The subject of Beatles-’64 – the new documentary produced by Martin Scorsese that debuts on Disney+ on November 29 – is a familiar one: the arrival of the Fab Four in the United States on February 7, 1964, and the cultural maelstrom that followed.
The film’s villains are also familiar: the old people, the establishment types, the squares – all the Americans who just didn’t got it.
“Visually they are a nightmare: tight Edwardian-Beatnik suits and big pudding bowls of hair,” sneered Newsweek in a contemporaneous cover story quoted at length on screen. “Musically, they are a near disaster: guitars and drums producing a relentless beat that puts an end to secondary rhythms, harmony and melody.”
But while most accounts of the Beatles’ invasion of the US treat the boys themselves as conquering heroes, Beatles-’64 does something different. It also takes a refreshing and revealing look at the band’s first fans in the United States – the vast majority being teenage girls, a group that was all too easily dismissed at the time.
“These young women discovered something that no one else knew,” said the documentary’s director, David Tedeschi (who previously edited Scorsese’s films). Rolling Thunder revue And George Harrison: Living in the Material World documentaries), says Yahoo Entertainment. “And it turned out to be true.”
To capture that bigger, broader picture, Tedeschi raided the archives of the Maysles Brothers, the revolutionary documentary filmmakers who followed the Beatles throughout their entire two-week first visit, unearthing 17 minutes of never-before-seen footage. in the process. All of the Maysles’ material was then restored to crystalline 4K by director Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post studio in New Zealand.
Meanwhile, the iconic of the Beatles Ed Sullivan Show performances and raucous first US concert at the Washington (DC) Coliseum were demixed and remixed using the same AI-powered innovations as their other recent releases. And a handful of hardcore fans were asked to reflect on their youthful obsession, 60 years later.
The result is a triumph of technology And storytelling – our clearest picture yet of what Beatlemania looked, sounded and, most importantly, felt like for those who experienced it.
For more information on how to create Beatles-’64Yahoo Entertainment spoke with Tedeschi and a producer of the film, Margaret Bodde.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
This is a film – a very intimate film – about the moment America fell in love with the Beatles. But of course there is a certain degree of familiarity here. Every Beatles fan has the iconography of this first American visit in mind: the plane at JFK, the funny press conferences, the screaming girls swarming through the car, the Ed Sullivan Showthe DC concert in the boxing ring. And much of the Maysles Brothers footage has been used in documentaries before. Was it difficult to find a way in – an approach that felt fresh? And how would you describe the approach you arrived at?
Tedeschi: We realized from the start that it was a challenge, but we had several advantages. A big one was that Park Road, Peter Jackson’s company, had restored the statues. And it just looks great. It looks better to me than 16mm film when I worked in 16mm. It’s so clean, but it still feels cinematic.
As for our vision, we wanted something that captured the joy of the Beatles’ music and the joy of the fans at that moment. After Kennedy’s assassination, there was a generational change in America. We wanted to find people who could really say something about their experience, so that in some way we could experience it too.
Bodde: A lot of unseen Maysles Brothers material is from people on the street – mainly young women – who are finally getting the chance to talk about their feelings for this band. It’s so visceral, so emotional. In the film you really see them as they were: these young teenagers who got there before everyone else. And they were right. They were right to focus on this band. They were right to be as excited as she was.
Once you dove in, what surprised you You in the material, in the making of the film – and what do you hope audiences will be surprised by when they watch it?
Tedeschi: The girls on the street surprised me.
Why?
Tedeschi: They had a lot to say and they had a lot of life. They really capture how emotional that moment was – what it meant to them even then. When you hear that teenage perspective, it’s clear that these young women discovered something that no one else knew. And it turned out to be true.
There’s a technological element to this too, right? Maysles’ footage has been beautifully restored and the live recordings have been demixed and remixed in the same way as the recently reissued albums. How important was this technology in making such an iconic moment feel fresh and new?
Bodde: I think it made all the difference. By simply peeling back the layers of time and degradation and being able to cleanly reveal these beautiful black and white images, those four young men come straight to you, with no artifacts of time to get in your way.
Tedeschi: And the music… I don’t think anyone ever really heard the Beatles at that concert at the Washington Coliseum. The audio restoration is simply stunning. On the old songs that we all heard, the mono tracks, all you hear is the screams of the crowd, you know? Finally, hearing the tape is key to the film’s proper functioning. They were just a great rock ‘n’ roll band in early 1964. That cover of ‘Long Tall Sally’? They have so much fun. They are so young. They have so much energy. It all translates into the music.
The big question you ask in the film is why – why did this happen? You start with the assassination of JFK and end with that. As Paul McCartney puts it on screen: “Maybe America needed something like the Beatles to bring it out of its mourning and just say, ‘Life goes on.’ Or as writer Joe Queenan remembers: “My father never recovered from Kennedy’s assassination – but we did.”
At the same time, you also discuss how the Beatles broke the barriers of sex, gender, race, and so on. Where do you end up after going deep and making this film? How do you explain Beatlemania?
Tedeschi: I don’t know there is an explanation. It was a generational change. I always go back to what John says at the end of the film: that they weren’t necessarily leaders, but they saw what was coming and somehow captured the energy of it. They became part of the change.
Bodde: One of the things that struck me is when John talks about the end of military conscription in England, and he says that they were the first generation who were ‘allowed to live’. So all these guys started bands instead. So thank God for England, because America didn’t fully appreciate its own music at the time.
That was really black music.
Bodde: Right. Soul, rhythm and blues, rock ‘n’ roll. America needed these outsiders to bring back our own songs.
Going back to those teenage girls and what they first intuited, something that feminist writer and activist Betty Friedan said in the film really resonated with me. It was this idea that the Beatles represented “a new man strong enough to be gentle.”
Bodde: The gender problem was enormous. Somehow the Beatles looked at love and romance in a more equal way. It was quite difficult to capture. But it wasn’t like, “I’m going to take you.” It was more like, ‘We’re going to do this together. I’m going to hold your hand.’
Another thing that really stood out in the film is how America collectively experienced the Beatles. But today we are all in our separate algorithmic echo chambers, experiencing our own versions of reality. Do you think we could ever experience anything like the Beatles again?
Bodde: Our technology is great. It does a lot for us, but it also really divides and separates us. So in that sense the film does provide a historical context to think about – where we were and where we are now. And I feel like we’ve lost something by not having more shared experiences. There’s a sadness in that.
Tedeschi: On the other hand, with everything that’s happened in the last twenty years, it’s almost like we’re trying to get back to the America that existed before the Beatles. I was born in ’62. So I grew up in the sixties and early seventies. And at one point I said to Scorsese that all those things – that period – seemed normal to me: the Beatles, New Wave cinema. It was normal because I knew it.
And he laughed. He says, “No, that wasn’t normal. That is something that happened thanks to us.”
Beatles-’64 begins streaming on November 29 on Disney+.