FEATURE:
In the Eye of the Storm
Inside Beatles ‘64
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ONE of the most anticipated…
PHOTO CREDIT: Albert and David Maysles © 2024 Apple Corps, Ltd. All Rights Reserved
music documentaries of the year is available on Disney+ from tomorrow (29th November). Beatles ’64 charts The Beatles’ first visit to the U.S. It is already receiving some incredible reviews. I will end with one of them. Even if you are not a huge Beatles fan, the documentary is a historical snapshot. A moment when this Liverpool band wowed America and changed popular culture forever. It must have been exhilarating and a whirlwind for people who were there at the time. I can only imagine what it was like for the band! Before getting to a review for Beatles ’64, here is some information about the forthcoming documentary:
“Today, Disney+ announced that Beatles ‘64, an all-new documentary from producer Martin Scorsese and director David Tedeschi, will stream exclusively on Disney+ beginning 29 November 2024. The film captures the electrifying moment of The Beatles’ first visit to America. Featuring never-before-seen footage of the band and the legions of young fans who helped fuel their ascendance, the film gives a rare glimpse into when The Beatles became the most influential and beloved band of all time.
On 7 February 1964, The Beatles arrived in New York City to unprecedented excitement and hysteria. From the instant they landed at Kennedy Airport, met by thousands of fans, Beatlemania swept New York and the entire country. Their thrilling debut performance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” captivated more than 73 million viewers, the most watched television event of its time. Beatles ‘64 presents the spectacle, but also reflects a more intimate behind the scenes story, capturing the camaraderie of John, Paul, George, and Ringo as they experienced unimaginable fame.
The film includes rare footage filmed by pioneering documentarians Albert and David Maysles, beautifully restored in 4K by Park Road Post in New Zealand. The live performances from The Beatles first American concert at the Washington, DC Coliseum and their Ed Sullivan appearances were demixed by WingNut Films and remixed by Giles Martin. Spotlighting this singular cultural moment and its continued resonance today, the music and footage are augmented by newly filmed interviews with Paul and Ringo, as well as fans whose lives were transformed by The Beatles.
Beatles ’64 is directed by David Tedeschi and produced by Martin Scorsese, Margaret Bodde, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Olivia Harrison, Sean Ono Lennon, Jonathan Clyde, Mikaela Beardsley, with Jeff Jones and Rick Yorn serving as executive producers.
Coinciding with the film’s Disney+ release, seven American Beatles albums have been analogue cut for 180-gram audiophile vinyl from their original mono master tapes for global release on 22 November by Apple Corps Ltd./Capitol/UMe. Originally compiled for U.S. release between January 1964 and March 1965 by Capitol Records and United Artists, these mono albums have been out of print on vinyl since 1995. Meet The Beatles!; The Beatles’ Second Album; A Hard Day’s Night (Original Motion Picture Sound Track); Something New; The Beatles’ Story (2LP); Beatles ’65; and The Early Beatles are available now for preorder in a new vinyl box set titled The Beatles: 1964 U.S. Albums In Mono, with six of the titles also available individually”.
I am keen to spotlight a five-star review for Beatles ’64. Before that, Rolling Stone interviewed director David Tedeschi about a documentary that is going to thrill and enlighten Beatles fans the world over. A unique and phenomenal look into the lives of four young men who were catapulted to a new level. The way they conquered America so quickly is testament to their extraordinary talent and appeal! We will never see anything like it again:
“The Beatles invaded America in early 1964, and the nation was never the same. Even as their plane was landing in New York, mobs of screaming fans stormed the airport. The night they played The Ed Sullivan Show, on February 9, they blew the minds of 73 million viewers. Beatlemania gripped the whole country. That moment is captured in Beatles ’64, a new documentary produced by Martin Scorsese. It’s directed by David Tedeschi, who has worked on many Scorsese docs, include the great George Harrison bio Living in the Material World.
Beatles ’64 arrives on Disney+ on Thanksgiving weekend—just as Peter Jackson’s Get Back did three years ago. It premieres on Nov. 29. The film features new interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, with archival interviews from John Lennon and George Harrison, as well as their first American concert. “The movie goes from New York to Washington D.C. and Miami, which was chaos,” David Tedeschi tells Rolling Stone in an exclusive interview. “There’s over 17 minutes of footage that’s never been seen before.”
The footage comes mostly from the documentary pioneers David and Albert Maysles, who went on to make classics films like Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens. They followed the band, filming three weeks in the life of the Fab Four as the world around them goes mad, capturing Beatlemania as it exploded day by day. “We were kind of normal, and the rest of the world was crazy,” George Harrison says in the trailer. “Everybody got into the mania when the Beatles came to town.”
Peter Jackson’s WingNut Studios remastered the footage, as they did for Get Back. The music is produced by Giles Martin, who has produced the stellar run of Beatles editions that began in 2017 with Sgt. Pepper. Beatles ’64 gets up close and personal as John, Paul, George, and Ringo, already stars in their homeland, suddenly experience the kind of mass hysteria they’d never seen before — and neither had anyone else. “It was like being in the eye of a hurricane,” John says in in the trailer. “It was happening to us, but it was hard to see.
The film also has interviews with American music legends testifying to the Fabs’ impact, from Motown founder Berry Gordy to the late Ronnie Spector. Smokey Robinson, the Beatles’ original songwriting idol, discusses their connections with African-American music. As Robinson says, “They were the first white group that I’d ever heard in my life who said, ‘Yeah, we grew up listening to Black music.’”
Beatles ’64 is produced by Scorsese, Margaret Bodde, McCartney, Starr, Olivia Harrison, Sean Ono Lennon, Jonathan Clyde, and Mikaela Beardsley, with executive producers Jeff Jones and Rick Yorn. David Tedeschi spoke to Rolling Stone for an exclusive inside tour of the film, discussing how it happened and what fans can expect.
Are you a fan?
I’m a big Beatle fan. I grew up on the Beatles—it’s part of my DNA. Listen, I live in New York City. In a way, oddly enough, it’s a New York City story. Beatlemania feels like it took over the world in New York — Ed Sullivan was here. It wasn’t the beginning of Beatlemania, but that’s where it went up another level. Then it started happening all over the United States. So in a way, it’s a New York story, as a New Yorker who loved the Beatles, I feel very connected to it.
How did the movie come together?
I edited a film for Martin Scorsese called George Harrison: Living the Material World. As a result, we were very good friends with Olivia Harrison. We interviewed Paul and Ringo for that film. So there’s a relationship with Apple — we know them. Apple was aware that they had this footage and they wanted to do something with it, so they reached out to me.
Where does this footage come from?
David and Albert Maysles, who became very famous later in the sixties. This is their second movie-they made a movie that was rarely shown called What’s Happening! And one of the reasons it was rarely shown is they didn’t really have rights — a variety of rights. So Apple took ownership of the actual Maysles negatives.
Hardly anyone has seen What’s Happening!
Al and David, they were just phenomenal filmmakers and pioneers, and what they were doing was very unusual. So What’s Happening! did play on American TV, but it was considered too, how shall I say this, radical or obscure. And what played on American TV had interstitials with Carol Burnett.
What’s Happening! has a beautiful moment when the Beatles have just landed, riding in the car from the airport. Paul is holding up a transistor radio, hearing their song on the air. He looks right at the camera and says “I love this!” It’s so intimate.
Yeah, the Maysles brothers were pioneers of direct cinema, as they called it. In that footage, you can see that the Beatles are very relaxed. They have so much charisma on camera. But even the fans, these young women in front of the Plaza Hotel, or what we call the Sullivan Theater now — they also have so much charisma. There’s something about the energy of Al and David that relaxed people, and allowed them to project something on film. I don’t know what it is. I worked with Al when Scorsese hired him for [the Rolling Stones’ concert film] Shine a Light. So as the Rolling Stones were rehearsing, I got to watch Al at work. And he was very sly. People would see the camera, but quickly they forgot about it.
In the trailer, there’s a moment of Ringo talking to Martin Scorsese. Did Scorsese interview him?
We did two interviews: Ringo and Paul. Marty was there for Ringo, and I would say he primarily conducted the interview. We didn’t want to do just sit-down interviews. With Ringo, he has saved a lot of his clothes through the years, so he had one of the suits he wore on the train to Washington. He has it all — that same drum kit that he played at Ed Sullivan. I interviewed Paul at the Brooklyn Museum, when he was there for Eye of the Storm photo exhibit. When you look at the handwritten lyrics for ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ it’s an emotional thing
How far into 1964 does Beatles ’64 go?
It’s just those three weeks—they arrive in New York, for maybe four or five days, then Washington and Miami. There’s footage from the Maysleses all the way through, but there’s other stuff. We had a great researcher who found a lot of local Miami footage from local archives—a lot of footage was buried, and he really had to go digging in order to find it. So that’s exciting”.
PHOTO CREDIT: © 2024 Apple Corps
I will finish off with a review from The Guardian. Although I have seen one or two reviews give a middling assessment of Beatles ’64 – calling it an uneven portrait -, many have given it a huge thumbs up. Tomorrow is going to be an exciting day, as we will get to see one of the most important Beatles documentaries ever made. I cannot wait to see what comes from it:
“The Beatles’ breaking of America – that mythic, ecstatic moment which restored Britain’s postwar pride and became an enduring cornerstone of our soft power self-respect – is the subject of this absorbing documentary from director David Tedeschi; Martin Scorsese is a producer and interviews Ringo himself in the present day, with Paul speaking to camera separately. It also uses the intimate hotel-room and backstage footage shot at the time by the Maysles brothers, Albert and David.
The film is a record of the band’s arrival in New York in 1964, and their legendary live appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, the host resembling a wary, jowly Richard Nixon. Craig Brown’s book One Two Three Four points out that the Beatles’ appearance on the show followed an interminable succession of forgotten support acts who, though they may have eagerly accepted the TV booking at the time, were doomed to be hated by an impatient nation for not being the Beatles, for ever tainted by their sheer irrelevance. This film shows one of the TV audience yawning at one of these lesser mortals.
The band’s first concert in the US was in Washington DC, where the staff and officials at a British embassy reception notoriously disgraced themselves with their boorish snobbery towards the band; a well-spoken chap is shown sneering that he had no patriotic pride about the Beatles. Then it was back to New York to play Carnegie Hall, then on to Miami where they got to goof around with Muhammad Ali, though there is no film footage of that.
As ever, the four faces of the Beatles glow with incredulous bafflement and joy at the surreal storm swirling around them; they radiate an inexhaustible, almost supernatural energy, cracking wise and laughing, and apparently never in a bad mood with the cameras that are forever being shoved in their faces. They are good-tempered and bemused by the New York radio DJ Murray Kaufman, or Murray the K, who had somehow managed to fluke his way into hanging out with them in their hotel room, and no one quite knows who allowed him to do this. The film gives us some great closeups of the band’s faces while they are playing – I’d never noticed before that George sometimes briefly appeared to zone out on stage.
Writer Joe Queenan chokes up while remembering how he felt when he first heard the Beatles on the radio; that eerie alchemy of voices, at once galvanised with rock’n’roll energy and yet innocent and unthreatening. They were cathedral choristers of romantic joy, and the band that gave white America permission to rock out and lift their spirits after the Kennedy assassination. Some of the documentary is interested in how soft, and even exotically non-binary, the Beatles looked – so different from what Betty Friedan is shown describing as the crew-cut Prussian masculinity that was mandatory for American manhood at the time. (Again, without knowing it, they paved the way for America’s acceptance of Brit-androgynous glam rock.)
Photographer Harry Benson is interviewed in the present day, confiding that John, nervous about how he and the others would go down with the US public, found himself talking about Lee Harvey Oswald. Lennon is also shown making a pertinent point: “The Beatles and their ilk were created by the vacuum of non-conscription … we were the army that never was.” National service was abolished … and rock’n’roll took its place? It’s an intriguing thought, though it should be said that Elvis Presley did military service.
And what is still amazing is how brief an instant it was; in just a few years, the Beatles and their music would evolve into something completely different. A few years after that, they would break up, while still only in their 20s. An amazing split-second of cultural history”.
Beatles ’64 shows that there is still this incredible gravity and love around the band. How the whole story can never be told. Sixty years after they visited America, we are still talking about them! Band members Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr talking about that time is really emotional and important. That incredible, first-hand testimony from young men who were in the eye of a storm. It must have been such a daze for them. They, John Lennon and George Harrison left their mark on the world. Their legacy will last forever. Make sure that you watch Beatles ’64 on Apple+, as it is a documentary…
YOU will not want to miss!