10 Things I Learned: Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese

Production Notes—

Feb 8, 2021

1.

Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019)—the director’s second film about Dylan, after 2005’s No Direction Home—was nearly a decade in the making. Work on Rolling Thunder continued while Scorsese shot Silence (2016) and The Irishman (2019).

2.

One of the reasons the film took so long to complete is that the original negative for the featured archival footage, shot in 1975, is lost. All of that footage had to be painstakingly restored from a 16 mm work print. (One step removed from original negatives, work prints are usually well-handled and cut and written on by the editor.)

3.

Rolling Thunder Revue captures, in the fall of 1975, the first of two legs of Dylan’s tour of the same title, on which he was joined by a number of other performers, including Allen Ginsberg and Joni Mitchell. A second leg commenced in April 1976 with some additional members coming aboard, such as singer-songwriter Kinky Friedman. Whereas the first leg covered the northeastern part of the U.S.—including the Community War Memorial in Rochester, New York, and the Patrick Gym in Burlington, Vermont—the second leg traveled a similar circuit through the South and Midwest. A TV special and live record, both titled Hard Rain (1976), were recorded at the Fort Collins, Colorado, concert on May 23, 1976.

4.

With the exception of “Hurricane,” which had been rush-released as a single in the summer of 1975, the majority of songs performed in the film—including “Isis,” “One More Cup of Coffee,” “Oh, Sister,” “Romance in Durango”—were new and unknown to audiences at the time. It wasn’t until the January 1976 release of Dylan’s Desire LP that these songs were featured on a record.

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Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese

5.

Appearing several times in the film, though uncredited, is Peggy, Bob Dylan’s pet beagle. Reports from the road suggest Peggy was not fully housebroken.

6.

Dylan cowrote several of the songs in Rolling Thunder Revue and on Desire with lyricist and theater director Jacques Levy. Levy—who had directed the experimental musical Oh! Calcutta!, which debuted off-Broadway in 1969 and went on to become a huge hit—was introduced to Dylan by the Byrds founder Roger McGuinn, with whom Levy had collaborated on an unproduced musical. Levy also rehearsed and choreographed elements of the Rolling Thunder Revue with the band to help heighten the concert’s dramatic effect on audiences.

7.

The 1975 footage was shot by cinematographer David Myers, who worked on Woodstock (1970) and The Last Waltz (1978), and Howard Alk, who edited Murray Lerner’s Festival (1967). A close collaborator of D. A. Pennebaker’s who worked as assistant director on Dont Look Back (1967), Alk coedited, with Dylan, the Dylan-directed Eat the Document (1972) and Renaldo and Clara (1978), in addition to directing his own films, including the acclaimed documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971).

8.

Martin von Haselberg—who plays Stefan van Dorp, the fictional filmmaker within the film—is the husband of Bette Midler, who can be seen in the film with Dylan and company at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village. In the fall of 1975, Midler and Dylan recorded a duet of Dylan’s “Buckets of Rain” that appeared on Midler’s third album, Songs for the New Depression (1976).

9.

Actor Michael Murphy plays another fictional presence amid Rolling Thunder Revue’s nonfictional footage, reprising his role as politician Jack Tanner from Robert Altman’s Tanner ’88 (1988), a documentary-style satire about the Michigan congressman’s bid to secure the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.

10.

Scorsese inserted himself into Rolling Thunder Revue for a cameo via voice-over. Kicking off the Rubin “Hurricane” Carter sequence, the director can be heard reciting the opening lines of Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again.”

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Alexandra Proulx is a translator and associate producer at the Criterion Collection.

10 Things I Learned: Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese

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