A lost manuscript about Hollywood in the sixties reveals Bob Dylan’s take on the Mecca of cinema
Barry Feinstein, the rock ‘n’ 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.

“It was the lost manuscript,” Feinstein recalled, “Everybody forgot about it but me.” 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 Feinstein’s photographs and 23 of Dylan’s prose poems.
The book was created in the 1960s when Feinstein was a 20-something “flunky” 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.

The pictures are sometimes dreary and sometimes tongue-in-cheek, shots of movie props and roadside stands, topless starlets and headless mannequins. After assembling the photographs, Feinstein thought of Dylan, whom he had met before on the East Coast. “I asked him as a joke, ‘Wanna come out and maybe write something about these photographs?’” Feinstein said. “So he came out and wrote some text.” Dylan, then in his 20s, examined the photographs and wrote his own prose poems to accompany them. The poems are by turns sparse, playful, witty and sarcastic. As the 11 Outlined Epitaphs begin: “I end up then/ in the early evenin’/ blindly punchin’ at the blind/ breathin’ heavy/ stutterin’/ an’ blowin’ up/ where t’ go?/ what is it that’s exactly wrong?”

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