(And while McCartney makes a prescient joke about people in the future thinking that the Beatles broke up “because Yoko sat on an amp,” in other conversations he goes out of his way to defend the relationship between Lennon and Yoko Ono, who spends much of the movie sitting silently by Lennon’s side.)Īt the beginning of each episode, “Get Back” includes title cards that concede, “Numerous editorial choices had to be made during the production of these films” and then promise, “At all times, the film-makers have attempted to present an accurate portrait of the events depicted and the people involved.” It shows the bonds that tied the band together and the pressures that were pushing them apart it includes the moment when Harrison (temporarily) quit the band with a terse “See you ’round the clubs,” but it also goes out of its way to include montages that focus on the apparent joy these men had in playing music together.
While Lindsay-Hogg’s film is widely considered a downer, Jackson’s is too many different things to be summed up that way. ‘The Beatles: Get Back’ Trailer Promises the ‘Most Intimate Footage’ Ever (Video) And with access to all of the original footage and no two-hour time constraints, the filmmaker has both restored the footage to startling clarity and produced a massive seven-hour, 48-minute look at 22 days in two studios and on one rooftop. You could think of “The Beatles: Get Back” as Jackson’s film version of the box set: It expands the “Let It Be” film to make a case that there was a lot more interesting stuff going on in January 1969 than we saw in that movie. In recent years, the “Let It Be” album has gotten a couple of makeovers, from the Paul McCartney-driven “Let It Be… Naked” version that was released in 2003 to a new box set with five discs of alternate takes and remixes. Lindsay-Hogg turned his footage into the 1970 doc “Let It Be,” a grim chronicle of a fracturing band that didn’t satisfy the group or the audience. The cameras rolled, the Beatles almost broke up and the concert turned into a 42-minute performance on the roof of the band’s London headquarters, a gig about which none of them were particularly enthusiastic.
Those three weeks were exhaustively documented by filmmaker Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who was brought in to shoot what was envisioned as a TV doc that would follow the Beatles as they made a “back-to-basics” album and then gave their first live concert since 1966. Peter Jackson’s ‘The Beatles: Get Back’: We’ve Got a Feeling You’ll Like Doc’s First Clip (Video)ĭespite the presence of such classic songs as “Get Back,” “Across the Universe” and the title track, “Let It Be” is a haphazard album recorded during a stressful period in the band’s existence.