‘I Was A Zombie For The FBI’: The completely unknown movie Bob Dylan wishes he had starred in
He’s shy, retiring and entirely enigmatic, but despite these aloof characteristics, there is also no doubt at all that Bob Dylan fancies himself as a bit of a thespian. How could he not? He’s been playing Bob Dylan since 1962, as he put it himself, “Whoever that is”.
Even when this latest biopic came around, A Complete Unknown, he comically acted out the script in its entirety in his kitchen. Imagine that? Imagine running through a printed facsimile of a chapter of your own life, scene-for-scene, at 83 years old on an idle Tuesday alone in your kitchen. It’s the behaviour of a joyous oddball—one with a lifelong penchant for paying pretend.
It’s an outlook that gave us the greatest artist of the 20th century—a necessary trait that turned Robert Zimmerman, the boy, into Bob Dylan, the larger-than-life hero. But he wasn’t satisfied with the myth-making and character play he used to embolden his magnificent songs; he wanted to dabble with work on the silver screen.
From pet projects like Renaldo and Clara to starring as Alias, the soft-spoken drifter with a dusty hat, in the Sam Peckinpah film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Dylan tried his hand at cinema in numerous different ways. But there is one mysterious and long-forgotten project he regrets not being part of: I Was A Zombie For The FBI.
When asked by Scott Cohen about the movies he wished he had been part of, he wasted no time in stating this strange cult oddity as his number one. The little-known feature from 1982 is a classic pulp romp. It follows the tale of a pair of brothers with a criminal past who survive a plane crash but, in the process, uncover an alien plot to conquer the Earth by turning humans into zombies.
The crooked brothers sound find themselves involved with the FBI and angling towards a redemption story when the authorities ask them to go undercover, infiltrate the aliens as zombie prototypes, and save Earth from its staggering, flesh-eating fate. As truly astounding as that plot sounds, the picture was barely seen by anyone bar Bob Dylan—a fact that surely would’ve melted the minds of the small time filmmakers behind it.
Helmed by Marius Penczner, who went on to direct nine music videos for the likes of Blackhawk and DeGarmo and Key, and seemingly nothing else, and starring nobody you’ve ever heard of, it unclear how Dylan even came to know of the movie’s existence. It truly was a ‘complete unknown’ in the more traditional sense of the spin that Dylan put on the phrase.
However, it did pop up quite a bit on the TV series Night Flight, a four-hour US magazine-style show that capitalised on the 1981 Writers Guild of America strike to showcase strange indie shorts and avant-garde features while mainstream successes like Saturday Night Live were out-of-action. It’s this detail that offers more insight into Dylan than his desire to have been part of it.
Picture, if you will, the artist who spearheaded the counterculture movement, hailed as a hero by fans, commentators, and pretty much every peer, simply perched in front of the TV well past midnight, watching a movie that few stoners cooked up on a shoe-string budget, broadcast on cable television, and uttering with his voice of sand and glue, ‘Woah, far out, man’.
40 years later, it sits on IMDb, and only 200 people who have seen it have ever bothered to rate it. And I’m one of them, giving it a slightly above average score of six – not enough to shift it from its 4.5 lodgings – with the only thing to report being that ‘it is as you’d expect it’, not a patch on similar movies like The Brother From Another Planet, that follows the story of a crash-landed alien hiding out from interplanetary bounty hunters in Harlem; a much more apt film for Dylan to have starred in to boot.
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