"He saw it out in Hollywood at a dreadful screening. Afterward, he said: 'We’ll have another screening and I’ll write down all of the things we have to change.'"

"Of course, that made me a little gloomy. The next night, we assembled again and he sat in the front with this yellow pad. At the end of the film, he held up the pad and there was nothing on it. He said: 'That’s it.'"

"He" is Bob Dylan, the subject of the documentary film "Don't Look Back," by the great documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker, who has died at the age of 94.

Here's the scene from "Don't Look Back" with Dylan and Donovan:



From Pennebaker's Wikipedia page:

In 1959, Pennebaker joined the equipment-sharing Filmakers' [sic] Co-op and co-founded Drew Associates with Richard Leacock and former LIFE magazine editor and correspondent Robert Drew. A crucial moment in the development of Direct Cinema, the collective produced documentary films for clients like ABC News... and Time-Life Broadcast.... Their first major film, Primary (1960), documented John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey's respective campaigns in the 1960 Wisconsin Democratic Primary election. Drew, Leacock and Pennebaker, as well as photographers Albert Maysles, Terrence McCartney Filgate and Bill Knoll, all filmed the campaigning from dawn to midnight over the course of five days. Widely considered to be the first candid and comprehensive look at the day-by-day events of a Presidential race, it was the first film in which the sync sound camera could move freely with characters throughout a breaking story, a major technical achievement that laid the groundwork for modern-day documentary filmmaking....

In 1992, during the start of the Democratic primaries, Pennebaker and Hegedus approached campaign officials for Arkansas governor Bill Clinton about filming his presidential run. They were granted limited access to the candidate but allowed to focus on lead strategist James Carville and communications director George Stephanopoulos. The resulting work, The War Room, became one of their most celebrated films....

Pennebaker's films, usually shot with a hand-held camera, often eschew voice-over narration and interviews in favor of a "simple" portrayal of events typical of the direct cinema style Pennebaker helped popularize in the U.S. Of such an approach, Pennebaker told interviewer G. Roy Levin published in 1971 that "it's possible to go to a situation and simply film what you see there, what happens there, what goes on, and let everybody decide whether it tells them about any of these things. But you don't have to label them, you don't have to have the narration to instruct you so you can be sure and understand that it's good for you to learn." In that same interview with Levin, Pennebaker goes so far as to claim that Dont Look Back is "not a documentary at all by my standards". He instead repeatedly asserts that he does not make documentaries, but "records of moments", "half soap operas", and "semimusical reality things".

ADDED: Pennebaker's YouTube page is fantastic. I'll just give you this — Janis Joplin (from the film "Monterey Pop"):



AND: The trailer for "Jimi Plays Monterey" (released in 1986, showing a performance in 1967):



ALSO: A "Monterey Pop" outtake (that's on the Criterion Collection edition of the movie) — The Mamas and the Papas and lots of shots of people in the audience, looking very 1967: