Two Soldiers
Look Back, Don't Look Back
By Robert Wilonsky
dallasobserver.com:80/issues/2001-03-08/sidebar.html
A friend of Justin Rice's
mentioned something about
Look Back, Don't Look Back
nearly a year ago--about how it
was about to become tied up in
litigation, because Rice and
filmmaking partner Randy Bell
had lifted Bob Dylan's music and
likeness without first receiving
permission from Sony Music
and The Man himself. Since
then, the half-hour documentary
about The Quest for Bob has
quietly made the film-fest
rounds, playing South by
Southwest, the New York
Underground Film Festival, and
the New England Film and Video Festival (where it took
best-of-fest honors). The Dallas-born, 24-year-old Rice, who
met the 22-year-old Bell when the two were attending Harvard
University, says the legal troubles never came to pass: They sent
the film to someone at the Los Angeles-based International
Documentary Association, who in turn shot a copy to Jeff Rosen,
Dylan's gatekeeper--and the very man who dismisses the two
young filmmakers during taped phone conversations throughout
Look Back, Don't Look Back.
"He actually took it pretty well," Rice says. "It's shown at a lot of
festivals, and I don't think it bothers him. It has prevented us from
selling the movie and making money off it, but he took it well. I
talked to him afterwards, and for 20 minutes he chastised me for
recording the phone call and not letting him know, but I asked
him, 'Did we make you look bad?' and he said, 'Well, no.' He
also said he didn't want to crush my career as a budding
filmmaker."
The premise of the black-and-white film is simple: Rice and Bell
want to, essentially, remake D.A. Pennebaker's 1965
black-and-white Dylan doc Don't Look Back. They want to
interview Dylan (to whom Rice, from certain angles, shares an
uncanny resemblance) but are turned back, repeatedly, by Rosen.
They decide perhaps they can snag a quick chat with Dylan at his
concert at Amherst; till then, they head for New York City and
re-enact a few scenes from Don't Look Back (they also weave in
footage from the original, much to Pennebaker's satisfaction and
Rosen's chagrin). They stand in front of a guitar store and repeat
Dylan's words ("They don't make guitars like this in the States");
they try to rent Dylan's first apartment in New York, which is
unavailable; and they stand in front of Café Wha? and repeat the
first words he ever uttered on its stage. As the two wrote in a
brief summary included with the film, they had seen Pennebaker's
film and "couldn't shake the Bob Dylan we found there"; they
became "fascinated by the mysterious power of the film [and]
obsessed with the image of the young Dylan." And so they picked
up a camera and went looking for Bob.
Their obsession becomes contagious: They don't know when to
quit, nor do you want them to. At one point, Bell even sends a
letter to Jesse Dylan, one of Bob's sons, who calls back and
leaves his number. When Jesse and Bell finally touch base, Bell
explains himself ("We're sort of researching the past through
Don't Look Back. We're trying to figure out what it was like.
We're sort of obsessed with that movie"), only to have Jesse tell
him to read Greil Marcus' Invisible Republic (about the making
of Dylan and The Band's Basement Tapes) and then send him
back to Rosen. The look on Bell's face is heartbreaking: He's
come so close, only to realize just how far away from the icon he
really is.
The closest they come to touching Dylan is when they brush past
the hem of history by interviewing Pennebaker, from whom they
garner invaluable truths that have nothing to do with Bob. "How
do you go about getting access to the things you want to film?"
Rice asks Pennebaker, who now looks a little like a kindly
professor. His response: "You ask people." Of Dylan, he says
little: "His strength is he knows what he's worth," Pennebaker
says, which is just enough. Like us, Rice and Bell only see Dylan
from afar: They sneak a camera into his Amherst concert and
bring back only silent, black-and-white footage of the
middle-aged Dylan, who does battle with his younger self seen in
concert footage lifted from Don't Look Back.
Rice and Bell made the film while taking a class with Ross
McElwee, who made such documentaries as 1986's Sherman's
March and 1997's Six O'Clock News. McElwee cautioned the
duo about how personal documentaries will "ruin your life," if only
because once you turn the camera on yourself, the unblinking eye
becomes relentless, merciless. "It ruins a lot of moments for you,"
Rice admits. "You have to be prepared at any moment to turn the
camera on, and it just wears you down." But the filmmakers
realized it was worth it when they saw the movie: Look Back is
an homage not only to Dylan and Pennebaker, but to obsession
itself.
For now, you will see the movie only on the festival circuit; Rice
says there have been inquiries from the likes of MTV, VH1, and
the Independent Film Channel, but it's likely that clearance issues
are keeping it off the airwaves. "Or maybe they think it's some
rough shit," Rice says. Sometimes, though, he thinks they ought to
just sell it or release it and deal with whatever hell Dylan's people
and Sony Music might throw at them. There are worse ways,
after all, to garner publicity.
"We'd just shoot the legal proceedings and make a feature," Rice
says. "That might not be bad." |
