Why Bob Dylan Left His Slapstick HBO Sitcom Idea Right After It Was Greenlit

In James Mangold's safe but enjoyable "A Complete Unknown," Bob Dylan, as played by Timothée Chalamet (who just missed out on the Best Actor Oscar) tells his girlfriend Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), "People make up their past. They remember what they want, they forget the rest." The legendary musician is notorious for doing just that, spinning questionable tales about his own life in a tradition he's very much kept alive throughout his career. His 2019 "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story," for example, was ostensibly a documentary but came packed with tall tales and fictionalized accounts of non-events, all presented as if they were incontrovertible fact.

This penchant for elaboration and misdirection, combined with his massive success and prolific output, has helped Dylan attain a kind of mythical status in pop culture. As such, you're never really sure which stories about the man are actually true — and there are many of them. Were we to try to create the Bob Dylan iceberg, it would surely be the largest and deepest of its kind. One of my favorite of the more arcane Dylan tales is the odyssey of his Malibu Christmas lights, which was chronicled by Merrill Markoe in a piece that details how he began by "wedging a small, decidedly uneven, single strand of Christmas lights into the hedge in front of his estate" back in 2008, and continued to do so in various forms throughout the following decades.

Now, we have another piece of Dylan lore to add to the volumes with the revelation that he once planned an entire slapstick sitcom, sold it to HBO, then bailed on the whole thing immediately.

Bob Dylan might be best known as a musician, but he's a true polymath, having ventured into writing, poetry, painting, and even acting throughout his career. On-screen, Dylan is mostly known for being the subject of documentaries (two of which just happen to be among the greatest music documentaries of all time). His dramatic roles, however, are quite sparse. He played the small part of Alias in 1973's "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," before taking on a role that didn't require much in the way of chameleonic talent when he played a reclusive rock star in Richard Marquand's "Hearts of Fire" in 1987. Dylan then played another former rocker in Larry Charles' 2003 effort "Masked and Anonymous," and it's this movie that actually started life as a slapstick TV series.

I say "started life," but this original incarnation of the project never really went anywhere beyond the mind of Dylan himself. It seems the music legend had become enamored with the films of Jerry Lewis and decided he wanted to make a comedy show. Hence, the great Larry Charles was brought in to help make Dylan's vision a reality. The "Seinfeld" writer, who penned some of the show's most controversial episodes, once recalled the entire bizarre episode when he sat down with Pete Holmes for his "You Made It Weird" podcast (via The Guardian).

According to Charles, Dylan contacted him in the early 1990s about working together on developing his idea for the show, in which Dylan was evidently supposed to star. Charles described the musician's never realized lead performance as "almost like a Buster Keaton or something," which, strange as it is, wouldn't have been the most bizarre thing Dylan has ever done.

Recalling the genesis of what would turn out to be the short-lived slapstick Bob Dylan series, Larry Charles explained how he met the rocker in a smoke-filled room in the back of Dylan's own Santa Monica boxing gym. After his assistant offered them coffee and Charles opted for an iced drink, Dylan said he wanted "a hot beverage," with Charles explaining, "So, they bring a hot coffee for him, like a cappuccino, and they bring the ice coffee for me, and they put them together in the middle of the table, and he immediately grabs my ice coffee and starts drinking my ice coffee." When Dylan asked why the writer wasn't drinking his drink, he responded with "You're drinking my drink," which evidently prompted laughter between the two and "broke the ice."

This seemingly convinced Dylan that Charles (who spoke to /Film in 2023 about his project "Dicks: The Musical") was the man to shepherd his comedy series, and the pair worked together to produce a "very elaborate treatment for this slapstick comedy which was filled with surrealism and all kinds of things from his songs." This was partly based on an assortment of paper scraps with phrases written on them, which Dylan had created over several years. "We'd take scraps of paper," Charles recalled, "put them together, try to make them make sense, try to find the story points within it."

The resulting treatment got the duo a pitch meeting with HBO, which Charles recalled attending in pajamas (he claims he was probably "having a nervous breakdown"), while Dylan arrived in "a black cowboy hat, a black floor-length duster, [and] black boots." As if that wasn't a bad enough start, then-president of HBO Chris Albrecht began by showing Dylan his tickets to the original Woodstock, to which Dylan reacted by saying, "I didn't play Woodstock." According to Charles, the musician then proceeded to look out the window of the office for the duration of the meeting.

Amazingly, Albrecht agreed to buy their show only for Dylan to undermine the whole thing almost immediately. "We go out to the elevator," Charles recounted, "Bob's manager Jeff, my manager Gavin, me and Bob — the three of us are elated we actually sold the project and Bob says, 'I don't want to do it anymore. It's too slapsticky.'" That was the end of that. Though the pair would go on to make "Masked and Anonymous," the Jerry Lewis-inspired comedy series never came to be and now just exists as a made up-sounding part of the expansive Dylan apocrypha.