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A HARD
’
DAY S
NIGHT
THE BEATLES
A PRIVATE ARCHIVE
Text by MARK LEWISOHN
Edited by MARTHA KARSH
Foreword by RICHARD LESTER
For Bruce
I’m happy just to dance with you.
Martha
With this dedication, the Karsh family—Martha, Katie, Jeffrey, Michael,
and Jacki—is making a generous gift to MusiCares, a nonprofit that assists
music people in times of critical need.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The fab six: The Beatles with their film producer Walter Shenson
(center) and film director Richard Lester (left), two Anglophile
Americans in the right place at the right time to help them make
an enduring classic movie.
The heart of this book is a trove of rare and remarkable photographs and ephemera from the
private archive of Walter Shenson, the producer of The Beatles’ 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night.
In 2001 my husband, Bruce, and I acquired both the copyright to the film and the vast
archive from Mr. Shenson’s estate. The photographs—film stills, on-set production images,
and head shots—most never before published, depict The Beatles as they were in 1964:
young, authentic, and extraordinarily talented, focused but also lighthearted and cheeky.
The images also capture the zany exuberance of the entire cast and story, as well as the
alchemy of director Richard Lester’s filmmaking, and herald a new age of music and film.
The ephemera are diverse, film-related items that Mr. Shenson collected and treasured
enough to save for decades.
This book was conceived as a surprise sixtieth birthday and thirty-fifth anniversary gift
for my husband, a lifelong fan of The Beatles. I thank Kim Hendrickson from The Criterion
Collection for the book idea, which arose during the many hours she spent examining our
archive for her work on the film’s fiftieth-anniversary restoration. I also thank my friend
Wendy Kaplan, curator of decorative arts and design at the Los Angeles County Museum
of Art, for her encouragement and invaluable guidance throughout the project.
A book of course has space limitations, and choosing the “best” from the thousands
of fascinating photographs and ephemera was a herculean task. Here we present a selection of these photographs in film sequence, and highlight noteworthy ephemera in unique
groupings. Curation and clearance of materials, and design of the book and cover, was
a meticulous, carefully considered, and ultimately joyous collaboration over more than a year
with Lorraine Wild and Ching Wang at Green Dragon Office, and Beth Goldstein and Joel
Kozberg; I gratefully acknowledge their dedication and prodigious efforts. For me it was
also a labor of love and a tribute, both to my husband and to The Beatles, surely the most
influential musicians of our time.
The colorful introductory essay, captions, and epilogue are by Mark Lewisohn, an
English author and historian who is widely considered the world’s leading authority on The
Beatles. I thank Mark for his lively text, insights, and graciousness in sharing his encyclopedic
knowledge of the film and The Beatles. I also deeply appreciate and thank Richard Lester
for the foreword: a visionary director’s wry and personal reflections, from the film’s first
on-set moments through its enduring legacy.
I join fans everywhere in applauding Apple Corps Ltd. for its vigilant protection and
preservation of all things Beatles, and extend my particular appreciation for its support
of this project. Finally, thanks go to the Phaidon Publishing team—both in New York and
London—who enthusiastically took on a project proposed by a neophyte book creator
with more vision than experience, and patiently helped make it a reality.
Martha Karsh
FOREWORD
We all met at Paddington Station, London, on the first day of making A Hard Day’s Night.
Seeing The Beatles literally being chased down the platform by their fans, I grabbed an Arriflex
camera and started shooting—and a little bit of that footage got into the film. George
Harrison was shaking his fist at me as if to say, “Why are we being subjected to this when
we’re supposed to be actors?” and Rita, the continuity girl, made a note that I’d shot
the sequence without her knowledge and that The Beatles were wearing the wrong clothing.
She wrote: “If this is how it’s started, I don’t think I’ll last a week.”
At the end of that first day, after we’d been down to the West Country on the train
and then returned to Paddington, we lost half of our work because fans thought the young
lad carrying all the undeveloped film was a Beatle. He had a Beatle haircut, so they chased
after him, he panicked, dropped some of the tins, and—because it was negative stock—
the light got in and ruined it.
That was the first day, but it got better after that.
I knew very quickly, soon after we started filming A Hard Day’s Night, that one day—
when I fell under a bus and died—the newspaper headline would be BEATLES DIRECTOR
IN DEATH DRAMA. And still, more than fifty years later, I’m sure that’s the way it’s going
to be. I’ve had a lovely life in the cinema and a career that has thrilled me—and sometimes
entertained audiences—but I know it’s because of The Beatles that I’ll be remembered.
And I’m very grateful for that.
Richard Lester, Director
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CONTENTS
FOREWORD
10
A HARD DAY’S NIGHT
THE BEATLES’ FIRST RUNNING, JUMPING & STANDING STILL FILM
15
THE FILM
INSIDE AND OUT
33
AFTERWARDS
273
Epilogue
274
Fifty Years On: Select Reviews
279
A HARD DAY’S NIGHT
THE BEATLES’ FIRST RUNNING,
JUMPING & STANDING STILL FILM
MARK LEWISOHN
talent-show winners. They were four war babies from Liverpool, England, brimming with
courage and unanimity of purpose. Keep moving forward; stay ahead of the game; tomorrow not yesterday. They really did think differently than anyone else, with a sideways slant
on life, and (though few noticed it) they said out loud: We’re in this to please ourselves,
to do things our way.
Starting in 1960, when they quit school/college/jobs and fixed on playing, everything
had been happening at high speed; 1960 was already fast, 1961 and ’62 much faster again,
and now in 1963 they were in toppermost gear. The film that would be called A Hard Day’s
Night budded merely ten months after the release of their first
record, at which point this weirdly named bunch of longhairs were
known nowhere beyond some sections of Liverpool and even
smaller bits of Hamburg, Germany.
Their October 1962 debut, “Love Me Do,” was a new sound.
People who heard it stopped and took notice. It snagged the ear,
and many bought it—the record was on the charts for four months,
remarkable for a debut. The first three years of the sixties were
swamped by instrumentalists and fifties-style solo singers, but The
Beatles were hitting a blues groove with a countryish sound—
harmonica, acoustic guitar, bass guitar, drums, harmonized vocals
start to finish. Their combination of these elements—screamingly
obvious in hindsight—was a development so unconsidered that in
their record company’s first press release, the publicist went for the
underline key to emphasize they were “singers and instrumentalists.”
The now well-established rock band formula of three guitars
and drums—the musicians singing lead and harmonies and usually
writing their own songs—wasn’t being done by anyone else in the
public ear, so when people heard The Beatles they heard change.
It happened quickly, as ever with The Beatles. Inside six
months that group model became all anyone in Britain wanted, and
in just a few further months, soon after the start of 1964, it was
all anyone in America wanted. This was a 180-degree turnaround.
In 1962 The Beatles had been rejected by every British record company because they were different, and they were told, in words that
bruised and stuck tight in their craw: (1) they’d never make it from
a Liverpool base, and (2) they should dump the name The Beatles
because it was ugly and stupid and no one would ever remember
it. But they toughed it out—they stuck to what they did and the way they did it. The world
would have to bend, because they weren’t going to.
And now, it had.
In the Britain of late 1963, to call The Beatles “big” or “famous” would have been
to black-and-white the situation somewhat. No adjective can adequately convey how huge
they were in their homeland. The Beatles were the biggest thing to happen in the seventy
years of mass entertainment, and that was just the start. They were opening up creative
opportunities for generations. They were revolutionizing fashion and hairstyles, accelerating
changes in society.
IT’S NOT ONLY WHAT THEY DID—IT’S WHAT THEY DIDN’T DO.
The Beatles’ first film was A Hard Day’s Night for one reason: they said no to at least
five others. Invitations started arriving in February or March 1963, and each was batted
away. They wanted to make a movie, but if this meant appearing in the usual low-standard
fare, they’d risk missing out. These four young men were nothing if not true to themselves.
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Richy Starkey knew all about
grotty rock films, because they’d been paying to see them since Rock Around the Clock
in 1956. This set the bar for the many that followed: integrity wasn’t on the menu, finesse
never figured. There was one main honorable exception, The Girl Can’t Help It (1956, director Frank Tashlin), but most rock films were squalid little affairs with crass storylines and
dialogue like “Hey, man, those squares don’t dig the most at all!” People went because,
as George Harrison later explained, “We were just desperate to get anything. Whatever film
came out, we’d try to see it. Whatever record was being played, we’d try to listen to,
because there was very little of anything.”
The showbiz term was jukebox musical and the formula was fixed: get some big names
to the studio for a few hours, film them faking a performance, string the acts together,
push the movie out, take whatever little money there was, run. As John Lennon explained
in Melody Maker (the British music weekly newspaper) in June 1963, The Beatles told their
manager Brian Epstein they’d never appear in one: “We’ve been offered parts in a package
show sort of film, where about twenty different pop stars all appear with no story and
no meaning. We prefer to wait until we find a film with a good plot that will hold the interest. Otherwise it might do us more harm than good.”
Their scorn didn’t extend only to jukebox musicals. The Beatles also ridiculed the
vaguely polished kind of musical, the modern but still trite moneymakers starring Elvis Presley or his number one British rival, Cliff
Richard. The big film of 1962 in Britain and internationally (though
not in America) was The Young Ones, in which Cliff and some other
happy youths leapt to put on a talent show “right here,” and the
fusty local bigwig threw aside his objections and did the twist. John,
Paul, George, and Ringo had a word for anything like this they considered stupid or obvious: soft.
The Beatles always had opinions—always—but the public
overwhelmingly saw their more-evident virtues. They were new
and they were different. They were intelligent and articulate. They
were dynamic, very funny, and visually attractive to both sexes and
all ages. They were alive, singing and playing music that was rhythmic, melodic, original, and smart—ear-grabbing, soul-seizing pop
songs mostly written by two of them, Lennon and McCartney.
The moment The Beatles arrived, everything before them
was old.
They treated the public to a collective four-man personality
stamp, at the heart of which was an unprecedented and compelling
blend of ability, cheek, candor, and steel. They were no one’s
puppets, no synthetic act to be exploited by a Svengali, no TV
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John, Paul, George, and Ringo resisted labels, but whatever other people chose
to call their music—pop, rock, the Mersey Sound—it was something that, in the few years
since “Rock Around the Clock,” had never been regarded as intelligent or artistic. It was
strictly for adolescents, before they grew up, before they became sensible. In Britain (the
same was also broadly true elsewhere), it was mostly for the working class. Schoolgirls and
shopgirls swooned over male singers whose names were fake and images were ersatz
Hollywood beefcake. Boys, if they bothered with it at all, were mostly interested in the
music and how it was made. Again, now: sea change. The Beatles’ breakthrough stimulated
a giant leap toward universality of audience, music for all. Rock was now on its way to
being everywhere, filling hearts, minds, pages, airwaves, arenas, record stores, and the narratives of generations.
By this point, they were no longer the only ones doing the thinking. Creative and
business ideas were beginning to pour into Brian Epstein’s office, because if you worked in
the business of entertainment in London in late 1963, The Beatles were the mightiest totem
to dance around. One of these ideas came from the film company United Artists.
For several years, pop films in England were conceived the same way, by the music
publishing divisions of film production companies. The company made the film, and its publishing arm got the song copyrights and, sometimes, the soundtrack record rights. What
eventually became A Hard Day’s Night began in August 1963 inside the head of Noel Rogers.
He ran United Artists Music, the British publishing office of the American film corporation,
and his idea was straightforward enough: produce a film with The Beatles, secure its song
copyrights, and take the recordings for UA’s record label. Rogers was on a hot streak.
He’d just persuaded UA to commission Elmer Bernstein’s music for The Great Escape, and
got Monty Norman and John Barry to compose for UA’s new and instantly lucrative series
of James Bond movies. The Beatles would complete a brilliant hat trick.
Rogers knew The Beatles’ song publisher, Dick James, very well, and they met to discuss the idea. It wasn’t as easy as the UA man expected. The copyrights were tied up, James
explained, vested in Northern Songs, a new company he owned fifty-fifty with Lennon,
McCartney, and Epstein. The only way UA could have British rights in the film songs would
be if these owners voted in favor, and why would they? On the flip side, good news:
a share of the US song copyrights could be made available. Similarly, while The Beatles’
recorded music was tied up in Britain, the delicious property of EMI, it could be negotiated
for America because, at this time, US interest in The Beatles was patchy at best. On top
of these rights, of course, UA would have the film’s boxoffice
receipts, to be divided between the contracted parties.
James conferred with Epstein and passed back his and
The Beatles’ response: UA was welcome to make an offer and talk
about who could be involved. Now the film company had to
decide. It had a blessedly short chain of command—there were no
top-heavy management tiers, no financial officers or marketing men
expecting to interfere, just a handful of creative film businessmen
to say yes or no. Some of the discussion was done by phone, but
mostly it happened in telexes and letters sent airmail. Rogers,
in London, recommended his idea to Mike Stewart in New York.
As worldwide head of UA publishing, Stewart conferred with
David Picker, also in New York. As vice president of UA Films, Picker
talked to George “Bud” Ornstein, chief of UA’s considerable production operations in Europe, based back in London.
They discussed the risk. UA would be digging into its pocket
without getting publishing or recording rights in The Beatles’ biggest
territory. Yes, the company could have them for America, but who
in America wanted The Beatles? For that matter, who in Britain
might want them by the time the film was shot, edited, and distributed? Bubbles burst. Such was the magnitude of The Beatles, UA
stayed in the game, agreeing to offer a black-and-white movie,
budget £200,000 (then $560,000). They could have pledged more,
or less; the point was, it was enough.
FILM ALWAYS INTERESTED THE BEATLES. As early as April 1963, while saying “no thanks”
to those unwanted invitations, they were having discussions with two young turks on the
London scene. One was Giorgio Gomelsky, a jazz promoter and aspiring film producer
who was also pushing an unknown, unsigned London R&B group called the Rollin’ Stones;
the other was Ronan O’Rahilly, a firebrand Irishman who, in March 1964, would upset
the British government by launching Radio Caroline, an illegal offshore pop music station.
They and The Beatles talked for a while about making a twenty-minute experimental cinema
verité piece, an eccentric little black-and-white B-feature something like The Running,
Jumping & Standing Still Film, an adored dialogue-free short made by Peter Sellers and Dick
Lester. But everyone was busy and distribution was going to be
a problem; the project got to synopsis stage and then stalled.
The Beatles’ interest in making a film—one they were comfortable with and over which they could exert influence—prompted
an approach to a writer of their choosing. This was Alun Owen.
Taking matters into their own hands, they let Brian Epstein send
him a letter telling him he was “particularly suitable” to the task.
Owen wrote drama with edgy humor and had never written
a film. He’d grown up in Liverpool, understood the phrasing
and cadences of the local vernacular, and was writing stage and TV
plays so deprecatingly forthright about the city’s ailments that some
Liverpudlians fretted about them being publicly aired. Owen’s bestknown work was the single TV drama No Tram to Lime Street, made
in 1959. On September 6, 1963, when Epstein wrote to him, Owen
had a play running in Liverpool’s main theater and another one on
TV. He was also writing the book of Maggie May (about Liverpool’s
infamous nineteenth-century robbing prostitute), which was to
be the next London stage musical from Midas man Lionel Bart.
Owen was clearly a busy man, but Epstein expressed his and
The Beatles’ great admiration and invited him to consider writing
a film for them.
Alun Owen, Liverpool-Welsh working-class playwright of repute.
He’d already been approached by Brian Epstein to write a Beatles
film if the chance came.
Richard Lester, the innovative Philadelphian in London. Because
he’d directed The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film, he was
the man in The Beatles’ eyes.
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