The new documental Beatles ’64 tells the tale of how John, Paul, George, and Ringo transformed U.S. culture, right from the moment they landed at the newly renamed “John F. Kennedy Airport.” They were greeted at the airport by swarms of screaming fans, who are the heroes of this movie along with the band. The Beatles and their new mobs of U.S. fans built a whole new future together.
When The Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show, for a TV audience of 73 million viewers, they did more than just invade America.
Beatles ‘64 is produced by Martin Scorsese and directed by David Tedeschi, who worked with Scorsese on the great 2011 George Harrison doc Living in the Material World. The film, which arrives on Disney+ on November 29, premiered Sunday night in New York at the Hudson Square Theater, with a star-studded audience including Scorsese, Tedeschi, Paul McCartney, Sean Ono Lennon, Olivia Harrison, Elvis Costello, Steven Van Zandt, Chris Rock, Fran Lebowitz, and Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley. In a Q&A after the screening, Scorsese told about his first time hearing “I Want To Hold Your Hand” on his transistor radio, walking from Elizabeth Street in Little Italy to Washington Square College. He missed his class. “My mother loved the Beatles,” Scorsese recalled. “She would come with us to the 8th Street Playhouse to see A Hard Day’s Night.”
The movie traces the band’s immediate impact all over American culture. The footage comes mostly from the legendary Albert and David Maysles, who went on to make classics like Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens. The brothers were making their brilliant but little-seen doc What’s Happening!: The Beatles in the U.S.A., where they just followed the Fab around for their first couple of weeks in America. It’s remarkably up-close footage of the lads around in private, in trains and cars and hotel rooms, while the Maysleses let the camera roll in their fly-on-the-wall “direct cinema” style. As Scorsese said at the premiere, “They let everybody behave, then picked up on that.”
The Maysles brothers got 11 hours of footage, which provides most of Beatles ’64. It’s been visually restored by Peter Jackson’s WingNut Studios in New Zealand, with the music produced by Giles Martin.
Beatles’ 64 is a tribute to the fans as well as the band. The O.G. Beatlemaniacs took over the mean streets of NYC, and they liked how it felt out there.
In one of the funniest scenes, two intrepid fans who sneak into the Plaza Hotel try to bluff their way past a cop who threatens to throw them down the stairs. They are not the least bit afraid of or impressed by him. He barks, “This is as far as you’re gonna go.” But he’s wrong. They’re creating the future, and they know it.
There’s powerful live footage from the famous Washington Coliseum show, with the band doing “This Boy” and “Long Tall Sally.” Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr also appear in brief interview clips. There’s a charming scene of Ringo showing Scorsese around his collection of gear, including the drum kit he played on The Ed Sullivan Show, while Scorsese asks if Ringo’s into NYC noir movies.
The late Ronnie Spector recalls taking the lads up to Harlem for barbecue, where she knew they wouldn’t get recognized.
Smokey Robinson raves passionately about hearing the Beatles cover his music — “I was elated” — but even more about the way the band couldn’t shut up about worshipping him, Motown, and American R&B in general. They spent their teen record-shopping days flipping through the racks looking for singles with “W. Robinson” in the credits — he was the songwriter they dreamed of being. For Robinson, performing in a still-deeply segregated America, it was a shock to get that kind of open adulation from the Beatles. As he says, “They were the first white group that I’d ever heard in my life who said, ‘Yeah, we grew up listening to Black music.’” The film has an exquisite clip of the Miracles doing “Yesterday”.
Nothing stops the band or the fans. “We were working-class boys used to posh people looking down on us,” McCartney says now. “But you know what? We didn’t give a flying f**k.” There’s an 1971 clip where John Lennon makes the crucial yet rarely-noted point that the band happened because the U.K., unlike the U.S., did away with the military draft. The band came from “the vacuum of non-conscription,” he says. “We were the generation that was allowed to live.” What the Beatles did in 1964 alone continues to change the world—and Beatles ’64 is testimony to that ongoing story.
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