Disney+’s new Beatles documentary mostly repackages old footage, but it also has some unseen gems.
Most accounts of Beatlemania begin by dropping viewers in the midst of the fray, ears ringing from the ecstatic shrieks of teenage girls. But Beatles ’64, which premieres on Disney+ on Nov. 29, starts by pulling back: way back. Instead of Paul, John, George, and Ringo, we get John F. Kennedy, urging us to go to the moon because it is hard and descending the airplane steps in Dallas, and then his funeral procession winding its way through the streets of Washington, D.C. The brief introduction sets up the idea, voiced by Paul McCartney toward the end of David Tedeschi’s feature-length documentary, that the U.S. was especially primed for the band’s arrival by JFK’s assassination—that their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show less than three months after Kennedy’s death gave a mourning nation something joyous to celebrate, and the newspapers something else to focus on (although, as Slate’s Jack Hamilton has written, the link between the two is a fairly tenuous one). But it’s also a warning that the Beatles themselves are at best co-stars in this particular account, supporting players in a larger national drama.
In large part, that’s because after 60 years of documenting the phenomenon of Beatlemania, there’s not much left in the way of new material. Beatles ’64 includes new interviews with McCartney and Ringo Starr, the latter’s conducted by a briefly visible and uncredited Martin Scorsese, who produced the film, as well as an assortment of fans and music-industry figures who offer widely varying degrees of insight. But its most enticing and illuminating aspect by far is the unseen footage, about 17 minutes in total, shot by the direct cinema legends Albert and David Maysles as they followed the band on their whirlwind East Coast tour.
Most of the Maysles’ footage has been released twice before, first as What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A., and then, in 1999, as The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit, which dropped several minutes of observational documentary and added the Fab Four’s Sullivan appearance and other live performances. (The Maysles were not originally allowed to use the TV footage, so they devised an ingenious workaround, shooting a family watching the show in their living room instead.) But the previously unseen moments in Beatles ’64 still manage to add something to this most pored-over of cultural watersheds.
Rather than introduce them fleeing from crazed fans or cracking wise to clueless reporters, Tedeschi introduces the Beatles as they’re marveling at the then-new apparatus that allowed the Maysles brothers to shadow them in relatively unobtrusive fashion. As Paul and Ringo point into the lens, Paul, the band’s most technically minded member, points out how the Maysles’ innovative technology allowed them to keep Albert’s camera and David’s tape recorder in sync without the need of a connecting wire that would have seriously limited their movement. Later, as the foursome chat around a coffee table in a hotel room, Paul insists that the camera pan down to show the woman sitting discreetly on the floor just outside their circle, poking a microphone into its center—an order Albert resists until it becomes clear that Paul won’t move on until he gives in. Toting along a portable radio that he uses to track the news coverage of their visit, Paul is the most keenly attuned to the machinery of star-making, marveling at the reporters announcing their arrival at New York’s Plaza Hotel the instant their car pulls up to the entrance. (Paul’s on-camera deconstructions are sufficiently sharp that they render Beatles ’64’s use of Marshall McLuhan clips to explain the shifting nature of media entirely superfluous.)
As a whole, the group seems astonished by the incessant commercialism of American culture. Paul reenacts a TV anchor’s seamless transition from a serious news item to a word from their sponsor, while John and George improvise a mock ad for Marlboros. Hounded by radio DJ Murray the K, who proclaimed himself the “fifth Beatle” despite a tenuous claim to the title—in an archival interview, an older Harrison says they never managed to figure out who kept letting him into the room—they gamely yell station identifications into the phone, but they openly mock him when he bungles the title of “Love Me Do.” (An off-camera Lennon jokes, with just a hint of edge, that the flub should cost Murray his job.) When Paul pulls out his handheld radio, slyly noting that its regular appearance will give the filmmakers something to use for continuity, you can’t help but notice the Pepsi logo on its plastic casing and wonder which enterprising adman contrived to slip it into his hands. Meanwhile, in the present, an avid collector shows off his preposterously large collection of Beatles artifacts, ranging from branded sneakers and mop-top wigs to a tin of Beatles-branded talcum powder—which, he proudly notes, has never been used.
It’s not surprising that the Maysles, who prided themselves on being able to disappear into the background, cut out moments that drew attention to their presence. But it’s a treat to have the exchange where two women attempting to sneak into the Beatles’ rooms explicitly enlist the brothers in their quest. More significantly, Beatles ’64 reclaims the on-camera interviews that the Maysles shot and categorically discarded, especially a sequence where they interview Harlem’s Black residents about their opinions of the band. Two young girls proclaim them to be at best “OK,” while another, slightly older woman allows that she likes them, “especially their hairdos.” (Their songs, on the other hand, are merely “nice.”) A twentysomething man whose tastes lean toward Miles Davis and John Coltrane calls them simply “disgusting,” while another, attired in a scarf and overcoat, says that they’re “very nice” because “I like anything that’s original.” But when he’s asked how they stack up against the jazz organist Jimmy Smith, whose name hangs on the Apollo marquee behind him, he politely demurs; “I wouldn’t make a comparison.”
Smokey Robinson, at least, comes to the Beatles’ defense. In a new interview, he says they were the first white pop group he heard be open about Black influences on their music. (During the Revolver sessions, Paul marshalled all of Abbey Road’s resources in an attempt to emulate the bass sound of the Motown records he loved.) Leonard Bernstein, too, is a fan, or at least someone who resists an interview’s attempt at a culture-war soundbite by saying that adults would be foolish to brush off such a seismic cultural shift. A few years later, he’d be guiding TV viewers through the tricky time signatures of “She Said, She Said.” Of course, he didn’t understand them the way the young Juilliard student in Beatles ’64 did, trotting over to wait outside the Plaza despite the fact that she doesn’t normally care for rock, or Bernstein’s own daughter, Jamie, who vividly recalls the contemporary dreams she had involving George Harrison and her bra.
Beatles ’64 falls far short of being revelatory, and although the old footage and audio has been enhanced with the same techniques behind Peter Jackson’s Get Back, it feels more like a series of footnotes than history itself. But it offers precious, if limited, glimpses of how the Beatles saw that history being formed even as they made it, and a world that was just beginning to understand what they were about to do.
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