Scratch Crib

".....I took I-80, ahead of (January) storms. I just wanted to get there. It was pretty Republican and flat and then you hit Colorado and everything breaks open. You start to follow the Columbia River Valley and head to Oregon. I took 84 into Portland along the gorge. I felt like Woody Guthrie."
Haynes' sister invited him to write for three months in a spare bedroom of her friend's Victorian house in northwest Portland. "For some reason in this winter it was not pouring rain," he said. "It was clear and crisp. Then the petals started to come. And they seemed to fall for three months solid. Flowers started blooming in this yard by the house. Gorgeous things were happening. All of a sudden I became available to everyone I met."
Haynes was artistically reborn.
Although he had always been a Dylan fan, he began digging deeper into the Land O' Bob. "I started to read the interviews from 1965, 66," he said. "Those were the key as were the genuine bootleg series. It was this voracious hunger that Dylan can endlessley fulfill. It got me in this phase. I read the (1971) Tony Scaduto biography ("Bob Dylan: An Intimate Portrait").
A watermark interview was the March, 1966 conversation Dylan had with Playboy magazine contributor writer Nat Hentoff. Among other things, Dylan told Hentoff he didn't think rock n' roll existed and then he made his point by throwing Lawrence Welk in the same bag as John Lee Hooker. Dylan places style and fashion in a kaliedoscope, which is precisely what Haynes does in "I'm Not There."
The evolution of "I'm Not There" was a seven-year process. Haynes said he was not affected by projects such as the 2003 Dylan-Larry Charles cut n' paste film "Masked and Anonymous" and the 2004 Dylan autobiography "Chronicles (Volume One)."
"I was intrigued by Masked and Anonymous," Haynes said. "Even if the execution was lacking I thought the script was interesting. I thought it was Dylan's thing. I got a copy of the script and I might have even put in a line or two in my film, but I can't remember what it was."
In 2003 I had lunch with Charles, the Coney Island-bred Emmy award winning writer and producer ("Seinfeld," "Mad About You"). He explained Dylan approached him under the guise of Rene Fontaine to collaborate on the film. "Rene has this box of scrap paper," Charles said. "He says to Sergei [Petrov, a.k.a. Charles], 'I don't know what to do with this stuff.' And Sergei starts to collage and juxtapose things; take this and put this with that. I...er, Sergei...was able to make a coherent picture of all these disparate ideas. Sometimes it was just a name. Or sometimes it was just a word. A line of dialogue."
All written by Dylan....er Rene.
Haynes has never met Dylan.
Haynes said, "It was kind of the same thing with 'Chronicles' as 'Masked and Anonymous.' It was an amazing book. The only thing I literally changed in my script after reading the book was adding (wrestler) Gorgeous George (a childhood Dylan role model).
"There was not an element of randomness or forced chaos in my process of putting the film together and I don't feel there is in Dylan's work, even when it had a stream of consciousness quality to it like in the mid-1960s. There was such a concerted crafsman a work if simply at the level of meter and rhyme."

Todd Haynes Dylan Playlist

a hard rains' a-gonna fall
sign language
farwell, angelena
it's all over now baby blue
I'll keep it with mine
When the ship comes in
Blind willie mc tell
Masters of war
Ring them bells
Precious angel
Trouble in mind
I believe in you
Tomorrow is a long time
Tangled up in blue
Visions of Johanna
I want you
She's your lover now
I'm not there
Knockin on heavens door
Sad eyed lady of the lowlands
One more cup of coffee
Yea! heavy and a bottle of bread
Goin to Acapulco
Wheels on fire
Banks of the royal