When filmmakers Oly Ralfe and James Bluemel discovered a 1960s recording of a phone conversation between self-professed Dylanologist A.J Weberman and Bob Dylan, it piqued their curiosity. Three years and three trips to New York later – not to mention innumerable hours spent editing about 60 hours of footage – The Ballad of A.J Weberman is the result of their labour. In their own words, it’s a “feature length documentary that chronicles the life, times and crimes of A.J Weberman the notorious Dylan obsessive and inventor of ‘Garbology’.”
To help promote the film, ArthurSteenHorneAdmason (ASHA) has created a promotional pack of stickers, badges and other bits of printed ephemera that celebrate some of the characters that appear in the film, along with some of the phrases they use when remembering past escapades...
“Oly originally wanted a poster,” recalls ASHA’s Marksteen Adamson, “but we thought it would be fun to create an identity that could be badged onto other stuff. Here in the UK, no one really knows about Weberman and his invention of the term ‘Garbology’ – the sifting through someone’s rubbish to find out more about their lifestyle,” he explains, “But in New York he was often on the news or on chat shows because of his obsession with Dylan. So we wanted to create a smörgåsbord of rubbish as the press pack – as if we’ve gone through Weberman’s bin, but hopefully it’s stuff that you don’t want to throw away.”
Every detail of the material in the pack has been carefully considered, from referencing a scene in the film in which Weberman takes an axe to a Dylan record to “free Dylan” (the DVD of the film in the pack is designed to look like a Dylan record), to the English postmark on the letters containing an invite to the Slamdance screening of the film. ASHA designer Sion Phillips even sourced an old Dylan poster which he faithfully aped to create the lo-fi Weberman film poster and all of the materials were created on a shoestring budget at ASHA. Ralfe took around 400 of the press packs to the Slamdance film festival in Park City, Utah and gave them away and stickered bins around the screening venues to promote the film.
The film is being screened at various film festivals around the world and was nominated for best documentary at the Raindance Film Festival last year and won the Raindance Award at the British Independent Film Awards.
Story by Gavin Lucas
Appeared in Creative Review Feb 2007