Bob Dylan‘s career always felt very cinematic. Once considered an ever evolving chameleon, maybe even more so than the late David Bowie, Bob Dylan’s fifty year career has been vast and eclectic, covering genres that totaled the history of music: country, folk, blues, gospel, rock, jazz, reggae and spirituals have all been given the Dylan treatment through the decades. Taking on many different personalities and identities in the process, he epitomized the importance of sinking into character and telling a story through song. Although he’s kept a "stable" identity in the last two decades, anyone who has followed his career is familiar with his shape-shifting nature.
With a musical catalogue that spans more than six decades, Amazon and Lionsgate have decided to team up for an upcoming TV show that will be inspired by the characters and themes of Bob Dylan’s songs.
"Time Out Of Mind," named after Dylan’s 1997 Grammy award-winning album of the same name, will be written and directed by Josh Wakely, who somehow managed to get the rights to Dylan’s catalogue. The show will be mostly set in the 1960 and 1970s in New York, where Dylan got his start in the Greenwich village folk scene. However, Dylan will not take part creatively in the project. You can consider us automatically intrigued, as the legendary singer-songwriter has an abundance of richly detailed songs with fascinating stories and characters in them. Imagine the potential of having an entire episode devoted to "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol" or "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts."
This isn’t the first time a filmmaker tries to interpret Dylan. You might remember Todd Haynes‘ eccentric, original, but all together Dylan-esque 2007 tribute "I’m Not There," which featured five different actors playing the singer-songwriter through five different phases of his career. One can only hope that Wakely can capture Dylan’s powerful spirit as brilliantly as Haynes did. [Variety]
