OSCARS WATCH 2025 – A Complete Unknown: A Conversation With Jonathan Taplin
/This post is part of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 97th Academy Awards.
The following is an edited and corrected transcript of a recording made recently for the production of the How Do You Like It So Far? Podcast, hosted by Henry Jenkins and Colin Maclay. Our guest is Jonathan Taplin, an American writer, film producer and scholar. Taplin is the Director Emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and Chairman of the Board of the Americana Music Foundation. Taplin's early production work included producing concerts for Bob Dylan and The Band. In 1973, he produced Martin Scorsese's first major feature film, Mean Streets, which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Between 1974 and 1996, Taplin produced 26 hours of television documentaries (including The Prize and Cadillac Desert for the Public Broadcasting Service) and 12 feature films including The Last Waltz, Until the End of the World, Under Fire and To Die For. His films were nominated for Academy Awards and Golden Globe Awards and chosen for the Cannes Film Festival six times. Taplin's memoir, The Magic Years: Scenes from a Rock and Roll Life was published in May 2021. The End of Reality: How 4 Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars and Crypto was released in September 2023.
In this excerpt from our upcoming podcast episode, we discussed A Complete Unknown (2024), what it was like to be at the Newport festival (which is the climax of the film), and how Taplin sees the current state of American popular culture. We will post here when the episode is released.
Henry Jenkins: Watching A Complete Unknown, I kept expecting to see your face pop up on the edge of the stage because you were there. You were helping to manage the Bob Dylan tour, so can you tell us about it, your response to the film, and what the actual event was like from your point of view.
Jon Taplin: So, I liked A Complete Unknown. I thought Timothée Chalamet kind of channeled Bob's nervous energy really well. The way it was designed was good, too. The costumes, the look of the film, I thought was really quite good. Now, on the other hand, they took a lot of liberties with the reality. Where they really took liberties was the capstone sequence of the movie, which is the Newport Folk Festival of 1965; it was a kind of rite of Spring moment culturally, right? In the sense that everyone wants to make it as a break point between folk and topical music [on the one hand] and rock and roll and folk rock [on the other]. But it wasn't as planned as the film makes out at all. My belief is that Bob had no idea when he arrived in Newport on Friday that he was going to play rock and roll on the Sunday.
newport folk festival in A complete unknown
There had certainly been no planning from the management point of view for that. In fact, I was pulled into working on Sunday to help set up amplifiers and stuff. Because he had only one road manager, which was Bob Neuwirth, who didn't ever lift anything except a guitar case.
What happened was that on Saturday afternoon they had these workshops and there was this guy named Alan Lomax, who we all know about, who was the great curator of blues music. And he was conducting a country blues workshop with Son House, Skip James, and Mississippi John Hurt. Three 70-year-olds. Black blues men who played acoustic guitar.
As this was wrapping up on a stage – a hundred yards away – the Paul Butterfield blues band was warming up and tuning up. Mike Bloomfield just ripped off a very fast guitar run and Lomax just kind of freaked out. He got up and walked the hundred yards over to the other stage and said ‘you have to unplug this thing! You're interrupting this thing and you're destroying this and this is Newport Folk Festival!’ Albert Grossman, who was my boss, just pushed him away. I said, ‘you stop it’ and these two big heavy guys started wrestling. Eventually they fell to the ground. It was ridiculous. Then Lomax slunk back to his thing Butterfield played.
Albert, myself, and Jeff Moldar – who was in the Jim Kreskin Jug Band (the band I was working for) – went back to the artist tent. Albert starts regaling the artists – one of whom was Bob Dylan – about what happened: ‘Lomax is trying to unplug Butterfield’ and everything! And my surmise is Bob just thought, ‘well, screw it. If they don't want rock and roll, I'll really give them rock and roll.’
Later that afternoon, Albert said ‘we got to organize this thing, and we'll get Butterfield's band to back Dylan, but we need an organ player because “Like a Rolling Stone”, which was his hit and was on the radio at that time – the organ was the key thing.
So they flew Al Cooper in a private plane in from New York to play organ, because Cooper had played on the record. They didn't rehearse, they didn't do anything. In the movie that Marty Scorsese did about this moment [No Direction Home], you see the sound check on Sunday afternoon, and it’s completely disorganized. They don't play much. Peter Yarrow from Peter, Paul, and Mary is trying to mix the sound, and he knows nothing about electric music. So when they went on that night, there definitely were boos but it was partially because the sound was so bad. It was so badly mixed. All you could hear was Bloomfield's guitar and he kept turning it up louder and louder.
And you could hardly hear Bob's voice. The boos were as much for this cacophonous thing. Peter Yarrow had no idea what he was doing. And partly because, yes, the old folk types didn't like rock and roll. But, nobody was throwing stuff at the stage. It was none of that. They had to dramatize this thing in a way that didn't really happen.
But, at the end of the day, there was a split, you know, and there was a group of people that didn't like rock and roll. And later, when Bob went out with the band on the road for a year and a half, they still got booed. And that was magnificent, the way the music was mixed, and the quality of the rock and roll was incredible.
So, there was a kind of cultural split between the old and the new. We keep coming back to the interregnum, “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” There will always be people who resist the new and that's what happened as far as I'm concerned.
Henry Jenkins: So that's a good case where culture change is often read through a political lens. Do you think it was political for the people involved or was it a sound, you know, a sound-based question?
Jon Taplin: Part of the problem was that there was a large group of people who believed that folk music was deeply political – protest songs were explicitly political. “The Times They Are A-Changin’ and “Blowing in the Wind” – Bob had stopped doing that. And so, on one level, ‘the folkies’ – who still wanted him to be a protest singer – resented that and thought he had sold out to rock and roll, which, quite frankly, he had not. My sense is that Bob was scared by politics. In 1963 and in your neck of the woods, Henry, he went down to Mississippi.
Henry Jenkins: As a Georgian, we don't see Mississippi as our neck of the woods!
[Laughter]
Jon Taplin: He went down there to be involved in a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizing drive in Greenwood, Mississippi. And literally, three weeks earlier, Medgar Evers was killed forty miles from where he was playing. So, that was a kind of brave thing to do, right? He sang a song about Medgar Evers. When Kennedy got killed, Bob much later wrote a song about that. I think it shocked Bob. And he also thought, ‘I don't want to be a spokesperson’. So he stopped doing that kind of stuff. He didn't ever play “Times They Are A-Changin” on stage, even though he did some acoustic music as a compromise in the future when the band and Bob went on the road. But if we think about it being political, it was only political in the sense that ‘I'm going to do what I want to do’, and I'm not going to do what the establishment wants me to do.
Henry Jenkins: It's easy for us old-timers to forget how little exposure younger folks have had to that history. My 40-year-old son certainly knew who Dylan was, but mostly he knew later Dylan stuff. But Joan Baez and Pete Seeger were new names to him, and we got to have a great sit down and play through some of their music vids on YouTube when we got home. Woody Guthrie was known as having written a ‘patriotic song’ called “This Land is Your Land” that he'd been taught in school music class, but he knew Arlo Guthrie's “Alice's Restaurant” far better than he knew anything else out of Guthrie. I would have loved to see Phil Oakes somewhere in that story because he's my favorite of the folkies. But, I think it actually brings this music back full circle at a point that it may be especially relevant to the culture that we pay attention to.
Jon Taplin: I totally agree. There's a genre of music called Americana. I was on the board of the Americana Music Foundation, and it's really folk, bluegrass, shading into country – but more Willie Nelson country, not Outlaw country.
Henry Jenkins: Yeah, yeah, the good stuff, yeah.
Jon Taplin: Americana is rising. Quite honestly, I'm not thrilled with what's on the radio these days. I think music is in a kind of dead space right now. But what does intrigue me is this Americana music. It's acoustic, totally goes away from electric. There's no drum machines. There's no synthesizers, there's nothing. It's always recorded in a studio live. It's never, ‘we'll send it over to this artist to do their vocal track and then assemble it piecemeal – we'll assemble it all later and we'll use autotune to make sure that this person who doesn't sing very well sounds like they sing well.
l’ll say a little bit that I'm writing a new book, which is called The Interregnum and the American Renaissance. Whenever you have a period where things get funky politically – whether it's McCarthyism, or it's Coolidge and the KKK, or whether it's the robber barons in the 1890s, or it's Andrew Jackson – it's always the artists that step forward and begin rethinking what it means to be an American and what Jefferson's promise was all about: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, where ‘all men are created equal’. I'm hoping that maybe Americana is part of that beginning of a renaissance, because quite frankly what happens in American culture – and I know Henry, you and I have some differences on this – is fairly nihilistic since 9/11.
If you just look at TV – The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Succession, White Lotus – there’s a lot of anti-heroes. It's always about horrible people struggling for power with other horrible people. And it has a nihilistic feeling to it. And a lot of hip hop has the same thing. Gangster rap is pretty dark. And a lot of video games, you know, are the same thing.
Henry Jenkins: I don't think we disagree on that last point nearly as much as you might imagine. I had come through the pandemic predicting that the next wave of pop culture was going to be more like Ted Lasso. I was little prepared for the reality that the global success of the post-pandemic moment was Squid Games, right? My vision was of an uplifting comfort food kind of media versus the genre of lethal games that seems to be widespread now. And now …
Jon Taplin: …we're in Squid Games 2.
Henry Jenkins: Yes and – more to the point – Beast Games, which was the live real-world version of Squid Games, where we saw people almost slitting each other's throats to try to win the multimillion-dollar prize that Mr. Beast was holding out there – wallowing on huge stacks of money. As someone who generally is in touch with pop culture, I watched every moment of it like a train wreck. But it's horrifying to see what it shows us about the state of America today.
Colin Maclay: I haven't watched the any Squid Games or Beast Games or any of that stuff. But, just recently, we had the strike and we've had a big slowdown – all the COVID delays, all these delays in producing new media content after so many really rich years where maybe there was more of a balance. You had Ted Lasso and Schitt's Creek and some other things that were more positive.
And so now, recently in my own little bit of escapism at night, I’m just going to watch a little TV before I go to sleep. And I kind of scroll through what's on offer and there's very little – it's basically all in the way that you describe. And so I guess the question I have is how much is that reflecting where we are culturally in this country? How much is it driving things versus reflecting things? Is it a response? Is it provocation? Is it part of that cycle that we're seeing play out in political space? Look no further than the fires. The mutual aid in LA and all the civic participation and support for one another has been tremendous. So we are seeing positive things happen in the world at a very local level. But the media properties are almost exclusively scary.
Jon Taplin: I made the argument that it does have an effect. Someone once said, “culture eats politics for breakfast every morning.” Let's just say for 15 years you had this dark vision of what power is and how the struggle for power is: it's not weird to think that eventually someone says, ‘Tony Soprano should be president’ and that's of course what Donald Trump is. He's a gangster – he acts like a gangster, and he treats people like a gangster as the Europeans are finding out. His fans think that's great.
You know, there's a famous theory somebody came up with about professional wrestling called kayfabe. Kayfabe is the idea that the participants, the audience, and the commentators are all in on the con, but they never acknowledge that it's a con. And that's a lot of what's happening in the media space. I don't know how we get out of it but I think we do get out of it. I think it's through individual artists making things. As Henry says, just even people seeing something that's a little more authentic like the Dylan movie is helpful, I think. Maybe that's the beginning of something.
Colin Maclay: This conflicts a little bit with what you're saying, but when I think of The Wire, which is kind of in that same period – anti-hero in some sense – it was also like diving into the complexities of urban environments in a way that was incredibly rich. For me it was a reset of TV. Compared to The Sopranos, which you see as the template for much of contemporary television, The Wire is another model with all the fraughtness, but it also has so much more humanity.
Jon Taplin: Yeah. David Simon wrote Homicide. It's amazing. We've been watching it wall to wall just because the writing is so rich and so original. There's no political correctness about it at all.
Henry Jenkins: Murder One comes out of the same period and fits that – or slightly earlier is Hill Street Blues. All would be representations of urban environments that have deep empathy, even for the criminal class, but certainly for the citizens living there. What we often lack in our media today is that empathy. Because with that empathy you can deal with brutal worlds. If we have characters we care about and who care about each other, there's something there to be salvaged.
One thing that gives me a little hope right now – I mean, it's going to sound odd to say because it's network procedurals – but I think there’s been a revival of interest in Columbo as a model for series television, which is resulting in Elsbeth, Matlock, High Potential, Pokerface and Knives Out. The Columbo character has the gruffness of someone who comes from the streets, who asks questions of the rich and powerful and exposes corruption and so forth. Such stories are frequently a critique of the ‘might makes right’ and ‘wealth makes smart’ ethos that we're dealing with right now. We are used to thinking of the procedural as probably one of the most conservative forms of TV. The quality TV is the serialized drama and these are self-contained episodes, but these series are asking questions about the rich and powerful right now. Matlock, for example, keeps calling attention to Big Pharma’s role in the Opioid epidemic and big law firms’ role in covering it up.
Stay tuned for the full podcast episode of How Do You Like It So Far? hosted by Henry Jenkins and Colin Maclay.
Biographies
Jonathan Taplin is director emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and author of Move Fast and Break Things, which was nominated for the Financial Times / McKinsey Business Book of the Year. Taplin has produced music and film for Bob Dylan, The Band, George Harrison, Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Gus Van Sant, and many others. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, chairman of the board of the Americana Music Foundation and sits on the board of the Authors Guild Council. His cultural commentary has appeared on Medium and in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time magazine, the Huffington Post, the Guardian, Washington Monthly, and the Wall Street Journal.
Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era. He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.
Colin M. Maclay currently serves as Research Professor and Executive Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC. Situated at the intersections of disciplines, sectors and communities, the Lab takes a think + do approach to exploring relationships among media, technology, culture and society. Colin has long been motivated to understand how radical changes in information and communications affect otherwise immutable organizations and institutions, including their complex interaction with people. Ultimately, his works asks what areas of understanding and associated actions can help emerging technologies and practices to work for – not against – people and society broadly.
