Deciphering "Beatles '64"
Disney+, the channel for normies to get access to Beatles rarities, is at it again.
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.
The rest of the film is a jumble sale of different interviews. There’s a bunch of civilians talking about what huge Beatles fans they are, there are more famous people: David Lynch’s random Beatles fandom, Jack Douglas’ story about hopping a freighter to Liverpool is epic and it’s great to hear it from his mouth, as is Ronnie Spector’s retelling of the Beatles calling her up when they got into town; “Veronica Bennett does an outstanding Little Richard imitation" is what I texted a friend – and then there’s archival footage of George, Ringo, and Paul, from different eras, from which they’ve extracted the bits that tie to discussion of the early days and jammed it all together.
The effect of all of this is like you’re watching 2 or 3 different documentaries in parallel, because you jump from modern color footage of Paul at the Brooklyn Museum back to black and white footage and then over to what is obviously much older color footage of George in his garden, and then here’s Ringo talking with Martin Scorsese, and then inbetween there’s these Beatles superfans we’re supposed to know? That’s the place where this thing falls down and you’ll probably go get a cup of tea or think about turning the thing off. There’s also no context: we don’t know what year it was filmed, who is doing the interviewing or what the interview was initially for. I like hearing Smokey Robinson talking about what it felt like finding out that the Beatles had recorded one of your songs, but like everything else, it arrives kind of sideways into the narrative and by the time it makes sense the film has moved on elsewhere.
There’s also a clumsy narrative arc jury rigged into place about how the reasons America responded so strongly to the Beatles is because they arrived in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. While that’s certainly part of the Beatles’ story, in this documentary it feels forced, like it was there to justify the existence of the documentary, when the existence of the documentary is, as best as I can tell from the research I was able to do -- that Apple Corps got the rights to the Maysles footage and so they decided to let it out and gave it to Scorsese and producer David Tedeschi to…do something with, so they did. We’re a long way from the days of Scorsese using the Ronettes in the opening of Mean Streets and not realizing he needed to license it.
Caryn Rose
To be fair, the archival footage has been restored, which was definitely a positive after everything I described about how some people used to caretake rock and roll film. I’ve seen the Washington Coliseum footage so many times – there is really not that much Beatles footage out there and if you started young by some point you’d seen it all – and it is definitely more enjoyable to watch the restored film, but also? I remembered how painful it was to watch those early films because of the screaming, the zillion shots of screaming fans, and the fact that the people who were behind the cameras didn’t have experience shooting a rock and roll band. You kind of had to live with whatever they did, and what they shot wasn’t great.
Trivia: if you watch Washington Coliseum, keep an eye on the little curtain under the drum platform. Because the Beatles had said that they liked jelly babies – e.g. jellybeans – fans brought them to that first show in the States and threw them onstage. You can see the jellybeans hitting the drum riser skirt. My friends and I used to play a game of trying to count them.
What I want is a world where they just make the raw Maysles footage available to people who are interested in it. That was the fun and exciting element of this film, and not the zillion side interviews. Jack Douglas was great (and it later ties in with the story), Ronnie Spector is hilarious, and Leonard Bernstein’s daughter had some interesting comments – but I would have traded all of that for more Maysles footage. I know it’s important that we get the remaining Beatles on film talking but, man, sometimes I feel like Paul especially is finding things to say because he’s being asked to Say Things. Maybe what’s here is really everything watchable from the Maysles and so they pieced together a film from the random other stuff that was readily available and vaguely relevant or at least tangential.
If they wanted to make a film that talked about how the Beatles saved America from its pallor of mourning post JFK assassination – and to be honest, that all felt like an afterthought – there were so many other directions they could have gone in, but it would have been more work than editing a bunch of existing interviews together. We’ve gone from the era where no one considered music documentaries to be mainstream or commercial or viable to the point where the artists are now filming everything and are able to enlist the best talent to put it together, and the very existence of the product – especially for a mainstream release – overshadows the content, especially when it comes to the Beatles. It doesn't have to be good, it just has to exist. I'll look forward to when the pendulum swings back towards the center.
On the note of having access to raw footage and just letting it run, if you liked or didn't get to see the Gary Hustwit Brian Eno documentary, they're doing to be doing a 24-hour streaming version (with "exclusive" footage and special guests) in January and you can buy early bird tickets now.
Caryn Rose
