TL;DR:
- Bob Dylan and D.A. Pennebaker were collaborators on several different projects.
- Bob Dylan became unpleasant to work with after an accident, according to D.A. Pennebaker.
- The film did not air on ABC as they had planned.
After working with filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker on the film Don’t Look Back, Bob Dylan decided to make another movie. Though he would still be the subject, Dylan wanted to direct the film with Pennebaker as the cinematographer. Nearly immediately, Pennebaker faced problems with the shoot. He said he essentially ran into a wall with Dylan after he got into a motorcycle accident. Pennebaker said Dylan became very difficult to work with.
Bob Dylan and D.A. Pennebaker were collaborators on the film ‘Eat the Document’
In early 1966, Dylan watched Don’t Look Back, a documentary film that followed him on his 1965 tour of England. Immediately after viewing, he asked Pennebaker to make changes to the film. After another viewing, though, he decided that Don’t Look Back was fine as it was. Instead, he wanted to make a new film where he served as the director. His goal was to make a movie that was “more real.”
The resulting project was Eat the Document, a film that followed Dylan on his 1966 tour of Europe. Pennebaker said that Dylan was taking a number of drugs during the filming and that all he could focus on was getting onstage and performing.
“One night when I stayed up all night with him,” Pennebaker said, per the book The Ballad of Bob Dylan: A Portrait by Daniel Mark Epstein, “he was trying to instruct Robbie [Robertson, the lead guitarist], and Robbie wasn’t really accepting it but he was going along with it. Eventually that led to their severance or something. But at the time Dylan was only thinking about the performances and he really loved being on that stage, jumping around with that band.”
Bob Dylan became extremely unpleasant to work with, according to his collaborator
In 1966, in the midst of shooting the documentary, Dylan got into a motorcycle accident. Accounts of the accident vary — by some, he dealt with severe injuries, and by others, he used it as an excuse to step back from the public eye. Pennebaker visited Dylan several days after the accident to discuss plans for the film.
Pennebaker said that physically, Dylan seemed fine, but his personality seemed changed.
“I never quite knew what happened,” he said. “I found him very unpleasant and also not so interesting. It was like he was caught up in some struggle that he wasn’t doing very well in.”
Pennebaker wondered if this came from a lack of patience on Dylan’s part.
“These guys, same with Norman Mailer, they don’t have the patience to stick with anything,” he said. “They want it to happen like a stage performance and be done, and that’s it. The thing that he was pissed about was that he thought Robbie had taken out his guitar solos. And put Robbie’s in instead. And this was unfair. He was having some problem with Robbie. And this was reflected in everything he said to anybody. And I thought: that’s not very interesting.”
The film was not a success
Initially, Dylan intended for the film to air on ABC, but the network turned it down, saying that it would be incomprehensible to audiences. Even John Lennon, who was in the film, said he hadn’t seen it.
“I’ve never seen it but I’d love to see it,” he told Rolling Stone in 1971. “I was always so paranoid and Bob said ‘I want you to be in this film.’ He just wanted to me to be in the film. I thought why? What? He’s going to put me down; I went all through this terrible thing.”
While some audiences have seen the film, Pennebaker’s original movie got a much wider, and warmer, reception.
