Unlike some legendary A-list filmmakers, Martin Scorsese has always been fairly prolific. He fairly reliably knocks out a movie every two or three years, and has never let more than four pass between major films (the gap between “The Departed” and “Shutter Islalnd” was his longest. Somehow, in that time, Scorsese’s also been a fairly prolific documentary filmmaker as well — this century alone has seen his films on Bob Dylan, George Harrison, The Rolling Stones and the New York Review Of Books, among many others.
The last of these, “The 50 Year Argument,” was unveiled in 2014, and as far as we’ve known, he’s not had anything firmly in the works since then (although a planned film about Bill Clinton stalled back in 2015, and one with Kenneth Branagh never emerged). But a tip-off from a helpful reader (thanks Kyle Miskell, we owe you one!) has pointed us in the direction of what Scorsese’s next non-fiction movie looks to be.
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A piece in Rolling Stone yesterday talks about a documentary being in the works on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, a series of theater shows that the music legend played in 1975 and 1976 with people including Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, the late Sam Shepard, Allen Ginsberg, T. Bone Burnett and others. The Rolling Stone piece doesn’t name the director of this documentary, but our tipster pointed us to a piece from the Desert Sun back in February, in which historian Douglas Brinkley talks up his upcoming book on Dylan.
In the piece, Brinkley says “He did a tour for the nation’s bicentennial called the Rolling Thunder Revue, where Bob Dylan toured the country with Joan Baez and Alan Ginsberg, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, playwright Sam Shepard, T Bone Burnett and others. Martin Scorsese is doing a documentary right now on the Rolling Thunder Revue and I’ve been able to get copies of all of the interviews that have been done by the Scorsese team over the decades as a primary source for my book.”
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Now, it’s possible that this doesn’t quite line up, or maybe that Scorsese’s just producing — it’s possible that Brinkley got his wires crossed. But it certainly sounds like the sort of thing that the director’s interested in — he did do another Dylan-related movie, of course: the great “No Direction Home.” And even if he’s had a relatively short gap between “Silence” and his currently-filming “The Irishman,” that’s not often stopped him from working on documentary projects in the meantime too. Could we see the film as soon as next year? Hopefully firm word will be out soon and we can start the anticipation process properly.
