written by Chris Willman, Variety
I scream, you scream, we all scream for Beatlemania… but maybe it’s been a while. “Beatles ’64,” the new Martin Scorsese-produced documentary on Disney+, aims to recapture the shrieks that greeted the Beatles‘ arrival on American shores at the beginning of 1964. Under the direction of David Tedeschi, the film brings back the tears of hysteria that accompanied the band’s every move in the U.S., and generates some fresh tears from some of its contemporary interview subjects, who tell how the band’s advent changed their lives.
Tedeschi spoke with Variety about some of the work that went into the film, which contains a lot of footage shot at the time by the documentary world’s legendary Maysles brothers, as well as some other archival film finds and modern interviews.
This is premiering on Thanksgiving weekend. That seems to be a good weekend in recent Disney and Apple and Beatles history, with “Get Back” premiering on the same weekend three years ago. Was that a deadline that was being worked toward, knowing that this would be an optimal timeframe to premiere it, or has this been done for a while?
No, it hasn’t been done for a while. It was important to Apple Corps that the film be released during the 60th anniversary year of the Beatles coming to the United States. So that was the pressure. But I thought that Nov. 29 sounded like a pretty good date.
How long have you been on this project?
I first heard about the project about two years ago, and opened the edit room when we started shooting a little over a year ago. So basically we worked on it full-time for a year. Before that, we worked on it, also, but it was more about looking at the footage (that was shot in 1964) and figuring out what the heck we were gonna do with this treasure trove.
I was imagining the making of the film might have dated back a lot longer than that, because you have Ronnie Spector in it — which is a highlight among the contemporary interviews — and she died in early 2022. How did she come to be in the film if it only got underway recently?
Ronnie had been shot for “Eight Days a Week” (Ron Howard’s 2016 documentary about the Beatles’ early career), and they hadn’t used it in the film and we had access to it. We thought she was pretty wonderful, with what she had to say. I had never heard that story before, and in fact, there are a lot of things I had never heard before that were new to me. I knew they were trapped at the Plaza Hotel because they were surrounded by literally thousands of screaming girls and boys. But I didn’t know Ronnie Spector knew how to get them out and take ’em to Harlem.
Paul and Ringo are very vivacious in the fresh interviews they did for the film. You did them as standup interviews, not sit-down interviews, so you’ve got Paul there in the museum and Ringo kind of giving a guided tour. Was there a reason for wanting the two of them almost sort of in action?
We wanted something that matched (the ‘60s footage) better. It’s not direct cinema, it’s not the MayslesBrothers, but it is something other than a sit-down interview. Paul, we shot at the Brooklyn Museum while the “Eye of the Storm” exhibit was up, which is his photographs from 1964. So he was already revisiting in his mind the events of ‘64, including New York and Washington and Miami. He had a lot to say about it, and his point of view to my ear was very new. He had almost a more rebellious attitude about things.
And Ringo, he says it himself — that he’s a hoarder, and he has all the clothes and all the drums and all the photographs from that period that he could hold onto. You see him with the drum kit for (the Ed) Sullivan (show); he talked about it, he played it. And he had one of the suits he wore during the New York trip. And I think both of them are very in the moment and give very grounded observations. I loved Ringo saying that he was closer to the band than other drummers, because he wanted to feel like he was really part of the band… and that whenever anything goes wrong with a band in a performance, everybody looks at the drummer. I thought that was a brilliant moment.
Let’s talk about the restoration work that was done on the footage and the sound. When people hear that digital restoration work is bieng done on something like this, there can be a fear that it’s going to look overly cleaned up or digitalized. This just looks like amazingly preserved footage.
The four Beatles were so young and vibrant. And when the film has aged, you lose some of that. You lose their charisma a little bit when it seems like an artifact from the past. Whereas I think Park Road restored the footage beautifully. More than anything else, even though it’s black and white, even though the aspect ratio is different and it’s not for a widescreen TV, it feels in some way like the energy is fresh and it could be shot yesterday. And I think that enhances the film.
From a sound point of view, I’m sure you’ve heard the Washington Coliseum as it sounded 20 or 30 years ago; I think it was sold maybe as a VHS, and there are performances here and there that you see maybe on YouTube. It was not very well recorded. And it’s almost a miracle, whatever the MAL team at WingNut was able to do to de-mix it. And then Giles Martin, of course, with his extraordinary producer chops, made it sound somehow fresh, and really like the Beatles, not processed. It’s like a real document of who the Beatles were as a live band in 1964. It’s remarkable. They do a cover of “Long Tall Sally,” and when I first saw it afresh, I couldn’t stop looking. I looked at it like eight or nine times because they’re having so much fun, and it’s raucous.
With the archival footage, how much did you look at at the various ways this material has been assembled before, with the rarely seen original documentary (the Maysles Brothers’ “What’s Happening?,” from 1964) and then the re-edited version that came out later (“The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit,” released in 1991 and again in 2004)? You had access to the negatives, so did you try to forget how it had all been edited before — or what was in your mind when you looked at how to reassemble any of that?
Well, all the negatives went to Park Road, Peter Jackson’s company, and all of it was transferred and restored. I looked at it fresh. I had seen “What’s Happening?” a few times, which is their original film made in 1964, which I think they edited maybe in a month. You know, it was a very quick schedule. So it was in my mind; I knew some of the more famous scenes. But there was a lot of stuff I didn’t remember from the film.
In our film there’s 17 minutes worth of new footage that’s never been seen before — just of the Maysles Brothers’ footage. Because there’s a lot of other new archival, also [1964 footage from other sources]. I did go back and I watched “The First U.S. Visit” and “What’s Happening?” a couple of times just to see what they had used, what the tone was.
What was some of the Maysles’ stuff you were able to newly include or put a different spin on?
There’s a scene in the British Embassy, and to me it’s an unbelievable scene. They are invited to a party in their honor at the British Embassy, and the staff at the British Embassy treats them badly, shoddily, because they think they’re these lower class guys. And, for me, it was totally unexpected. I had never heard about that story before. And there’s different footage of that night — there were newsreels there and stuff. But in the Maysles’ footage, there’s an intimacy, and a sort of a feeling or a warmth towards their subjects. And their subjects are able to project themselves on the screen in a very special way. And of course, all the Beatles are very charismatic and that’s part of it. But there, you have an ambassador or another official saying — “Aren’t you proud? Does this make you proud of being British.” They’re like, “No, no, we’re not proud.”
Charlotte (Zwerin, who edited and sometimes co-directed with the Maysles brothers) said something super-interesting. I don’t think she worked on any of the versions of “What’s Happening?” — she certainly didn’t work on the first one — but I saw her speak when I was quite young. And what she said was, “The first time you see footage is the most real reaction you’ll ever have to that footage. And you need to treasure that. You need to keep that. As an editor, you need to figure out a way to remember that.” So although I’d seen some of the footage before, I really tried to focus — and we had a wonderful editor, Mariah Rehmet — on what my original reaction was in thinking about what the value of the footage was.
Also, Al (Maysles) himself talked about it later: At the time they weren’t as interested in (including) the fans, and it’s not in the style of what they did. But when we looked at the footage, the young girls and boys who are interviewed jumped out of the screen. I thought they had great energy. They had something to say and they were a document of the times themselves. You know, it couldn’t have been shot earlier because it was the Beatles. But in terms of the way people talked and the way people looked, it still could have been the ‘50s. It could have been the ‘40s, almost. And everybody is talking about how long the Beatles’ hair is, and to my eye, it’s not long at all. You can see their ears, 100%!
The girls on the street are amazing. They’re all so vivid, even though they may only be on screen for 20 seconds each; you almost want to see a movie starring each one of those girls. And there was a fictional movie made about Beatlemania, Robert Zemeckis’ “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” but these moments are like the real-life version of that. It’s interesting that the Maysles thought that it would be interesting to follow some fans who snuck into the Beatles’ hotel and got caught, as well as to hang with the Beatles themselves. Of course, there was no template for making a Beatles movie when they were doing this. It must have been interesting for them choosing what to shoot.
Information traveled much slower in those days. So, Beatlemania had started maybe three months before. And I think there had been one piece on CBS News about Beatlemania, something that had been filmed in the U.K. But people didn’t necessarily (know much). The Maysles themselves had heard of the Beatles, but I don’t know how much they knew about them, you know? And the way the music was released… Capitol Records had waited a year to release the music on Capitol Records because they didn’t know if rock ‘n’ roll was over, and guitar groups were over. But starting in December, two months before the Beatles came, the music was promoted and released, and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” hit No. 1 a week before they arrived. So, many people knew what the Beatles sounded like; they didn’t necessarily know what they looked like.
What else was a highlight to you about the unseen footage?
That Harlem footage had never been seen before. So you have various reactions from young, Black teenage girls and boys, and a few older people, and of course you have these young men in the record store. The one guy says, “It’s just disgusting the way they play that music over and over again. I like Miles Davis. I like John Coltrane.” But it was sort of interesting the way the teenage girls in Harlem just loved the Beatles, loved their hair, loved their music. That to me was a surprising thing, because of course the civil rights movement was going on. Of course I knew that later on when they actually toured the States, they refused to play before segregated audiences.
But when we decided to interview Smokey, I didn’t expect him to say everything that he said. One of the things was that the Beatles were the first white artist of their magnitude that said they loved and learned from Black music and sang Black music. We have several people, from David Lynch to Smokey, talking about the power of music, I thought in a very beautiful way. And when Smokey says in regards to the audiences being desegregated, that it gave kids a common love and that it was the power of music that literally overcame the barrier that was set up between the white audience and the Black audience, I thought that was really a wonderful thing for him to say, and unexpected.
It’s striking in this how sophisticated the Beatles were about certain things so early in their career. There’s a moment when Paul playfully orders the camera operator to turn the camera down, away from them, saying, “Defy convention.” Even the way he says “Defy convention” seems like something that an older, more experienced person would say as a joke, as opposed to somebody as fresh out of the box as he is. Obviously it struck you enough to include this in the film.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for two reasons. One is, first of all, they’re so young — I think Paul is 21 there; I’m not sure, he might be 22 — and yeah, he’s very self-possessed. But also, it’s a classic direct cinema moment. For Albert and David Maysles, this is their second film, but they were experienced (in other ways). Al had shot with Robert Drew and a lot of different people, and David had worked on a lot of different movies, doing sound, not directing. But as directors, as filmmakers, this is their second movie. And there’s a classic moment in cinema vérité, or “direct cinema,” which is how they like to refer to their style of making films — their movement — where people stop being aware of the camera.
This was from the first day that the Maysles are filming in their hotel room, and you can tell how aware of the camera they are. They’re just sitting there knowing they’re being filmed. And to me it’s such a classic moment of these two worlds coming together, of direct cinema and the Beatles. Because you see after that how relatively quickly they forget about the camera. When they’re partying at the Peppermint Lounge, they’re not thinking about the camera, or even when they’re in the car, doing what they need to do.
John Lennon is heard talking about being in the eye of the hurricane, and there is this sense that they’re in kind of this bubble where they’re still having a good time, amd not terribly stressed out by what’s going on. How much did you want to convey with the footage that you had to work with that they were just kind of normal guys in this very abnormal situation, which they were kind of protected from up to a point? Or is it wrong to think of the Beatles as normal guys?
But what is normal? You know what I mean? All four of them are really different, but they’re all accessible in a way and in the moment and grounded. But they’re also tremendously talented and intelligent. You say normal guys, and I think you’re paraphrasing George, who said in the film, when someone asked — I think it was Jools Holland asking him, obviously in the archival footage — “Were you guys really crazy?” And he’s like, “No. We were normal and we had each other. Everybody around us went crazy.” And I think with the contemporary interviews of Paul and Ringo and then the archive interviews of John and George, you see how they make very simple observations… but from those very simple observations, they explain pretty complicated phenomena, and I think it’s part of their genius.
