letter to bob dylan (from rouge press 2004 vol 4)

Filmmaker Robert Kramer (1939-1999) once remarked: ‘Everything I’ve ever wanted to say was sung by Bob Dylan.’ Near the end of his life, he began to imagine a collaborative project with the singer-songwriter. A letter was sent, and never answered. When Paul McIsaac looked through the effects in Kramer’s Paris studio apartment shortly after his death, he turned on the CD player: Time Out of Mind filled the room. Recently Kramer’s daughter Keja found this letter on his computer; it is printed with her kind permission and that of his collaborator on the project, Bobby Buechler.

Thoughts

So much of the world has changed since those wonderful days talking to Robert about a Dylan movie. He would say that history was frozen then in some sort of playful moment that day. Even the serious among us could think about playing with fantasy. Today we are at a crossroad moment in history. I’m not sure if I can imagine how any of those Dylan movie thoughts translate to the present. Maybe Dylan still fits.

It was in the spring of 1998 ... Robert was in the southwest and I was in Berkeley. The plan was to meet a few days later in Baker, California. He said, ‘Where do you want to meet?’ I said, ‘at the thermometer ... at noon.’ There was no agenda but to cruise the Mojave Desert in wildflower season. We drove and talked ... walked Zabriskie Point, Furnace Creek and the Red Cathedral. More than I really wanted to walk. We talked about lots of things ... making a movie together and ramblings. It was there, somewhere on one of those long straight roads that the idea of making a movie with Dylan came up. There was not much to say ... how do you reach him and what do you say? How do you avoid an agent, a middleman? It was very much in passing that the thoughts of this project came and went as drove for days ... in the funky Death Valley hotels and again in the glory of the Great Basin. Robert would draft a letter and I would figure out how to get it to Dylan. We passed it back and forth and then sent it through the back doors hoping it would get to Dylan unread by other strangers. The letter is what it is ... written very much the way Robert made movies ... ‘Clear and vague’, open ended with a dream in mind of telling a continuing life story Robert told in many ways ... one of them through film ... written to someone whose work Robert loved. I don’t know if Dylan ever got the letter. It would have been a great movie. In some ways they were very much alike.

Bobby Buechler
Berkeley, California,
September 2004

Hello:

I’m from NYC. The 50’s were bad. I got reborn in the 60’s. I left the states at the end of the 70’s. I’ve been living around, mostly based in Paris, and I make movies.

Throughout this life you’ve been one of the voices in my head. We’ve walked together through a history, for better or worse. I like Time Out of Mind a lot. Maybe you are talking about someone, her, but what I hear (my story) is that love gone wrong, or gone just the way it’s gone, is Am*r*c*, the USA dream, is just us trying to navigate the river. Love sick.

I’d like to make a movie with you. Not a movie about you, not a documentary or a report, but the two of us, make a movie together over a period of time: pieces of this and that, scenes you imagine and I imagine, try to piece something together that is as rich and varied, as clear and vague as the trip itself has been. A movie that works like a dream or a vision, large enough to put anything we want inside it, another kind of river.

I have no idea how to approach you. People say it’s hard. I’m not comfortable with the star thing, and I don’t know anything about it. I’m not going through your agent or writing a proposal or something like that. So all I can propose is the obvious: If you’d like to see some of my movies, I can arrange it. Or if you’d like to meet somewhere to talk, I can be there. Just let me know. I’d do a lot to make this film happen, but I can’t do the hollywood thing. Please understand, there’s no lack of respect or empathy here, it’s just how it is, old dogs/new tricks, there’s no point in pretending.

Robert Kramer
Paris, France

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© Bobby Buechler and Keja Ho Kramer 2004.

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i often wonder what it would of been like to attend college during the 1960s. Anyone from this period seems to look back on it with a love hate realtionship, a period that brought both the dark and light sides out, and sides out that we don't talk about anymore. young adults today get confused in this mess...what really happened? not that there is some sort of golden knowlegde behind this era but there is a mystique that captures the fancy of so many in our generation today. you can simplify this and reduce it until you are content with an answer but i won't accept anything.

i'm particularly interested in the time period in the world before the 1960s. The 1940s and 50s were interesting periods in world history which seem naive and quaint in comparison to the 60s. the generation that raised our parents, when i think about it, seem cold and impersonal. my grandfather never once hugged my mother or told her that he truly loved her. when he was on his death bed he finally laid bare all that had kept him from being a human with emotional expression a conversation that i will never know the exact details of.

a youthful sincerity seems evident in the letter above, even though it was written well after the 60s milieu. i've had many teachers in both high school and college that seem to hold onto these precious moments of the 60s with a youthful sincerity, as if they were going to be taken away by the younger generations. maybe it was their privelege to experience the revolution that wasn't a revolution and leave us to ponder middle class existence with a computer, a weblog and millions of artifacts scattered with little to no unity anymore.