anything. It has a timelessness.”
What lasts culturally has lately been much on Scorsese's mind. The cinema he grew up with and which he makes, he has said, is gone, a victim of today's screen-hogging blockbuster dominance. It's been a decade, he notes, since a major studio financed one of his films. “I'm looking at this and I say: Wait a minute. What if I had another 20 years or something, where would I be getting the financing? It's not going to be the studios. They need the blockbuster. I don't do those,” he said.
