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Journalism of Courage
A lost manuscript about Hollywood in the sixties reveals Bob Dylan8217;s take on the Mecca of cinema
Barry Feinstein, the rock 8216;n8217; roll photographer, was digging through his archives last year when he came across a long-forgotten bundle of pictures of Hollywood in the early 1960s. Tucked next to the photographs was a set of prose poems, written around the same time by an old friend: Bob Dylan.
8220;It was the lost manuscript,8221; Feinstein recalled, 8220;Everybody forgot about it but me.8221; The poems were so lost that Dylan, when told of the discovery, had forgotten that he had written them. But after more than 40 years, the text and photographs will be published in November as Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript. It includes more than 75 of Feinstein8217;s photographs and 23 of Dylan8217;s prose poems.
The book was created in the 1960s when Feinstein was a 20-something 8220;flunky8221; at a movie studio in Hollywood, eager to be part of the industry and having landed a job working for Harry Cohn, the president of Columbia Pictures. He roamed around movie sets, snapping pictures backstage and in dressing rooms, and during off hours he drove around with his camera in tow.
After the photos and text were pulled together into a rough manuscript, Dylan and Feinstein took it to a publisher, Macmillan, where executives were afraid that the pictures would bring a lawsuit from the studio. So Feinstein kept it for more than four decades in his vast collection of photographs, books and other papers. He went on to develop a close collaboration with Dylan. He shot the cover photo for The Times They Are A-Changin8217;, and dozens of photos of Dylan throughout the years.
Christopher Ricks, a professor of the humanities at Boston University and the author of Dylan8217;s Visions of Sin, noted the contrast between the Hollywood book, in its black-and-white starkness, and Dylan8217;s most recent book, the collection of cheerful, brightly coloured paintings. 8220;From the beginning, he8217;s been a mixed medium artist,8221; Ricks said.
8211; JULIE BOSMAN, NYT
