It is a cold January morning in 1969, and three of the four Beatles are assembled in a cavernous film studio in London, with cameras rolling and microphones everywhere.
With Ringo Starr and George Harrison sitting groggily before him, a tray of toast and jam by their side, McCartney starts to strum and sing, searching for inspiration.
Lennon, who seems to space out for much of the meeting, declares vaguely that “communication” with an audience is his only aim, while an impatient McCartney challenges his bandmates to show some enthusiasm for the project or abandon it.
Those back-to-back scenes in Peter Jackson’s documentary series “The Beatles: Get Back,” a seven-hour-plus project that will be shown in three parts on Disney Plus from Nov.
“It’s sort of that one impossible fan dream,” Jackson said in a video interview from Wellington, New Zealand, where he has spent much of the last four years in a darkened editing suite surrounded by Beatles memorabilia.
The band’s journey in January 1969 began with intense pressure to put on a high-concept live show and ended with something wonderfully low-concept: an impromptu lunchtime performance on a London rooftop that reminded the world of the band’s majesty, spontaneity and wit.
That period was already the subject of “Let It Be,” a 1970 vérité film by Michael Lindsay-Hogg; its soundtrack was the Beatles’ final studio LP.
Yet that narrative has long been challenged by some Beatles aficionados.
Jackson’s film, arriving with the authority of a lightning bolt hurled from a mountaintop in Middle-earth, may become the final word in the argument over this period, though the story it tells is far from simple.
The Beatles, or at least their corporate surrogates, have embraced Jackson’s retelling, and a preview of the film highlighted moments of brotherly silliness, like the band dancing and clowning in the studio.
For fans who remember Lindsay-Hogg’s film, or have read dismal anecdotes in any of dozens of Beatles books, Jackson’s scenes of lighthearted antics and creative breakthroughs jump off the screen.
Day after day, new material takes shape.
Generations of fans, if they’ve seen it at all, have had access to the movie only in crummy bootlegs transferred from videotape.
Jackson grabbed a vintage VHS copy and said he had long regretted not buying it when visiting the United States in the early 1980s, but the format was unplayable on his machine in New Zealand.
Jackson’s restored images in “Get Back” are strikingly clear, and help flesh out a story of creative anxiety and creature comforts inside Fortress Beatle.
But the misery is never far away, and as the arguments grind on, it starts to seem miraculous that the Beatles can still come together at all.
After Harrison walks out, the remaining Beatles jam loudly and angrily.
Yet it is never clear whether the Beatles’ conflicts are caused by the events of the day or by the accumulated stress of years in the spotlight.
“They were doing things that they’d never done before, and they were very, very worried that it was going to take off,” Brown said.
Neil Finn, of the New Zealand group Crowded House, said that Jackson showed his band about four hours of footage earlier this year.
“Paul asking John if he had any new songs, and John kind of blustering with his answer: Uh, maybe, not really.
But the stakes were incredibly high for the Beatles, and the prospect of the band’s dissolution hangs like a cloud over almost the entire film.
To some extent, “Get Back” and the original “Let It Be” are exhibits in a study of truth.
But Jackson’s film makes clear that the end was nigh.
Those problems are foreshadowed in “Get Back” with the utterance of a single name: Allen Klein, the American business manager who arrives a few days before the rooftop show to pitch his services for the band.
If Beatles’ scholarship and fandom has proved anything, it is that even a contradictory summation of the band and its influence can still hold true.