Deciphering "Beatles '64"

If you -- like me -- went from noticing people talking about a new Beatles documentary to feeling like you missed out on some big announcement, fear not. Beatles ‘64, now available on Disney+, did not have months of runway and if it feels like it just showed up out of nowhere, that’s kind of pretty much what happened. I watched it this past weekend and am happy to report that this film is interesting but not critical.

I was born less than a month after the Beatles arrived in America and back when I was a teenaged Beatles fanatic, that datapoint was crucial to me. I was alive when this happened, is what I think it meant to me, that this wasn’t something beyond my scope. When I’d go to the city on a field trip or with my family and we were anywhere near the Plaza Hotel, I would absolutely remind people that the Beatles stayed there. My mom – not a rock and roll fan – was in the Plaza years ago when friends were staying there and she went out of her way to find out what floor it was on because there were apparently plaques, but the only reason she knew about it was because I would tirelessly remind them whenever we’d go into the city in December to Go Look At The Christmas Decorations. So I had a fair amount of positive bias towards this documentary, which is meant – by its title – to transport the viewer back to that time period, when the Beatles first arrived in America. 

The sudden existence of this film made sense when I saw the title credits for Albert and David Maysles, the documentarians whose names you definitely know from Gimme Shelter. Oh. The Maysles were there and shot film. That’s absolutely enough to base a documentary off of, and their footage remains the most interesting and compelling part of this project. If you’re any kind of Beatles fanatic, you’ve seen some of this stuff before, either underground or at various Beatles-fest type things. There was always that one movie room at fan fests that didn’t do a great job at being publicly specific about what they were showing, because the legality of their possession of the film might have been a little shaky or permissions didn’t exist or someone else owned the rights. 

[This was how I saw a prominent photographer’s footage of the New York Dolls at Rockages one year, someone saw me carrying something Dolls related and whispered, Ballroom A at 3:30pm, you should come see the movies there. Or maybe a friend of similar persuasion was there and found me to share the news. Both things happened. But they didn't have the rights to show the movie so their solution to letting people see it was to carry the reels in a briefcase and then stand there while the film was screened and pack them back up when it was done, leaving quietly and not answering any questions.]

The footage of ‘64 in America is mostly the Beatles sitting around the hotel suites, listening to Beatles songs being played on the radio, taking phone calls from DJ’s around the country, and looking at the hordes of screaming teenagers who were camped out in the park across from the Plaza. There’s footage of those women, carrying their schoolbooks, clearly on their way to or from or maybe they just skipped class that day. The outerborough accents are pure and glorious. There’s not any explanation of what’s going on, which I appreciate; you’re figuring it out from context or you’re not. 

Originally I was somewhat disgruntled that Disney+ had become the channel for normies to get access to Beatles rarities, give the amount of effort I have invested in my lifetime to get access to rare rock and roll footage, but what saves Beatles ‘64 is that they just let the Maysles footage exist, they let it run, and so you get side conversations and the various band members taking their turn at clapping the slate, in this case just a microphone and a piece of paper with a number on it, among many other small moments that you will find and love and appreciate and I will not denote here because the fun of watching these things is discovering your own moments. No one has done anything to make the footage more interesting because it doesn’t need to be made more interesting, it’s hours of the Beatles sitting in a hotel room and goofing off and making jokes, which is gold. And there’s recognition of that because they just let it happen.