The absurd movie the Traveling Wilburys always wanted to make
Step aside, The Avengers – The Traveling Wilburys should have been the ones stealing the box office glory for all the supergroups.
No, your eyes have not deceived you. Aside from being one of the greatest and most illustrious rock and roll supergroups to ever grace the scene, The Traveling Wilburys indeed had even grander plans in the pipeline, aside from the casual dominance of the music world and millions of adoring fans in their wake. Of course, with five titans of the scene as iconic as they were, they always had an unending panging hunger to strive for more.
It’s very difficult to know what this would have actually constituted, given that no movie ever came to fruition for the band, at least in the most typical Hollywood sense of the word. An action hero movie? A gooey romantic chick flick? OK, those suggestions may admittedly not have been the likeliest takes to ever reach the big screen, but it still doesn’t get away from the fact that The Traveling Wilburys did have plans to capture their cinematic dreams, bringing their seismic sonics to the whole next level.
The revelation of the shot at the silver screen came in November 1988, when Roy Orbison let slip during an interview with Rolling Stone what grand plans the band had on the bright horizon. “It’s a legendary family,” he said of his bandmates – and even this was probably slightly understating it. Going on to explain how a movie telling the story of their iconic formation was in the works at the time, all Orbison elusively added next was, “The whole story of the Wilburys will unfold,” which certainly leaves a lot to the imagination.
In actual fact, given that each member of the band had a little catchy nickname tied to them, the idea that The Traveling Wilburys could be transformed into superheroes as well as a supergroup perhaps isn’t as far-fetched a notion as you might first think. Orbison was dubbed as ‘Lefty’, while George Harrison got called ‘Nelson’, Bob Dylan named ‘Lucky’, Jeff Lynne with the moniker of ‘Otis’, and Tom Petty with the fetching title of ‘Charlie T Jr’.
In this sense, they could have had the making of an all-fighting conglomerate of heroes – but that idea ultimately only reached the cutting room floor.
The most hardcore and eagle-eyed of Wilburys fans will know that a film, of a certain description, did reach the screen in 2007, with The True History of The Traveling Wilburys depicting the band in a retrospective documentary format, being produced by Harrison’s wife, Olivia. While this did obviously achieve Orbison’s ambition of seeing the band’s entire story unfold, it still leaves some questions unanswered – not least whether their foray into film might have completely swept them off their feet.
Of course, some of the members of The Traveling Wilburys have received the Hollywood treatment as time has gone on – Dylan’s A Complete Unknown biopic became a sensation and Harrison will also hit the big screen with the four Beatles movies in 2028. Is there a world in which Timothee Chalamet, Joseph Quinn, and a trio of others could join forces to bring The Traveling Wilburys to life on the big screen? Only time will be able to tell.
