A documentary series from the director of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ explores the nuances of the last year of the band’s history. The film includes dozens of hours of previously unreleased material.
Do you know how the Beatles ended? It is a cold January morning in 1969 and three of the four Beatles are gathered in a vast London film studio, cameras rolling and microphones everywhere. "Lennon is late again," Paul McCartney says casually, as he connects his bass.
With Ringo Starr and George Harrison dozing and sitting across from him and a tray of toast and jam beside him , McCartney begins strumming and singing, seeking inspiration. In a few minutes, a halftime beat takes shape and a familiar vocal melody emerges. Get back, sing in a low howl. Get back to where you once belonged: go back to where you once belonged. Almost like magic, a Beatles classic begins to materialize out of nowhere.
Later that day, after the arrival of John Lennon, the four rock deities meet in a circle and argue. They have loose plans for a special television concert with new songs, but most of them seem intimidated by the event, and they may also intimidate each other. Lennon, who appears to be distracted for much of the meeting, vaguely states that his only goal is "communication" with the audience, while an impatient McCartney challenges his bandmates to show some enthusiasm for the project or to abandon it.
Harrison blurts out what everyone may be thinking: "Maybe we should get a divorce?"
Those scenes, one after another, in Peter Jackson’s documentary series The Beatles: Get Back, a more than seven-hour project that will air in three parts on Disney Plus from November 25-27, encapsulate the two sides of the most controversial period in the history of the Beatles: the glory of the artistic creation of the most beloved and influential rock band in the world, and the exhausting conflicts that led to their breakup, announced a year later.
For Beatles fans, or any student of 20th century pop culture, these are amazing glimpses into the band’s work life and the tensions surrounding it.
"It’s like that single pipe dream for a fan," Jackson said in a video interview from Wellington, New Zealand, where he has spent much of the past four years in a darkened editing room surrounded by Beatles memorabilia. "I wish I could walk into a time machine and sit in the corner of the stage while they work," he said, describing a lifelong dream of a boy praying for the best Christmas present. "’Just for a day, just to see them, I’ll be very still and sit there.’
"Well guess what?" He continued. "The time machine is here."
Jackson’s film is also a volley in one of the oldest debates in scholarship about the Beatles. The band’s journey in January 1969 began with intense pressure to put on a high-concept live show and ended with something wonderfully low-concept: an impromptu lunchtime performance on a London rooftop that reminded the world of the majesty, spontaneity and wit of the band. "I hope we passed the audition," jokes Lennon at the end of the show.
That period was already the subject of Let It Be, a 1970 film vérité by Michael Lindsay-Hogg; its soundtrack was the last Beatles studio LP. Over time, that film acquired a reputation as a joyless document of the band’s collapse, and subsequent testimonies from Beatles members seemed to reinforce that view. Lennon described the sessions as "hell" and Harrison called them the "winter of discontent" for the group.
However, this account has long been questioned by some Beatles fans. They argue that Lindsay-Hogg’s film was selectively edited for maximum sadness, perhaps to retroactively explain the breakup – Abbey Road, the true Beatles swan song, was made after Let It Be, but was released before – while the evidence from the bootleg tapes suggests a mix of pleasure and frustration familiar to any musician striving to hit take 24 by the deadline.
The mere existence of Get Back is a sign that, more than half a century after the dissolution of the Beatles, its story remains unsolved, and it remains infinitely ripe for in-depth investigation and partisan counter-stories.
Jackson’s film, which comes with the authority of a bolt from a mountaintop in Middle-earth, may become the final point in the discussion of this period, although the story it tells is far from simple. Jackson, the Oscar-winning director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy – and an avowed Beatles fan -, had access to nearly 60 hours of unreleased material from Apple Corps, the Beatles’ company, for no other purpose, according to Jackson, who restore the movie and tell the full story.
The Beatles, or at least their corporate surrogates, have embraced Jackson’s version, and a preview for the film highlighted some moments of brotherly nonsense, such as the group dancing and clowning around in the studio. At a music industry event last year, Jeff Jones, CEO of Apple Corps, promised that the new film would "break the myth" that those sessions were "the last nail in the coffin of the Beatles." However, Jackson said the band has had no influence on his work.
"Everybody thinks it’s a facelift" because the Beatles have licensed the movie, Jackson commented with a laugh. But in reality it is almost the opposite. It shows everything that Michael Lindsay-Hogg couldn’t show in 1970. It’s an open-minded look at what’s going on. "
For fans who remember the Lindsay-Hogg movie, or who have read grim anecdotes in one of dozens of Beatles books, Jackson’s slapstick scenes and creative teasers jump off the screen. We see the Beatles cracking up at the microphone, imitating fancy accents, and performing silly antics like a Monty Python number.
"You see these four great friends, great musicians, coming together and developing these songs, and you see it all on the screen," says Jackson.
Day after day, the new material takes shape. In polishing the lyrics to the song “Get Back,” McCartney and Lennon try out names for a character leaving their Arizona home: Jojo Jackson, Jojo Carter, Jojo Daphne. By removing the last name, McCartney has enough syllables to give the story a little more specificity: "Jojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona …".
Lennon, chewing gum, looks up to ask, "Is Tucson in Arizona?"
The original Let It Be was shot on 16mm film and enlarged to 35mm grain. Generations of fans, if they have ever seen it, have only had access to the film in poor quality copies transferred from videotape. It has never been officially released on DVD or in online formats.
I told Jackson that when I finally saw Let It Be, about 20 years ago, my local video rental store required a $ 100 cash deposit. Jackson picked up an old VHS copy and said that he had long regretted not buying it when he visited the United States in the early 1980s, but that the format could not be played on his machine in New Zealand. While doing Get Back, he located an original on eBay for $ 200.
"I don’t have a VHS," he said, "so I still can’t play it."
Jackson’s restored images at Get Back are strikingly clear, and help flesh out a story of creative anxiety and comforts within the Beatle Fortress. Attendees serve glasses of wine while musicians rehearse; Yoko Ono paints Japanese calligraphy while Lennon and McCartney, a few feet away, jokingly sing “Two of Us” with silly accents.
But misfortune is never far away, and as the discussions progress, it begins to seem miraculous that the Beatles can still be together. At one point, Harrison briefly resigns from the band, seemingly fed up with his second hand status. In the studio cafeteria, Lennon tells McCartney that the band’s disagreements with their lead guitarist have been "a festering wound."
After Harrison leaves, the remaining Beatles play loud and angry. Starr breaks the battery. Ono, dressed in black, stands in front of a microphone and screams until she reaches a wild climax, perhaps the most violent sound the Beatles have ever created.
A recurring theme is the band’s discomfort over the role of Ono, who sits next to Lennon constantly during sessions and who would come to be vilified by fans for his alleged role in the breakup of the Beatles. A companion book to the film, with more transcripts of the tapes, quotes Lennon as saying to McCartney: "For her, I would sacrifice all of you."
However, it is never clear whether the Beatles’ conflicts are caused by current events or by the accumulated stress of years in the spotlight. Peter Brown, who was a top Apple executive during this time, said in an interview that the problems began with Sgt. Pepper’s success in 1967.
"They were doing things that they had never done before, and they were very, very worried that it was going to take off," Brown said. And of course it took off like crazy. So how do you continue after that?
Some of the dramas, of course, can be typical band stuff. Neil Finn of New Zealand group Crowded House said Jackson showed his band about four hours of recording earlier this year. "We all cry," he wrote in an email.
"A lot of things struck a chord with my own rehearsals and recording experiences," Finn added. Paul asking John if he had any new songs, and John kind of bragging with his answer: Uh, maybe, not really. You can see the others staring in disbelief. I’ve seen that look before. "
But the stakes for the Beatles were incredibly high, and the prospect of the band’s disbandment hovers like a cloud over most of the film. At first, McCartney suggests an idea for the television special, which is as yet undefined. He proposes to intersperse his performance with news reports on earthquakes and other "hot" events around the world. "And last," says McCartney, "the final bulletin is: ‘The Beatles have split up.’
To some extent, Get Back and the original Let It Be are evidence in a truth study. Do the pictures really show the end of the Beatles, or has history been wrong all these years? Does the weight of the evidence point to the band being joyous and creatively fruitful, or fed up with each other’s company? The answer may be: all of the above.
In a note included in the new Let It Be reissue, McCartney writes that the original film “was quite sad, as it was about our band breaking up, but the new film shows the camaraderie and love that the four of us had for each other. ”.
Lindsay-Hogg believes that not only fans, but probably the Beatles themselves as well, have misinterpreted Let It Be for years.
"I think part of the reputation Let It Be has had is that for a long time no one had seen it," he said in an interview. "And it all got very confusing by the time he came out, which was right after they broke up."
Of course, the Beatles did not disband in January 1969. They came to record Abbey Road later that year, very carefully; Most of the songs on that album, including "Octopus’s Garden," "Mean Mr. Mustard," "Carry That Weight," and "Something," are heard in their early stages during Get Back.
But Jackson’s film makes it clear that the end was near. If there is a real culprit for the breakup, it was the business conflicts that occurred during 1969, when the group fought over its management, and Lennon and McCartney tried, unsuccessfully, to take control of the company that had their composition rights.
Those troubles are foreshadowed in Get Back with the pronunciation of only one name: Allen Klein, the American business manager who arrives a few days before the rooftop show to offer his services to the band. Shortly after the events depicted in Get Back, Lennon, Harrison, and Starr signed with Klein; McCartney refused, and the schism was never repaired. Klein died in 2009.
"Our movie doesn’t show the breakup of the Beatles," Jackson said, "but it does show the only singular moment in history that you could say was the beginning of the end."
If scholars and Beatles fans have proven anything, it is that even a contradictory summary of the band and its influence can still be true. The Beatles were a pop boy band that ended up pushing the creative limits of rock music further than anyone else; almost every day of their existence together has been exhaustively documented, although it is impossible to get a full account of their motivations.
Get Back seems to contain all of those crowds – the delight, the tension, the fights, and the wonder of the Beatles just playing rooftop music.
"There are no hotties in her, no bad guys," Jackson said. “There are no villains, there are no heroes. It’s just a human story. "