Bob Dylan Wanted to Make a Dance Movie Starring Jeff Bridges and John Goodman
In 2003, Bob Dylan starred in the movie Masked and Anonymous. He co-wrote the feature film with writer Larry Charles and had the opportunity to act alongside a number of Hollywood stars, including Jeff Bridges and John Goodman. Charles said he enjoyed working with Dylan, but he had to shut down some of the musician’s most out-there ideas. One of these was to make everything in the film a dance number.
Bob Dylan wanted to add dancing to a movie he wrote and starred in
Dylan and Charles met when the musician wanted to produce a slapstick TV series. While the project never came to fruition, they started working together on the screenplay for Masked and Anonymous. After completing the script, Charles stepped behind the camera as director, while Dylan became one of the lead actors. Starring alongside him were Bridges, Goodman, Val Kilmer, Jessica Lange, Penelope Cruz, Luke Wilson, and Angela Bassett, among others.
While Dylan had acted on screen before, he was not as experienced as his co-stars. Charles explained that the musician still had a number of ideas of what his performance should look like.
“He had a lot of very interesting ideas about how he wanted to do his performance,” Charles told Uproxx in 2023. “He tried a number of accents on me. I was like, ‘What is this? I don’t think this is right.’”
One of Dylan’s suggestions was to make the film one extended dance number.
“One time he wanted the whole movie to be in dance,” Charles said. “Everything was going to be a dance. He had called Toni Basil, and I was like, ‘We don’t have the time to choreograph the entire movie like that.’”
Bob Dylan often got distracted by the talent of the other actors in the movie
Dylan’s suggestion was perplexing, perhaps more so given that he struggled to remember his lines and blocking. A choreographed dance would have almost certainly derailed the entire project.
“Bob would be so into what was going on in the scenes,” Charles said. “There’s a scene where John Goodman and Jessica Lange are going back and forth and he’s sitting there and he’s got dialogue. But he would get so into their acting that he would forget that he was in the scene. And so he would forget his lines, he’d forget his cues. Also, the idea of blocking, going from point A to point B in the scene, these things were not really natural to him.”
Charles said Bridges was extremely helpful in moments like these. Ultimately, though, they had to allow Dylan to watch a run-through with a stand-in.
“But ultimately what we did was I would have Bob’s stand-in walk through the scenes, and basically do the scene with Jeff Bridges or John Goodman or Luke Wilson or Penelope Cruz, whoever it was, and Bob would stand there and he would watch the stand-in do the scene,” Charles explained. “He would copy the stand-in, and that’s basically how the performance was created.”
The musician wasn’t his typical reclusive self on set
While Dylan has a reputation for being relatively reclusive, Charles said he was gregarious on set. Charles knew that many of the other actors were excited to meet Dylan, so he asked that his co-writer sit in a visible position between takes. That way, actors could approach him and speak with him.
“And he was like, ‘Okay.’ And he did it,” Charles said. “So he was very personable. He happens to have a great sense of humor. It’s very dry, but he was very personable to people and he had a pretty good time, actually.”
