Today is Bob Dylan day at the Woodstock Film Festival. The four-day fest is closing tonight with a screening of the Todd Haynes biopic I’m Not There, in which six different actors, including Christian Bale, Richard Gere, and Cate Blanchett, portray various incarnations of His Bobness over the years. The movie had its official premiere at the New York Film Festival ten days ago, but this is undoubtedly its sentimental premiere. There’s a strong connection between Dylan and Woodstock: Dylan first came here in the early 1960s, seeking an escape from the fishbowl of his mega-celebrity. From 1966 to 1970, he lived here and enjoyed a degree of peace – though, as he writes in his 2004 Chronicles: Volume One, rabid fans tracked him down and invaded his property even here.
These days, Woodstock is still a town with a strong counterculture identity (need I say more than “drumming circle on the Village Green every Sunday”?) There’s clearly a lot of excitement about this movie, and despite what I thought of as the all-encompassing power of my press pass, I’ve been unable to score a ticket to I’m Not There (so in fact, I can literally say “I wasn’t there.”) By way of consolation, I head over to the Bob Dylan lookalike contest at the Lotus Gallery on Rock City Road, which is also exhibiting images of Dylan’s Woodstock years by local photographer Elliott Landy.
Dylan was famously suspicious of photographers, but he made an exception for Landy (it helped that their last names were anagrams of each other). Starting in 1968, Landy took a series of charming, candid images [1] of Dylan, some of which ended up on the star’s album covers. My favorites are the ones that show Dylan goofing around as he plays with his children – bouncing on a trampoline, peeking out from behind bushes. Landy himself turns out to be a warm, soft-spoken and modest man. “I wasn’t sure whether to put descriptions with the images,” he tells me, “but then my wife told me I had to.” His wife made a good choice, I say.
Just then, we’re interrupted by the judging of the lookalike contest. I thought I’d be swimming in a sea of Dylans here, but in fact, only three lookalikes have shown up – and one of them confesses that he “just dressed like this by coincidence.” The winner, Zach Gluser, is an Los Angeles filmmaker whose short film Who You Know, is playing at the festival. “Someone told me the other day I looked like Geoffrey Rush,” he says. “I’ll take Dylan over Geoffrey Rush any day.”
The next thing on my slate is a panel discussion with the intriguingly vague title “Indie Filmmakers Talk.” It turns out to be a bit of a bust. Moderator Peter Bowen begins by suggesting that “independent film” is a misnomer, since indie filmmakers are so dependent on friends, family, and community. This leads to panel members discoursing at eye-popping length about their individual histories, mentors, and challenges. The most interesting panelist is Paul Rachman, who co-founded the Slamdance Film Festival in 1995 when his short film Drive Baby Drive didn’t get in to Sundance. For the last 12 years, Slamdance has shadowed Sundance, occasionally scooping its more glamorous sister. (In 2005, it premiered Mad Hot Ballroom, which immediately sold to Paramount Pictures for the largest amount ever for a feature-length documentary.) “It was like group therapy,” Rachman says of the festival’s early days. “We could lean on each other. We had positive energy and strength in numbers.”
The rest of the panel is less than scintillating, but it does provide a handy lens through which to view my final screening of the featival, Mary Stuart Masterson’s directorial debut The Cake Eaters. The movie was filmed in the Hudson Valley, with significant help from the Hudson Valley Film Commission. Closely allied with the Woodstock Film festival, HVFC has been instrumental in bringing many film productions to the area. For The Cake Eaters, HVFC helped find local crew members, extras and locations, providing the kind of community that Paul Rachman extolled in the Indie Filmmakers panel.
The Cake Eaters is a bittersweet story about the sparks set off in a family after the oldest son Guy, a failed rock star, returns home. As you’d expect from someone who’s logged plenty of time on indie films, Masterson understands her actors and gets wonderful performances from them – notably from Kristen Stewart, who plays a lovely, neurally-damaged teenager, without using the character as an excuse for a "star turn." Jayce Bartok, who plays the role of Guy, also contributed the poignant script.
There’s only one problem, though. I hate to be literal, but unless I missed something, there wasn’t a single cake in the movie, eaten or otherwise. The filmmaker wasn’t on hand to answer questions, and as the screening emptied out I heard several people ask, “Why that title?” The best theory I can come up with is that it references the old saying, “You can’t have your cake and eat it too." If so, the reference doesn’t resonate deeply enough in the movie. It’s a small quibble, yet not a negligible one. As Mr. Tambourine Man knew very well, titles do matter.