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Michael Glover Smith, "Bob Dylan as Filmmaker: No Time to Think" (McNidder and Grace, 2026)
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- [00:01]
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Bradley Morgan
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Bradley Morgan
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Interviewer
Hello. Welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Bradley Morgan, and I am joined today by my guest, Michael Glover Smith. Michael is a filmmaker, professor, and also the co author of Flickering How Chicago Invented the US Film Industry. His latest book is Bob Dylan as Filmmaker, no Time to Think and is published by McNitter and Grace. Michael, thank you so much for joining me today.
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Bradley Morgan
Thank you so much for having me, Brad.
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Interviewer
So, to get things started, can you tell us what your book's about?
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Bradley Morgan
Yes. This is kind of a deep dive into Bob Dylan as a filmmaker, as the title indicates, of course, Dylan is best known for being a singer, songwriter. That's what he won the Nobel, Nobel Prize in literature for. But he's kind of a Renaissance man. He's, you know, explored a lot of different arts over the decades. And I think his work in filmmaking is probably the least examined of the arts that he's, you know, explored. So I thought there was kind of a void in terms of the Dylan scholarship there. No one's really written a book from this particular angle. And since I'm a filmmaker myself, I thought, you know, if I don't do this, maybe nobody will.
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Interviewer
So the book's introduction lays the groundwork about him pursuing all these different mediums, such as painting, sculpture, welding. And as you mentioned, his work as a filmmaker is the least understood by both fans and critics. Why hasn't his work in cinema been as seriously considered as his other artistic pursuits?
- [03:13]
Bradley Morgan
Well, first of all, it's a small body of work. I mean, he's only directed two feature films, and both of those movies are not available to watch legally. So that is the main reason. I mean, Dylan owns, you know, the negatives to those movies, and he has chosen to not make them available on home video. And he's chosen not to make them available to stream. You can, you know, find them if you search around the Internet. You know, they're. They're available in sort of poor quality bootleg form. And then he made a third film with Larry Charles that the two of them wrote together and which Dylan stars in. And in my book, I also argue that Dylan is the primary author of that film, Masked and Anonymous. So the book is really devoted, you know, it's really three long chapters devoted to those three films.
- [04:14]
Interviewer
So Dylan's work in film is nowhere near as prolific as his songwriting. But in presenting another side of Bob Dylan as an artist, you make very clear distinctions about which projects you profiled for the book. Could you tell us more about those distinctions and why you chose the films that you did?
- [04:28]
Bradley Morgan
Yeah, well, there have been several other books written on Bob Dylan's work in relation to cinema, but those books tend to take kind of an exhaustive approach to documenting every movie that he was ever involved in, whether he was acting, whether he was an interview subject or. Or if it's a movie about him that he wasn't even really involved with. Like, I'm not there because I think people want to write about how Dylan has been represented on screen. And I thought that's interesting. But I think a more interesting question to me is, you know, is Bob Dylan a real filmmaker? And since he's. Since he has made films himself, if he is a real filmmaker, then, you know, what do his movies have to say? And then, you know, how does he use film form in order to say those things? And so those were the questions that were most interesting to me.
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Interviewer
So let's get into those films. And. And given the approach you made with the book, the first film you explore is Eat the document from 1972, which is a follow up to the much acclaimed documentary Don't Look Back that was released five years prior. And. And which cements the image of Dylan as the. As this icon within the Popular consciousness, you know, this hip young musician in dark sunglasses. But you start with Eat the Document because Don't Look Back as a behind the scenes profile of Dylan on tour at the height of his fame. It's more intimate. He's not really a collaborator. But I did want to set some context by discussing that film first. How does Don't Look Back portray Dylan and why was a film like that so groundbreaking?
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Bradley Morgan
Yeah, well, Dylan Don't Book Don't Look Back is a landmark documentary film. It's. It's one of the most famous examples of a sub genre of documentary called cinema verite, which means cinema truth. And that was a genre that was kind of pioneered by D.A. pennebaker who directed it along with
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Interviewer
a
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Bradley Morgan
few other directors at that time. But Don't Look Back specifically, it's kind of famous for documenting the life of a musician on tour. And it was Dylan's last tour as a solo artist. You know, just him and his acoustic guitar. And what's remarkable about it and what is verite about it is the filmmakers never interact with Dylan directly. They never interview him. There's no voiceover narration, there are no titles that appear on screen that kind of tell you what you're looking at. It's. It's more of an observational kind of fly on the wall approach to we're just going to follow this guy with a camera. And it's remarkable how successful the film is in being, you know, easy to understand. Like you always know who you're looking at, where they are. You, you know, it's kind of a linear approach to this two week tour, Dylan's two week tour of the UK in May of 1965. And it's really entertaining, but it's a pretty straightforward documentary. And so there's a lot of overlap between that and Eat the Document. Because Eat the Document was made one year later, Dylan was returning to Europe, although he was doing it under very different circumstances because he was playing with a band for the first time, a group called the Hawks, which later became the Band. And you know, Eat the Document is in color, whereas Don't Look Back is in black and white. And Eat the Document is a much stranger film. It's much less straightforward. And basically what happened was Dylan DA Pennebaker was heavily involved in Eat the Documentary. Dylan said to him, hey, I helped you make your film, which was Don't Look Back, now I want you to help me make mine. So it was basically the same filmmaking team. It was, it was D.A. pennebaker and Howard Alk who's a great documentary filmmaker from Chicago. They shot Eat the Document under Dylan's direction. And then Dylan and Howard Alk and a guy named Gordon Queen Quinn then edited the film. They spent years editing it, and it didn't see light of day until 1972.
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Interviewer
So you just mentioned how Pennebaker and Dylan worked together for this film. And there was this follow up that was going to follow Dylan on this historic tour throughout Europe. And while Don't Look Back was a feature film, this was. This was intended to be an hour long, made for TV movie. However, Pennebaker's role on this film was more vague and the rough cut he put together was scrap. Because Dylan, he put together a whole new film using the same footage. And you had mentioned just now in the interview and in your book how this project was infinitely stranger, but that there was a method to the madness. How did this film, Eat the Document, reflect Dylan's own vision as an artist working in this medium really for the first time?
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Bradley Morgan
Well, I think what's amazing about Eat the Document, and I think it's, you know, probably the least successful of the movies that I examine in the book, simply because it was his first time making a movie. And he later was critical of it because he felt like he didn't get enough footage. They only shot about 40 hours of footage for the Document. And he said in an interview in 1968, if Howard, Al and I could, you know, do this again and get more footage, we could make a really remarkable film. So that ended up becoming Ronaldo and Clara. And for Ronaldo and Clara, he shot a hundred hours of footage. So he didn't want to make the same mistake. But having said all that, I mean, I think Eat the Document is a really fascinating film because Dylan seems to have an intuitive understanding of how cinema works. You know, he was only 24 years old when they made that film. And know, as I said earlier, he had a day job, right. He was a musician on tour and. And yet what makes Eat the Document work is Dylan's inherent understanding of film editing. Dylan knows that editing is what makes cinema the art form that it is. And that's where he really imposes his point of view as an author, as a film author. It's in the editing room. Something else I talk about in this book, in the. In the introduction, is that Dylan in 1984, said in an interview on MTV that he didn't like directing because he didn't like telling people what to do. Now, I'm a director myself, and I know that. That the process of directing is the process of giving explicit instructions to your collaborators. That's what it is. You tell your cast, you tell your crew what you expect of them. And Dylan doesn't like to do that. So for him, I think where the magic of filmmaking happens is when he's sitting at a flatbed editing table by himself or with Howard Alk. And that's where he creates the kind of surprising juxtapositions and creates the visual jokes that really make, you know, eat the Document what it is.
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Interviewer
So Dylan made Eat the Document as he went along, because that method was an attempt to make the process of filmmaking more freer and more spontaneous and something in which you write as closer to the manner in which he was accustomed to making music. And you said that editing was the kind of premier way that he's able to express himself artistically through that. Could you share with us an example of. Of what you mean by the editing in the film reflecting his vision?
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Bradley Morgan
Yeah. Well, the. The first joke in the document is Dylan is in what looks like the lobby of a hotel where there's a piano. He's snorting heroin off the top of a piano. And there's what looks like a waiter with a bow tie. And Richard Manuel from the Band are standing nearby. And Dylan starts laughing uncontrollably. And then he says, are we ready to move on? And then there's a cut to. And it's very surprising because nothing has really happened yet. And then there's a cut to a train moving through the countryside in Ireland. And Dylan is now on the train with other members of the band, you know, on their way to a gig in, you know, whatever the next town is. And it's the line, are we ready to move on? Is what motivates the cut. Because the film itself is moving on. They're moving on to the next scene. So he's always. As an editor, he's always trying to find a reason to cut from one scene to another. And when he said move on, in reality, he wasn't talking about a film edit, but he saw that possibility in the footage.
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Interviewer
I wanted to ask that last question. Because of your own background making and studying films. And in the book, you highlight that there's this crucial difference between the skills that are required for a band leader versus that of a filmmaker. And one of Dylan's qualities as a musician is that he relies a lot on nonverbal communication cues. And you kind of alluded to how that could create a problem as a filmmaker. For you.
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Bradley Morgan
But.
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Interviewer
But as someone who teaches about film history and aesthetic, not necessarily as someone who makes movies, what have you come to appreciate about Dylan's methods?
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Bradley Morgan
Well, it's highly unusual for someone who is as famously nonverbal as Dylan to be a filmmaker. And I think it's funny because I read the book Pledging My Time by Ray Padgett, who's a buddy of mine. And Ray basically interviewed dozens of Dylan's musical collaborators over the decades. And I noticed there was this recurring motif in all of these interviews where his band members and people who've played with him on stage talked about how little he gave them. You know, it's sort of like he. He doesn't tell you what to do. He expects you to just understand what he wants. And even very recently, there was an interview with Jerry Pentecost, who's a young drummer. I don't even think he's 40 years old, but he, he was one of Dylan's recent drummers on the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour. And Jerry Pentecost told this hilarious story where he said he was. He was rehearsing with Dylan, and on a certain song he said, hey, Bob, what do you want me to play here? And Dylan said, I don't know what the. You should play. Don't ask me that. He goes, but I'll know it when
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Interviewer
I hear it,
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Bradley Morgan
you know, which is hilarious. You cannot have that attitude towards your crew when you're. When you're making a film. And yet Dylan, in spite of that, managed to make two movies, and pretty, pretty darn good ones at that. But I think the difficulty he had in collaborating with a crew is the reason why he stopped directing after Ronaldo and Clara. And discovering that was kind of an aha moment for, for me, I thought it's interesting that he hasn't directed since then, yet he has continued to be involved in various film productions, you know, as a producer, as a writer, as an actor. And so the thesis of this book sort of became that Dylan still wants to create films and he still wants to use cinema to kind of author his myth, but he, he doesn't want to direct. So therefore he, he has to find a collaborator that will allow him to kind of be the invisible co author of these film projects. And I'm talking about, you know, the Scorsese documentaries Mask and Anonymous, where Larry Charles is the director, and even something like Shadow Kingdom, his, his fake livestream, which was directed by Alma Harrell.
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Interviewer
We're going to get to those movies a little bit later. But I did have one more question about Eat the document, because three decades after the movie was released, this is in 2004, Dylan would publish his first memoir, titled Chronicles Volume One. And in this memoir, he describes his exposure to European art films and how much of a profound influence they had on him. And in your book, you suggest. In the. You suggest that Dylan likely would have encountered the films of Jean Luc Godard at the time and that both men, independently of one another, would arrive at the same method of developing screenplays. What was that method? And how can you feel the influence of European art films within it? The document?
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Bradley Morgan
Yeah, well, Dylan made no secret of the fact that, you know, he was kind of enthralled by the European films that he saw when he first arrived in New York City in 1961. He's spoken repeatedly about the impact that La Dolce Vita had on him. He's talked about that in interviews. He, you know, wrote about it in Chronicles. He references La Dolce Vita famously in his song Motor Psycho Nightmare. But he was also influenced by the French New Wave. And, you know, the, the great thing about these European art films is they, they're so formally innovative. I mean, the French New Wave in particular revolutionized cinema. This was a group of young film critics who, who became filmmakers in the late 50s and early 60s. And they were making low budget movies that were shot very cheaply and quickly, you know, and that was revolutionary because they, they weren't shooting on sets. They were going out into the streets of Paris and kind of shooting documentary style. So what Dylan said about Breathless, he said seeing Breathless for the first time made him feel like he could make a movie himself. You know, because when you watch a movie like that, it's not technically polished. The camera movement is very shaky. It's all handheld. You know, there are no, you know, tracking shots like what he would have seen in Hot. You know, he grew up on Hollywood with phelps in the 40s and 50s. And so I thought it was important to really emphasize the impact that seeing these European films had on him in 1961, when he was 19 years old. I mean, that's how old he was a teenager when La Dolce Vita opened in New York City in April of 61. So, so I think they blew his mind in the same way that all of the folk and blues music he was being exposed to in Greenwich Village also blew his mind. I mean, he, he had fallen in love with folk music back in Minnesota. That was the whole reason why he, you know, kind of made this pilgrimage to New York was to meet Woody Guthrie, his hero, but he was exposed to so much more after he arrived. And I think Greenwich Village, along with Paris was kind of the, you know, the artistic capital of the world. So he was exposed to, you know, not only cinema and music, but, you know, you know, painting as well and theater. He kind of fell under the influence of Bertolt Brecht and all of that ended up feeding, you know, the music that he was making. And ultimately it ended up feeding the films he made as well because Eat the document is very much like a French New wave version of a music documentary.
- [21:23]
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- [21:54]
Bradley Morgan
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Interviewer
The document is only screened a few times theatrically and it's never been in television or released on home video or streaming. And as you mentioned, Dylan's the rights holder and we may never understand why. But it's not the only film under lock and key. You've alluded to it a few times, but it's Ronaldo and Clara, which is this five hour film that was developed while Dylan was doing the Rolling Thunder Review, which for those who may not know, was a tour in the mid-70s featuring Dylan and other musicians playing smaller and more intimate concerts in this style of an old time traveling medicine roadshow. And the film blends three distinct styles of filmmaking. And so I'm wondering if you could tell us more about, about, about those styles of filmmaking, how the film incorporates that.
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Bradley Morgan
Yeah, well, the Rolling Thunder Review. First of all, I think it was Dylan's greatest tour ever. I mean, I, I frequently get asked the question if you could go back in time and see any show, you know, I would go back to 75 and see a Rolling Thunder show. So it was an amazing tour. But what a lot of people don't really understand about that tour is the reason why it existed is because Bob Dylan Wanted to make Ronaldo and Clara. His decision to make a movie about his life on tour influenced the way that that tour was structured. You know, it was. It was not a normal concert tour. It was an epic four hour show with a whole bunch of acts and, and they played non traditional venues. They didn't play big arenas, which Dylan could have done. And that's what he had done the previous year with the band. You know, they had played, you know, stadiums all across the country. And I don't think he enjoyed that process. He wanted to kind of get back to his roots in the, you know, folk revival of Greenwich Village of the early 60s. So a lot of those acts that came along with him were people he used to play with, like Joan Baez, like Ramblin, Jack Elliot, like Bobby neuwirth and Roger McGuinn and so on and so forth. And so it's kind of a bridge to his past in a way. And his, his methodology in, in terms of making the film was to mix together, you know, concert movie scenes of himself and all of the other Rolling Thunder ensemble members playing. And I think Dylan is incredibly generous in terms of granting screen time to all of these other performers in the movie. So it's, on the one hand, it's a concert film, but it's also a fictional narrative film because there are some scenes where the Rolling Thunder players are inhabiting characters and are improvising scenes. The very title of the film, Ronaldo and Clara, refers to characters that are being played by Bob Dylan and his wife, Sarah Dillon. They're really the two stars of the film. And then the third mode of filmmaking is it's a behind the scenes documentary about what the Rolling Thunder ensemble members were doing while on tour. And so there, there's no sort of obvious aesthetic signal of when he's going from one mode to another. And I think that's what frustrates a lot of people. I mean, you know, you see Bob Dylan and he's singing a Bob Dylan song, but then, you know, someone will refer to him as Ronaldo. So you're never quite sure if you're looking at Bob Dylan or if you're looking at Ronaldo, if you're looking at Joan Baez or if you're looking at the woman in White. Is this scene, you know, improvised? Or, you know, is this a documentary? You're never really sure where you are. It's very dreamlike and it's a challenging watch. But I think more so than eat the document, there is an ironclad logic at work in terms of the editing of that film. And once you kind of start to recognize some of the patterns that are at. That are at work and how meticulous Dylan was about editing it, then it doesn't seem quite as, you know, self indulgent as I think a lot of its initial critics claimed.
- [27:07]
Interviewer
So the Rolling Thunder review was really notable for the performances and how Dylan classics were reimagined. And as you mentioned, if you can go back to one Dylan show, it'd be that. But for Ronaldo and Clara, he experimented with how he juxtaposed the images and music, which became this attempt to kind of bring the viewer into a form of active collaboration with him. And could you share an example of that?
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Bradley Morgan
Yeah, absolutely. While the sound design in Ronaldo and Clara is very ambitious, it's much more ambitious than Eat the Document. You know, Eat the Document was being made for television at the time. And so it's. It's mono. You know, I think his thought was that, you know, this is. This is going to be seen on tv, but with Ronaldo and Clara, you know, it's a stereo soundtrack. And even more impressively, he's overlapping sounds from, you know, he'll take the sound from one scene and play it over the images, you know, from the next scene and vice versa. And, you know, he'll have audio of performances that he did in rehearsal that he never played live, that will play over, you know, a dramatic scene. Or he'll have one of my favorite moments in the movie, he has the poet Ann Waldman read her iconic poem, Fast Talking Woman, and you don't see her read it, but he plays that over a scene where he's, like, walking through the streets of Montreal. And that creates a rhyme with another scene where his wife, Sarah Dillon, is. Is walking through city streets while you're hearing Allen Ginsberg recite his poem Kaddish. So it's just things like that, you know, just. Just little patterns of how he juxtaposes image and sound and then how those scenes kind of rhyme with one another over the course of the film.
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Interviewer
In some ways, Renaldo and Clara offers viewers a small glimpse behind Dylan's mask. And I think this is important given that one of the main themes of the film is Dylan's troubled relationship with women, namely his wife Sarah and Jon Baez, both of whom. Both of whom play characters in the film. And you write in the book that this combination of Gillan's personal life and life as a performer establishes the movie's ultimate meaning. What is that.
- [29:41]
Bradley Morgan
Yeah. Well, it was kind of bold of me to claim that I knew what the ultimate meaning of the film is, but. But after having watched it many times over the decades, you know, the conclusion that I drew is that this is maybe the most nakedly autobiographical work that Dylan has given us. I think Dylan, and this is kind of a paradox, but I think he is more personal in his movies than he allows himself to be in his songs. And I think the reason why is because of what you just said. When he's appearing in a film like Ronaldo and Clara or Masked and Anonymous, he's playing a character. He's wearing a mask, and I think the mask allows him to speak the truth in. Ronaldo and Clara literally begins with Dylan performing on stage wearing a. A face mask. And he loves masks. He loves disguises. So the fact that he's playing a character named Ronaldo is what allows him to tell us about his. The struggles he's having in his marriage. Because I think he's basically saying, well, this isn't really me. This is Ronaldo. And then I think he does the same thing in masculine Anonymous. It's like he's. He looks like Bob Dylan. He's playing Bob Dylan songs, but everyone's calling him Jack Fate. And, you know, later on in Rolling Thunder Review, the documentary, Dylan said something very memorable. He said, when someone is wearing a mask, he's gonna tell you the truth. If he's not wearing a mask, it's highly unlikely. And he has kind of a Cheshire, you know, cat grin on his face when he says that. And also he's not wearing a mask when he says it.
- [31:48]
Interviewer
So, you know that there's ample anecdotal evidence that Dylan was rather proud of Ronaldo and Clara as an artistic accomplishment, even though the theatrical run was short and the film was panned by critics. But you consider Ronaldo and Claire as one of Dylan's major works that is worthy of serious analysis. What do you see with this film that you want others to appreciate more?
- [32:10]
Bradley Morgan
Well, that's a great question. And it's. It's difficult for me to sum it up concisely because Ronaldo and Clara is such an expansive film. You know, it's four hours long. It accomplishes a lot. But I can tell you a few things. First of all, I think there's sort of a popular misconception that Dylan ceased to be a political artist after 1964. Right. Because he was involved in the civil rights movement. You know, he performed at the March on Washington. The songs he wrote during that time period were explicitly political.
- [32:56]
Interviewer
And.
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Bradley Morgan
And he drifted away from that, arguably, when he started playing, you know, electric. But at the same time, you know, I think a film like Ronaldo and Clara shows how much he cared about social issues. Because, first of all, a major part of that film is Hurricane Carter and his legal plight. Hurricane Carter was, you know, the subject of the song hurricane from 1976, and he was a boxer who was, you know, kind of wrongly incarcerated for a murder he did not commit. And Dylan devotes, you know, a chunk of the movie towards showing Reuben Carter being interviewed by journalists, talking about his plight. And then he also juxtaposes that footage with people in Harlem being being interviewed by the Ronaldo and Clara camera crew being asked, you know, how they feel about Reuben Carter. And it's one of the most, you know, political things Dylan ever did is that section of the film, because you have all these black people in the street expressing support for Carter. And then the camera crew interviews one white man who identifies himself as a police officer, who is kind of the lone dissenting voice in that sequence. It's really electrifying to watch. But what's. What makes it really interesting, I think, is the fact that, you know, that was being filmed against the backdrop of the bicentennial celebration of, you know, America's 200th birthday. And Dylan, you know, incorporates that into the film. Another aspect of the film that I think is really interesting is Dylan going to visit the Tuscarora Nation on Thanksgiving. He and the members of the Rolling Thunder Review visit this, you know, reservation, have dinner with the people who live there. And then over that sequence, you hear Dylan singing a cover of Curtis Mayfield's People Get Ready, which is one of the greatest songs ever written. And it's just. It's so moving because you can feel the compassion that Dylan has for, you know, the Native American subjects of that scene. And I think by including that along with the Hurricane Carter section, Dylan is basically saying, you know, everyone is celebrating America. This is a patriotic time. And yet there are a lot of things we don't have to be patriotic about. And America still has a long way to go.
- [36:00]
Interviewer
So it's a shame that Dylan never directed again after that, because as the 80s came along and the music video format became popularized, I would have loved to have seen how Dylan would have directed a music video. But he wouldn't really collaborate on a new film project again until the early 2000s, when he teamed up with Larry Charles, who was a sitcom writer known for his work on Seinfeld and Curb youb Enthusiasm. And they made this film masked and Anonymous. And although he didn't direct the film, Larry Charles did. You had mentioned earlier that you think that the film. That. That Dylan is the film's primary author. Can you tell us more about how this project came about?
- [36:37]
Bradley Morgan
Yeah, this film has a very unusual genesis and it's. It's kind of a hilarious story. Apparently Dylan is a big fan of Jerry Lewis. As am I, by the way. Jerry Lewis as a filmmaker. Dylan was watching Jerry Lewis movies on his tour bus in the late 1990s and was kind of enamored of Jerry Lewis's approach to slapstick comedy.
- [37:04]
Interviewer
And.
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Bradley Morgan
And Dylan's original idea was to create not a movie, but a television variety show and there would be like a musical comedy variety show. And he was looking for filmmakers he could collaborate with. Apparently he met with other people before Larry Charles. I. I don't know who he met with. I would love to know who he talked to and how those meetings went. But Larry Charles was the first person who apparently impressed Dylan. And at that time, Larry Charles had only. He was known primarily for being a writer on Seinfeld. I think he had directed one or two episodes of Curb youb Enthusiasm, but he had never directed a feature film. And he was introduced to Dylan by a mutual friend of theirs named Eddie Gorodetsky, who's also a sitcom writer. And apparently they had this chemistry meeting in a coffee shop. And Dylan, according to Larry Charles, literally pulls out a box, opens it up, and it's full of scrap paper. That is hotel stationery from hotels around the world, you know, where Dylan stays while he's on tour. And all of these little pieces of hotel stationery have phrases written on them, names written on them, just thoughts that Dylan has scribbled down. And Dylan says to Larry Charles, I have all of this stuff and I don't know what to do with it. And Larry Charles starts to put the scraps of paper together and he says, well, this could be a character, and this could be something that this character could say. And that impressed Dylan. Dylan said, oh, oh, you can do that, you know. And so that was really the birth of the screenplay. That was the beginning of the process whereby they co wrote the film together. Ultimately, you know, the. The names that appear in the film are pseudonyms of the writers. It says Sergey Petrov and Renee Fontaine. But the cat was let out of the bag pretty early on that, you know, it was actually Dylan and Larry Charles who wrote it.
- [39:32]
Interviewer
I was reading Larry Charles's memoir when. When they had a meeting with HBO to talk about making this into a sitcom. And they go to whoever the head of HBO was at the time, and the guy shows him a framed copy of a ticket to Woodstock. And he goes, hey, Bob, I've got a ticket to Woodstock, originally framed. And Bob goes, I wasn't at Woodstock. And I can imagine just that moment alone that was just like. That killed it. There was no project after that with hbo.
- [40:02]
Bradley Morgan
Well, no, you're partially right. Dylan says, I wasn't at Woodstock. And then Dylan turns around and looks out the window for the rest of the interview, never says anything. And Larry Charles continues to sell the project to the president of hbo. At the end of this meeting, the president of HBO agrees to greenlight the show. And then they leave the building. And as they're in the elevator, Dylan says, I've changed my mind. I don't want to do this anymore. And Larry Charles says, what do you mean you don't want to do it? And Dylan says, it's too slapsticky. So the very thing that made him want to do it is also the reason why he ended up scrapping it. But what they had written apparently morphed into a screenplay instead. So instead of being, you know, a season of a television show, they turned it into a two hour movie.
- [41:10]
Interviewer
So in the film Masculine Anonymous, Dylan plays the star, Jack Fate. And you write that it is impossible to separate the story of Jack Fate from the legend of Bob Dylan. And this kind of goes into what we're talking about earlier with Mask. But, you know, between Ronaldo Claire in the, in the 70s and this in the 2000s, Dylan has more of a legacy. So how does the film play with Dylan's legacy? And what do you think it reveals about Dylan's own artistic vision for himself within it, how he sees himself?
- [41:37]
Bradley Morgan
Well, yeah, I mean, I think the thing that's really interesting about Masked and Anonymous is how much Dylan seems to be looking back on his entire career. I mean, Dylan is kind of, you know, famously the person who doesn't look back. And yet if you think about Jack Fate, the character being kind of a bizarro world version of Bob Dylan, it's really, you know, it's fascinating because the film itself takes place in a. In a kind of alternate reality. It does not take place in the world we live in. There's a. There's a heavy, you know, kind of dystopian science fiction element to this movie. It takes place in a version of America that is a totalitarian police state where the president of the United States is a dictator. Sound familiar, Bradley? And I think this was part of the reason why the film was not accepted when it first came out. I think that just confused people, you know, and the character Dylan plays, Jack Fate, is. Is the son of the dictator who is president of the country. And at the beginning of the film, Jack Fate is in prison, and his manager, played by the great John Goodman, springs him out of prison so that he can play a benefit concert that is supposed to benefit, you know, the victims of this civil war that is raging in America. And so, I mean, on the surface, none of that seems to be autobiographical in terms of Dylan's life. But on a poetic level, I mean, I think Dylan does feel like he is, you know, in prison. He's said that many times over the years. He, you know, there's a great line in the song Dreaming of you where he says, you know, first they put me into. First they locked me into a cage, then they put me onto the stage. And that's basically the plot of Masked and Anonymous. You know, they let him out of prison to play a show, and spoiler alert, he goes back to jail in the end. And I think that is on a meta, you know, like in a metaphorical way, how Dylan sees himself. And it's not just himself. I think the entire film is kind of studded with references to his career. I mean, Dylan played live aid in 1985. It was the biggest gig he had ever played. I think the televised audience was something like too billion people. And it's one of his worst performances. I think he was, you know, severely under rehearsed, possibly intoxicated. He's playing with Keith Richards and Ron Wood. All three of them are playing acoustic guitars. And it's a very kind of shambolic performance. And so the fact that he's playing a televised benefit concert in Masked and Anonymous, I think he's kind of offering us a window into his psyche and how he feels, how skeptical he is about the whole concept of a benefit concert. But also specific characters in the film, I think, are also kind of bizarro world versions of people that he has known throughout his life and career. Uncle Sweetheart, in my opinion, is basically Albert Grossman, Dylan's manager, who was kind of like a. Kind of like a Colonel Tom Parker figure. You know, in. In Dylan's early years, the character Bobby Cupid is like Bobby Newirth, who was Dylan's best friend and tour manager in 1965 and 1960, 66. And so on and so forth. So I think the more you know about Dylan, the the more you're going to get out of the film.
- [45:48]
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- [46:46]
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- [47:15]
Interviewer
in your book, you explore the way Dylan's work as a filmmaker interfaces with the songs he was writing at the time. And I'm glad you brought up Dreaming of youf, because you write that one needs to understand how Dylan's songwriting methodology has evolved over time. Prior Dylan's lyrical and melodical roots, they came from traditional folk and blues music, but then he later expanded to more surrealist lyrics based on non musical sources like Hollywood films from the 50s. And if you've been following them on Instagram lately, there's been just lots of clips from these old movies, which is kind of fun. But by the time of making Mask than Anonymous, his songwriting had become much more complex and dense. How did that songwriting craft influence the tone and direction of the film?
- [47:58]
Bradley Morgan
Yeah, now this is, to me, absolutely fascinating. There's a Great writer in Albuquerque, New Mexico, named Scott Warmuth. He used to be a DJ, and he's probably the preeminent Dylanologist of the 21st century because he's the guy who. Who discovered the source material for so much of the songs that Dylan has written from Time out of mind in 1997 through the present. And not only the songs, but also Chronicles Volume 1, which is just filled with quotations from other books and the screenplay for Masked and Anonymous. You know, when I was talking about the scraps of paper earlier, I mean, what Dylan is writing down, oftentimes it's a phrase from a book that, for whatever reason strikes his fancy. Something that about it speaks to him and he. He removes it from its original context. And then for him, I think the. The process of songwriting, it's kind of a. It's kind of an al. It's kind of a alchemical process where he's basically synthesizing all of these different pre. Existing things. You. You talked about Godard earlier, and what I should have said then, but I'll say it now, is that Godard did the same thing. Godard made a film called King Lear in 1987 where he was sued for his use of appropriating someone else's text and not crediting them. Dylan has never been sued, but he has been accused of plagiarism because he's. He's basically a literary sampler when it comes to writing.
- [49:52]
Interviewer
He's.
- [49:52]
Bradley Morgan
He started doing it really heavily on Time out of mind in 1997, but with love and theft in 2001, he really makes it explicit. I mean, even the title of that album, you know, he's saying I'm a Thief, you know, and he puts the title Love and Theft literally in quotation marks. It's the only Dylan album where the title is in quotes. So it's. It's kind of like, you know, I think he's. He's surveying the history of American music, but he's also drawing from literary sources. He's drawing from plays, he's drawing from movies, and he's recombining all of these things in a way that I would argue produces something new.
- [50:41]
Interviewer
Yeah, it's always fascinating to me that Love and Theft was in quotation remarks. It kind of reminds me of Bowie's Heroes in a way, because, you know, both albums, or maybe not both albums specifically, but, you know, throughout that album or even Dylan's longer career, there's this. There's these masks, and Dylan and his mask are a very consistent thread throughout his career, especially seen later in his collaboration with Martin Scorsese for the film the Rolling Thunder Review. And Scorsese had worked with Dylan before, first as a performer for the concert film the Last Waltz, and then as an interview subject for the documentary no Direction Home. However, Rolling Thunder Review traces the same history as Ronaldo and Clara, but completely rewrites everything about it. So with that, could you tell us more about the film's concept?
- [51:26]
Bradley Morgan
Yeah, I love Rolling Thunder Review. I think, you know, it's the second collaboration between Dylan and Scorsese, and in my opinion, I think it's much more interesting than no Direction Home, which I also like. But no Direction Home is a very conventional documentary and I think when you look at how those films were made, it was a completely, you know, polar opposite approach. Because no Direction Home, all of the interviews that appear in that were conducted by Jeff Rosen, a lot of them going back to the 1990s. You know, Alan Ginsburg is an interview subject and he died in 97. And so I think basically the genesis of no Direction Home was Dylan's manager, Jeff Rosenberg, basically realizing these people who were around in the early days aren't going to be with us much longer. And we need to document, you know, their memories of what, you know, was happening in the early 60s, the people around Dylan. And I don't think that they knew what form those interviews would ultimately take. I don't think they knew it was going to even be a movie, you know. And then later they talked to Scorsese and then kind of brought him on to, you know, finish the film to put it into its final form. And so when Dylan was interviewed for no Direction Home, those interviews were done in the year 2000, five years before the film itself debuted. And I, you know, Dylan is basically just answering questions in a pretty straightforward manner, like he would, you know, if he were being interviewed by a journalist with Rolling Thunder review in 2019. It's a whole different ball game. The whole movie is basically a hoax and Dylan is in on the joke and is really the co creator of the joke. They pretend that the film, Ronaldo and Clara never happened, even though they repurpose footage from it, you know, that forms the core of the entire film. They pretend that this pretentious European director named Stefan Van Dorp, who I guess is from Holland, they pretend that he was the one who shot all that footage. And they hired an actor to play him in the film for these kind of pseudo documentary, you know, sequences. And what I love about Rolling Thunder is You see interviews with Dylan in the present day, circa 2019, talking about people who never existed, like Stefan Van Dorp, and doing it utterly convincingly. I mean, it's a hilarious performance. Once you know that, it's all. And you don't know that. I mean, I didn't. When I first saw this movie, it was. It was. I think the night before they made it available to stream on Netflix, they had a screening at the Gene Siskel Film center here in Chicago. And in the beginning, I kind of assumed it was all real, but then I thought, wait a minute, who is this Van Dork character? I've never heard of this guy. And why aren't they talking about Ronaldo and Clara? And then Sharon Stone shows up, and she talks about being there and kind of traveling with the Rolling Thunder review when she was a teenager. And then, you know, my Spidey sense really started tingling. And I thought, man, I think I would have known if Sharon Stone had been there. As someone who's been a fan of Dylan since the late 80s, I would have heard about that. And then eventually what happens is the character actor, Michael Murphy shows up playing representative Jack Tanner, who is the. The main character of a television show that Robert Altman directed called Tanner 88. And as soon as I saw that, I said, oh, I get it now. This is all a joke. So I think it's kind of ingenious that the film works that way. You know, it's like there, on the one hand, Scorsese and Dylan are. They're. They're perpetrating a hoax, but they. They do want you to get it. They. You know, and I think, you know, I was really the. The ideal audience member for this screening because it was like, it's kind of. I gradually figured it out while I was watching it, and. And the fact that Dylan and Scorsese collaborated in the way that they did, you know, it's a true collaboration between them in a way that I think no Direction Home was not. And that's why I chose to write about Rolling Thunder Review at the end of my book, because I do think that Dylan's contributions in the interview segments amount to co authorship.
- [56:42]
Interviewer
I was surprised to read in your book that Scorsese did not originally include any fictionalized elements at all. And by omitting Ronaldo and Clara, you write that these creative limitations also led to the film gaining something special in terms of Dylan's own creative involvement. Can you share with us an example?
- [56:58]
Bradley Morgan
Yeah. I mean, I was surprised, too, when Scorsese said that his original cut had no fictional elements. And basically what he has said is that the initial assembly of the footage, he thought it was boring. Boring. He thought, you know, there's nothing special about this. It's just a documentary about this group of people and where they went. And he said, but the tour itself was really special. So in order for the documentary to reflect the spirit of that tour, you know, where Dylan wore a mask, where Dylan wore white face paint, where Joan Baez dressed up like Dylan so convincingly with the white face paint herself, that she fooled people into thinking she was Bob Dylan, you know, Scorsese's rationale for including these fictional elements is the film itself kind of needed to wear a mask. And that's why he chose to inject these fictional elements. And in terms of, you know, the film gaining something special, it's. It's basically what I said earlier. Dylan is performing. He's not merely answering questions. He's saying these outrageous things about how Roger McGuinn was into sophisticated electronics, and Roger McGuinn may have bugged Stefan Van Dorp's hotel rooms while they were on tour, like he was spying on him. So, you know, it. I actually go so far as to say that it's Dylan's best acting performance in any movie, because ultimately, Dylan is not a natural actor. You know, he's always a little stiff, he's always a little awkward, no matter what the film is. And I think the role, you know, he can play the most convincingly is himself. And when he's talking about things that didn't happen, when he's talking about people who didn't exist, when he's talking about interacting with Sharon Stone, you know, a lot of people believed him. So that's the highest praise I think you can give him as an actor.
- [59:18]
Interviewer
Even after all these decades, Dylan has this innate ability to still surprise fans and critics. And in 2021, while unable to tour because of the COVID 19 pandemic, Dylan announced a live stream called Shadow Kingdom. And many assumed that it would be just a live performance, as was the case for so many other artists at that time. But it was so much more than that. What was Shadow Kingdom?
- [59:38]
Bradley Morgan
So Shadow Kingdom was announced as a live stream, a live stream performance. And in the book, I call it Dylan's ultimate cinematic hoax, because when it was announced that he would be giving a live stream performance, everybody assumed it would be a live concert. And so basically, you know, this was before everything opened up again. You know, this was kind of during the height of the pandemic it was the summer of 2021, and a lot of musicians started doing live stream performances as a way to kind of connect with their fans because they couldn't go on tour. So when Dylan announced he was doing it, you know, the people in Dylan world, all of his fans, got really excited. And this live stream performance was broadcast through a website and app called Veeps, which is pretty obscure. I had never heard of it until this particular event. And veeps was charging $25 to watch the Dylan live stream. So, of course, I eagerly forked over my money. And as soon as the performance began, it was very obvious that we were not looking at a live performance, but rather a film that had been made earlier that was meticulously shot and edited, shot in very beautiful black and white. By the way, the cinematographer of that film ended up winning an Oscar for the Brutalist. And, you know, you knew from the very beginning because the first song is When I Paint My Masterpiece. And you can hear Dylan playing the harmonica at the introduction of the song. And yet he's on screen strumming a guitar and he's not playing a harmonica, and nobody else is playing a harmonica. So they didn't even try, really, to make the synchronization perfect. And, you know, Dylan has always been something of a trickster figure. You know, he likes, you know, illusionism, he likes magic. And I mean, this is, I think, one of the greatest tricks he ever pulled. Because the film that resulted, it's an art film. It's not just one location. You see him on several different sets, you see him in several different costumes. The whole thing was carefully constructed in advance. And I've watched it many times since, and I think it's a blast.
- [62:31]
Interviewer
You write that Shadow Kingdom bears certain hallmarks seen in many of Dylan's performances from recent years, especially those in masculine Anonymous. And you write that this suggests Dylan had some input into the visual style. You know, we mentioned black and white, we mentioned the different costumes, the editing, like not playing the harmonica. But what are those hallmarks in visual style? You know, kind of translate that, what that might mean from a musician to filmmaker.
- [62:55]
Bradley Morgan
Yeah, well, this is. I think that's a really great question. I think the most important hallmark of Dylan's on screen performances is his use of long takes. Dylan does not like. You know, we talked about him as an editor earlier. When it comes to presenting his music for the big screen or the small screen, he really prefers long takes. And Larry Charles has talked about this with regards to Masked and Anonymous before they made the film. The two of them watched old television performances of, you know, the Grand Ole Opry, Hank Williams, they watched the Johnny Cash show. Because a lot of those shows are filmed with a single camera. And there's either very little editing or no editing. And I think Dylan likes the way that the long take kind of immerses the audience in the performance. It really makes it feel like you're there. You know, the more you cut, the more sort of distracting that is from what the musicians are actually doing. And so, you know, you see this not only in Mask and Anonymous and in Shadow Kingdom, you see this in Dylan's television performances over the years. Like when he performed on, you know, there was a Johnny Cash tribute show in 1999. And Dylan's performance is a. It's a great performance. I don't know if you've seen it. He does the song Train of Love and he, he does this great interview or a great introduction where he and his band are playing the song. And he thanks Johnny for standing up for me. Way back when, he's talking about 1964, you know, the letter that Johnny Cash wrote to Sing out magazine. And then he sings the song. And the camera starts off in a wide shot and then where you can see the full band. And then the camera slowly pushes in until it ends up in a close up on Dylan halfway through the song. And then in the second half of the performance, the camera slowly backs away until it ends up where it started. There's not a single cut and it's a great performance. And then he does the same thing almost 20 years later. There was a Tony Bennett tribute show. And Dylan recorded this performance, pre taped it, sent it in, and it's the exact same visual strategy. He does a song. This was when he was in his, you know, Great American Songbook phase. He does a song called Once Upon a Time. It's on the album Triplicate and Tony Bennett had recorded that back in the early 60s. And it's the same thing. The camera starts off in a wide shot, pushes into a close up on Dylan and then pulls back. So I think it's pretty clear. And this speaks to Dylan as a filmmaker that even when he's doing something for tv, he obviously has has it in his contract how he's going to be shot. You know, he's. He wants to have creative control over the visual style.
- [66:18]
Interviewer
The final work you profile in the book is the 2024 biopic a complete Unknown, starring Timothee Chalamet as a young Dylan undergoing This shift from being a folk musician to this cultural phenomenon and the film takes some historical and narrative liberties when it comes to Dylan's life. But Dylan ultimately did approve the script. It's not a film I think we need to dive into too deeply because it is recent and more well known than the other films. But I did want to ask you one thing about it, and it's that you write in the book that more than anything, though, what Dylan seems to have infused into the movie is this sense of loneliness that he experienced at the time. So with other films trying to capture the complexities of Dylan, like what I'm not there tried to do, what about this sense of loneliness sets the complete unknown apart from other Dylan portrayals?
- [67:05]
Bradley Morgan
Yeah, I think that's really interesting. I mean, when I wrote about a complete unknown, I am a fan of the film, but I wasn't really trying to argue that it was a good movie. What was interesting to me about analyzing it at the very end of this book was looking at how Dylan's involvement in the film was ultimately shaped what it ended up being. And, you know, a lot of people, when they hear, oh, Dylan had script approval, they think that he probably, you know, disapproved of things that may have been in there, you know, and that because. Because when you hear that an artist has approval over the. The script about their lives, you think, oh, it's going to be whitewashed, squashed or whatever. But apparently Dylan didn't object to anything in the script, even though, you know, it does make him look like a jerk at times. Apparently the only thing Dylan asked to be changed was the name of one character, his real life girlfriend, Susie Rotolo. He asked that her name be changed to Sylvie Russo in order to protect her and her privacy. So what happened was the director of the film, James Mangold, met with Dylan on five occasions to interview him. They read the entire script together and Mangold had a bunch of questions, you know, practical questions, like, when did you write your songs? You know, what time of day did you do it in the day? Did you do it in the night? Were you sitting at a desk? You know, did you do it in bed? And, you know, he asked Dylan, what was your initial impulse for going electric? And Dylan said that he felt lonely performing by himself. This is something Mangold has said in interview after interview was that Dylan stressed to him how alone he felt when he was performing by himself. And so that ended up becoming, I think, a huge part of the film was showing Dylan alone, you know, showing him to be lonely when he was playing by himself, and that when he started playing with a band, it was because, you know, he thought it would be more fun to jam with his friends, you know, to feel a sense of camaraderie with the people he was playing music with. And so once you know that and watch the film, you know, you start to see that that's probably Dylan's most important contribution, I think, to the film.
- [69:54]
Interviewer
Well, I really appreciate you walking through all of Dylan's films of me, and it's really fascinating. But before we wrap things up, there are some things I want to ask you about. Specifically, since you're a filmmaker, you yourself, are there things about Dylan's filmmaking that influenced how you make films?
- [70:11]
Bradley Morgan
Yes, as a matter of fact, you know, I didn't think so originally, but when I started writing this book. But the thing that you said earlier about Ronaldo and Clara being about how Dylan has difficulty balancing his personal life and his professional life, I. Last summer was getting ready to shoot my new film, which is called Hecla. It's getting ready to have its world premiere. And it's about a day in the life of an actress. It's about her inner life as an artist. And we literally go inside of her brain at certain points in the film. So, like, while she's auditioning, it's, like, what she's thinking about, her memories, her fantasies. And I was writing a director's statement about this film for the purpose of putting it, you know, in a. In a press kit, and I actually used the phrase. I used the exact same phrase that I used when writing about Ronaldo and Clara. I said, this is a film about a woman who has a hard time, you know, balancing her personal life and her professional life. And I swear to God, Bradley, I didn't realize until I finished writing that sentence that I wrote the same thing about Ronaldo and Clara. And I thought, oh, man, I need to change this because I can't plagiarize myself. But then I thought, no, I'm going to keep it in there because it's true. And, you know, I think that is that difficulty that I'm talking about. I think it's pretty universal, I think. I think a lot of artists feel that way. You know, it's. It's hard to maintain relationships with people when you're also obsessed with your work. And. And I think that without even realizing it, I was exploring very similar thematic concerns in my new film.
- [72:16]
Interviewer
Did studying Dylan as a filmmaker make you appreciate certain aspects of his songwriting more?
- [72:21]
Bradley Morgan
Yes, I Mean, I think Masked and Anonymous in particular, I've read the screenplay. You know, watching the film is one thing, but the script is fascinating because it's a lot longer than the film. There's a lot of material that he and Larry Charles wrote that I don't know if they shot it and it ended up on the cutting room floor, some of it that ended up on the cutting room floor, but some of it I don't even think they shot. But it's. It's really dense and the references are relentless in it. I mean, it's kind of like Murder Most Foul, you know, which is also very reference heavy. But you're reading the screenplay for Masked and Anonymous and then watching that over and over just made me realize how similar his process is, whether he's writing a screenplay, whether he's writing a song, or, you know, whether he's. He's welding iron gates. I mean, he's a sculptor too, and, and I think even that is similar in the sense that he's taking scrap metal, you know, found objects, and recombining those things in order to produce something new. So, yeah, it's, it's. I really, through studying his films, it made me see parallels among the ways that he creates everything. And, and I think there's something kind of admirable about that, about how consistent he is.
- [73:57]
Interviewer
I think I recall in Larry Charles's memoir that he hopes to screen the longer cut of Masculine Anonymous. So someday. It. It's long. I think it is like three to four hours long. I, I may not be remembering that correctly, but he, he did say there is a longer cut of that.
- [74:13]
Bradley Morgan
Yeah, Larry Charles, his original director's cut is three and a half hours long. And, you know, one can only hope that it sees the light of day. I should point out there are three cuts of the film because the cut that played at sea Sundance in 2003 was an hour and 53 minutes long. And then after, you know, the, the reviews were so negative, you know, Larry Charles recut the film and cut about six minutes out of it for the theatrical release. And so that 107 minute version, which opened in theaters in the summer of 2003, that's the only version that's been available ever since. And I think, you know, hopefully one day there will be some kind of physical media box set where they'll release all three versions and we can, you know, watch them all and compare.
- [75:11]
Interviewer
So for my final question, which of Dylan's songs do you think best lend themselves to his artistic sensibilities as a filmmaker.
- [75:19]
Bradley Morgan
Ooh. Which of his songs is the most cinematic?
- [75:24]
Interviewer
Well, I guess maybe not necessarily cinematic, but, you know, and I'm not a filmmaker myself, so I can't really see that process the same way you do. But is there something that, you know, parallels between his creative process in filmmaking and creative process in songwriting? Do you see that there's certain songs that lend themselves to connecting those two more than others say would any. I know there's a lot of the. More.
- [75:50]
Bradley Morgan
Absolutely. Okay, well, I'm gonna. I. I could name so many, but, you know, in the interest of time, I'm gonna pick one. Brownsville girl from 1986. Now, this is one of Dylan's greatest songs, and it's on his worst ever album. You know, 1986 was the absolute low point of his career as a musician and yet this album, which is, you know, horribly produced, it's slathered with, you know, synthesizers, and there's a children's choir on one song.
- [76:27]
Interviewer
Knocked Out Loaded.
- [76:29]
Bradley Morgan
Oh, I'm sorry. Knocked Out Loaded. What did I say?
- [76:31]
Interviewer
Well, no, because you said it's his worst album. And I'm thinking, like, it's down on the Groove. That's got to be his worst album. Right?
- [76:36]
Bradley Morgan
Well, those two came out back to back. I mean, it's kind of the one, two punch. But Knocked Out Loaded, yes, is the one that Brownsville Girl is on. But, you know, in the middle of this. This album is this epic song which is a narrative. And he co wrote it with Sam Shepard, who gets an additional dialogue by credit on Ronaldo and Clara. And what I love about it is it's a story song that's like a puzzle, but some of the pieces are missing. You know, it's like you get the general idea, and yet you. Again, as with his movies, you have to collaborate with him in order to complete the puzzle.
- [77:27]
Interviewer
You know, I'm just thinking about that song and your choice of that question, because the opening line is like, there's a movie I saw one time. And we've been talking about films the entire time, so.
- [77:36]
Bradley Morgan
About a man riding across the desert. And it starred Gregory Peck. Exactly. It's literally a song about movies as well, so.
- [77:45]
Interviewer
Well, Michael, I really appreciate how we came full circle on that, and thank you so much for talking with me about your book. You know, so much ink has been spilled on Dylan. But really, seriously, congratulations on framing this brilliant and complex artist in such a radically new light. You should be really proud.
- [78:00]
Bradley Morgan
Oh, thank you so much. And I had a blast talking with you about it.
- [78:04]
Interviewer
My name is Bradley Morgan, and you've been listening to the New Books Network with my guest, Michael Glover Smith. His latest book is Bob Dylan as Filmmaker, no Time to Think and is published by McNitter Grace.
- [78:28]
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