Scorsese 'Arena' Documentary

Dozens of reviews of the TV Show/DVD/CD all over the net - won't even try an capture any here. Check out the comprehensive references at Expectinggrain.com.

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BobDylan.com:

"No Direction Home", the first feature-length film biography of Bob Dylan, will premiere this September, directed by Martin Scorsese.
The two-part film, which focuses on the singer-songwriter's life and music from 1961-66, includes never-seen performance footage and interviews with artists and musicians whose lives intertwined with Dylan's during that time.
The film features previously unreleased footage from Bob Dylan's groundbreaking live concerts, studio recording sessions and interviews.
The documentary will be released on DVD on September 20 and will make its U.S. broadcast premiere on September 26-27 on PBS, on "American Masters".

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PBS.org:

Airing September 26-27th, 2005
A film directed by Martin Scorsese.

Bob Dylan gives his only full length interview in 20 years, participating for the very first time in an exclusive film biography. From his explosive arrival on the downtown New York City scene in 1961 - with a raspy voice, pounding guitar and stunning lyrics - through his near-fatal motorcycle accident in Woodstock in 1966, no one had more of an impact and no one changed the landscape of contemporary music more profoundly. Private, almost reclusive, disdainful of customary forms of publicity, Dylan has now agreed to make an appearance in his own story, illuminated in particular by this remarkable five-year period. Directed by Martin Scorsese, the intimate and incomparable film includes an archive of, literally, never-before-seen footage from childhood, from the road and from backstage, as well as unreleased interviews conducted over the past 15 years with other seminal figures from those times - some of whom, like Allen Ginsberg, are long dead. And, Dylan brings the rights to his legendary music with him - Blowin' in the Wind, Like a Rolling Stone, Don't Think Twice, Mr. Tambourine Man, It Ain't Me Babe, Just Like A Woman, Positively 4th Street, The Times They Are A-Changin' - and infinitely on and on.


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NY Post Online:

MARTIN Scorsese is said to be driving PBS bananas while making his long-awaited documentary about Bob Dylan. The network paid the legendary director a hefty sum to helm the four-hour "American Masters" program, which was slated to run in September. But a source tattles: "Scorsese is driving PBS nuts. He says it won't be ready on time and he won't show them any footage." The movie concentrates on Dylan's early performing years from 1961 to 1966. Scorsese, who has been working on it for two years, directed "The Last Waltz," which chronicled the final performance of The Band — a group that once backed-up Dylan.

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Kansas.com:

Bob Dylan opens his vaults for two-part 'American Masters' on PBS
Martin Scorsese is directing "No Direction Home" which will premiere this summer.

For an artist who for so long cultivated mystery as part of his poetic persona and sidestepped straight answers in the few interviews he gave, like the "song and dance man" he purported to be, it's now time to set the record straight for Bob Dylan.

Following his critically lauded and briskly selling autobiography "Chronicles, Vol. 1," Dylan has opened up his considerable vaults of little-seen road films, performance videos and home movies -- as well as a freewheeling 10-hour interview with his manager -- for a two-part "American Masters" this summer, directed by no less than Martin Scorsese.

It is at once one of the longest "American Masters" programs in the history of the Public Broadcasting System biography series -- with two nights and probably four hours -- while covering the briefest period of time.

Scorsese's film, with the working title "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan," covers only the jingle-jangle morning of Dylan's career -- the five years from leaving his home in Hibbing, Minn., for New York City in 1961 to the motorcycle accident that took him briefly out of action in July 1966.

Even so, the sheer volume of filmed material will require some judicious editing (at least until the expanded DVD version is released). A double-disc CD package of previously unreleased performances will accompany the premiere of "No Direction Home," slated for broadcast July 13 and 14.

Scorsese previously filmed Dylan when he performed in the farewell concert for the Band, captured in the 1978 film "The Last Waltz." Like that film, Scorsese well might assemble the huge portrait without ever dealing directly with Dylan.

"I'd like to create the story -- to find the story, first of all -- and then play it out the way I think it's right," Scorsese told reporters at the TV Critics Association winter press tour in Los Angeles in January. "I'm looking out for clarity. I'm looking out for the understanding of how mercurially an artist like this develops. And in a way, it's better I don't speak (with Dylan). It's better I just deal with the material.

"I feel the freedom that way, in making it that way, but I want to bring something that I can to it without being influenced in any way," said Scorsese, who has been nominated for an Academy Award as best director for "The Aviator."

That means "No Direction Home" will be authorized in the sense that it will have the full cooperation of the Dylan camp and access to its archives, but Dylan will not have editorial control.

The decision was made to limit the focus from 1961 to 1966 because of the wealth of material released, against a backdrop of world events changing just as quickly.

"I think there were eight albums" in that period, said producer Nigel Sinclair, who previously produced Dylan's 2003 theatrical puzzlement, "Masked and Anonymous." "Every single album was an extraordinary piece of work. There was a time with such fertile change in the world, in the cultural world and the political world, the feeling was that, to get through what we had to cover, we couldn't do more than this period in this film."

A short clip shows some extraordinary performances -- a marvelous piece of film from a Newport Folk Festival workshop stage, playing around on Dylan's 1965 tour, and putting on reporters at any number of news conferences.

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LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - The more Bob Dylan reveals, the more he conceals:
Lately, the singer-songwriter has been much in the public eye. His memoir "Chronicles Vol. 1" has been perched on the New York Times bestseller list for 14 weeks. Late last year he sat for an infrequent TV interview, with Ed Bradley on "60 Minutes."

Despite that current high profile, Dylan remains a cryptic figure. Though it's a delightful read, "Chronicles" often obfuscates about the facts, and he was as gnomic as ever in his CBS sit-down.

Now Martin Scorsese is taking on the Dylan mythos. The director's three-hour feature "No Direction Home" will premiere on PBS's "American Masters" series in two parts on July 13-14.

"It's nonfiction -- maybe," Scorsese said candidly at a Television Critics Assn. session at the Universal Hilton on Saturday. "With Bob Dylan, you never know."

The film will focus on the five years from Dylan's arrival in New York in January 1961 to the July 1966 motorcycle crash that sidelined him. During that time, the protean musician underwent a hurtling artistic metamorphosis -- from Woody Guthrie acolyte to protest-song icon, from impressionist folk poet to surrealist rock dandy.

"You're constantly in a state of becoming," Dylan says in a clip drawn from 10 hours of fresh interview footage shot by Dylan's aide de camp Jeff Rosen, who takes a co-producer credit on the project. (Scorsese said he has not conducted any interviews himself, though it's still a possibility.) The feature will also offer testimony from such familiars as onetime paramours Suze Rotolo and Joan Baez, musicians Dave Van Ronk and Pete Seeger and poet Allen Ginsburg.

"American Masters" executive producer Susan Lacy said the show pursued Dylan for 10 years. Judging from the five-minute reel screened for critics, the payoff for that quest should be breathtaking.

"No Direction Home" will tap a glittering lode of hitherto unseen footage. The promo reel included what may be the earliest film of Dylan, taken in 1962 by John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers on his New York rooftop. The film will unearth performances from the '63 and '64 Newport Folk Festivals, and outtakes from D.A. Pennebaker's "Don't Look Back" and "Eat the Document," shot respectively on Dylan's '65 and '66 tours of England. Even some Dylan home movies will be aired.

The most unexpected clip unspooled for the writers shows Dylan -- on stage in Manchester, England, on May 17, 1966, during his confrontational first electric tour -- reacting as outraged folkie Keith Butler yells "Judas!" from the audience. It's a legendary moment in rock history, and now we can see it.

In conjunction with the PBS airing, Columbia Legacy will issue a two-CD set of unreleased Dylan music. Paramount Home Video will release a DVD, with additional footage, in late summer or early fall.

It remains to be seen if Scorsese -- who filmed a balky Dylan for his 1978 documentary on the Band, "The Last Waltz" -- can capture the essence of this guarded, endlessly morphing musician. As the director noted, "He's constantly trying not to be pinned down ... Tomorrow, he may be something else."

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From The Houston Chronicle 18 January 2005:

Perhaps the most anticipated American Masters will air in July. For nearly 20 years, series producer Susan Lacy has been pursuing Bob Dylan to make himself available for the American Masters touch. He finally said yes. Dylan devotee Martin Scorsese will direct a two-parter, focused on the singer's seminal years, 1961-1966. The series will feature never-before-seen clips of Dylan — bits of which were shown here — and will make use of more than 10 hours of audio interviews made by Dylan with his manager Jeff Rosen.

"I've had no contact with Dylan," Scorsese said. "Whatever questions I usually ask, I ask through Jeff. We have been working on this alone for two years now. I'm looking out for the understanding of how mercurially an artist like this develops. It's better I just deal with the material. I feel the freedom that way. I want to bring something to it without being influenced in any other way."

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From bbc.com piece on Chronicles release:
In May next year the BBC will air an Arena documentary in which the singer talks to movie director Martin Scorsese in his first filmed interview for nearly 20 years.

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Martin Scorsese has managed to persuade the notoriously taciturn Bob Dylan to let him film a documentary about the singer's early career. Dylan, who hasn't given a filmed interview in over 20 years, agreed to let Scorsese film him for the BBC's Arena arts programme. The two last worked together on Scorsese's 1978 film The Last Waltz – an account of the band's last concert.
'I had been a great fan for many years when I had the privilege to film Bob Dylan for The Last Waltz,' said Scorsese. 'I've admired and enjoyed his many musical transformations. For me, there is no other musical artist who weaves his influences so densely to create something so personal and unique. This project gives me a chance to explore one of the most exciting artists and icons of the past 50 years.' .
The documentary's financier Nigel Sinclair is, understandably, in seventh heaven at the prospect of two cultural icons teaming up. 'Imagine the chance to have Bob looking back at those years, with an exhaustive catalog of concert and other footage that has never been seen,' he tells Variety, 'and Martin Scorsese to interpret it and make it his authored story.