Bob Dylan Wrote a Screenplay Inspired by a Historical Era He Was ‘Very, Very Obsessed’ With

In the early 2000s, Bob Dylan teamed up with writer Larry Charles to work on the screenplay for the film Masked and Anonymous. This was not the musician’s first movie. Still, this was the first time he worked on a screenplay in this way. Charles said he worked well with Dylan and that the script was the product of their equal collaboration. Charles noted that Dylan had been researching the Civil War at the time, so the historical era influenced the screenplay.

Bob Dylan took inspiration from the Civil War when he wrote a screenplay 

When Charles and Dylan began working on Masked and Anonymous, Dylan pulled out a box of possible character names. He’d written them on scraps of paper with assorted words and phrases. In a similar manner to which Dylan writes songs, they began putting the scraps together to write a screenplay. 

They also used Dylan’s fascination with the Civil War to inform the film’s style and themes.

“In terms of specific politics, Bob was interested at that time in the Civil War,” Charles told Uproxx in 2023. “He was very, very obsessed with the Civil War. And a lot of the lines, which also wound up in Time Out Of Mind and in Love & Theft especially, are very Civil War influenced. So we were juxtaposing these Civil War ideas, which is gallantry and a regal quality to a lot of the language, onto this dystopian, postmodern America and seeing what would happen.”

He said much of this was experimentation, but both Dylan and Charles were happy with the finished product. 

“A lot of it was, ‘Let’s try it and see what happens,'” Charles said. “That beautiful experimentation is really the inspiration for the movie and it’s what to a large degree propels it.”

The musician wrote a song about the Civil War

Dylan’s interest in the Civil War influenced a song he released in the same year as Masked and Anonymous. In 2003, Dylan released “‘Cross the Green Mountain” on his album Gods and Generals. 

“A letter to mother came today/ Gunshot wound to the breast is what it did say/ But he’ll be better soon he’s in a hospital bed/ But he’ll never be better, he’s already dead,” Dylan sings.

Dylan reportedly used a line from Confederate poet Henry Timrod in the song.

Bob Dylan personally annotated the screenplay of an upcoming biopic

While Dylan has not done much film work since Masked and Anonymous, he has some involvement in the screenplay for the upcoming film A Complete Unknown. In the film, Timothée Chalamet will play Dylan on his journey from Minnesota to New York up until his 1965 performance at the Newport Folk Festival.

Dylan met with filmmaker James Mangold and personally annotated the script.

“I have a script that’s personally annotated by him and treasured by me,” Mangold told Rolling Stone. “He loves movies. The first time I sat down with Bob, one of the first things he said to me was, ‘I love Cop Land.'”

A Complete Unknown will begin filming in Aug. 2023.