Sixty years later, the film looks at the Beatles’ arrival in America, with new interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.
Martin Scorsese will produce a new documentary to mark the 60th anniversary of Beatlemania. Beatles ’64, which premieres on Disney+ on November 29, will include new interviews with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and the Beatlemaniacs who followed them, as well as footage from the band’s first U.S. concert and appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. All archival footage has been restored to 4K, and audio was demixed by WingNut Films and then remixed by Giles Martin, who oversaw the Music for the documentary series Get Back de Peter Jackson.
Filmmaker David Tedeschi, who co-directed a documentary about David Johansen of the New York Dolls and was Emmy-nominated for his documentaries on George Harrison and Bob Dylan, is the film’s director. This includes sequences filmed by documentarians Albert and David Maysles and traces the triumphant welcome given to the group at JFK airport in New York on February 7, 1964. On February 9, they performed three songs on the Ed Sullivan Show in front of 73 million viewers. Two days later, they played their first-ever U.S. concert at the Washington Coliseum in Washington, D.C. The filmmakers promise to include behind-the-scenes footage shedding light on how the quartet handled their instant fame.
Besides Scorsese, the film’s list of producers includes McCartney (who last year released a book of photos of the Beatles in 1963 and 1964), Starr, Olivia Harrison and Sean Ono Lenon, among others.
In an interview given to Rolling Stone In 1979, George Harrison expressed his ambivalence towards Beatlemania: ” We were four relatively sane people immersed in madness. People used us as an excuse to do anything, and we were the victims. […] Most of the time it was fantastic, but when it really got to Beatlemania it was either stop or die. We were almost killed in a number of situations: planes catching fire, people trying to shoot down the plane, and riots everywhere we went. All this aged me. But we had fun. »
Kory Grow
Translated by the editorial staff
France
Music
