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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.”
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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.
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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. Solana Token Creator
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