George—in black fur coat and lime green pants—straps on a Telecaster as John arrives to take in the weird scene through gold-framed spectacles: amplifiers and mics, movie cameras and crewmen scurrying around the rooftop of a five-story building on a cold gray day.
The approximately 43-minute sequence from director Peter Jackson’s forthcoming documentary, The Beatles: Get Back—screened exclusively for Vanity Fair—shows the full, uninterrupted concert on the roof of 3 Savile Row, the band’s headquarters, including iconic performances that would appear on their last album, Let It Be.
For a Beatles fan, this is manna from heaven, every detail taking on immense power: Paul’s brown shoe tapping in rhythm to George’s guitar; John flubbing a line, George smiling at the fuckup, Paul peering over to make sure John picks up the slack; an assistant crouching to hold a clipboard of newly written lyrics for “Dig a Pony” so John can remember them; car horns blowing on the streets as John belts out “Danny Boy” between songs; the beauty of Ringo’s observant eyes behind the kit and George’s Mona Lisa smile as nerves settle and the band soars behind John in the transcendent chorus of “Don’t Let Me Down.” We witness John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr lock together as a band, in real time, and the alchemical mix of tough and tender—McCartney helming his Höfner bass like a bearded sea captain, Lennon’s vulnerable smile peeking through long hair—is freshly shocking.
“We went to London and screened that to Apple,” says Jackson, referring to the company founded by the Beatles in 1968, which still manages their legacy.
The whole thing—including a comic subplot involving a baffled 19-year-old policeman responding to noise complaints and getting a sly runaround from Apple staffers—forms the climax of Jackson’s documentary, a 21-day diary of the Beatles in their intimate creative world.
All this footage was originally shot for Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s vérité film Let It Be, which included a roughly 22-minute version of the rooftop concert but became known, by the few who saw it, for very different reasons.
As he watched, says Jackson, history shifted: “What I found is that I was laughing continuously.
When Jackson went backstage at a Paul McCartney concert in Auckland, New Zealand, in 2017, he was surprised to find McCartney nervous to meet him, concerned with what Jackson had found in the footage.
Because he has never seen this stuff, even though he lived through it.
Last year, when Disney released a teaser for Get Back—meant to assuage expectant fans after the project was delayed for a year because of COVID-19—the montage of never-seen footage showing Lennon gleefully horsing around the studio with McCartney , and Ono chatting warmly with McCartney’s wife, Linda Eastman, looked revelatory, astonishing, and a bit suspicious to fans with even a passing knowledge of Beatles history.
The books, of course, have long been in accord: The Let It Be sessions were a miserable time for the Beatles, an inflection point for their coming breakup as Ono became a wedge between Lennon and the band, and Harrison yearned to break free from the mop-top machine .
And so went the story until 48 years later, when Apple Corps CEO Jeff Jones and Apple executive Jonathan Clyde invited Jackson to their offices in London to discuss a traveling Beatles exhibition that would feature unrelated archival films. They asked Jackson whether he could update old footage using the same technology he used to revive vintage World War I reels for the acclaimed 2018 documentary They Shall Not Grow Old.
Unlike Ron Howard’s Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years, the 2016 documentary about the mid-’60s period before the Beatles, overwhelmed by fan mania, stopped playing live, Jackson’s film isn’t just a delicious peek at lost footage .
Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the son of Irish actor Geraldine Fitzgerald, was the 28-year-old director of British pop music TV show Ready Steady Go! when the Beatles asked him to produce a series of promotional movies for their 1968 singles.
And so on the second day of January, 1969, the Beatles showed up at the cavernous Twickenham Studios in London to begin rehearsing songs for a TV show that would also be the basis of a live album.
“Everything comes to a halt for a couple of days, and we’re all sitting around and doing nothing much.
“That little episode,” he continues, “has been taken and completely blown up by some people to represent acrimony between George and Paul and underlying severe tension.
The TV show idea was scrapped, and instead Beatles management decided to expand the project into a feature film to fulfill a three-picture contract that manager Brian Epstein had forged with United Artists before he died in 1967.
For his own project, Jackson decided that when Harrison and McCartney begin fighting—a brief but tense scene in which McCartney placates a wounded Harrison after criticizing his guitar parts—he would show not only that but the aftermath as well.
“If this was a fictional movie about a fictional band, having one of the band members walk out at the end of the first act—it’d be the ideal thing that you’d actually write into a script,” says Jackson.
One involved an amphitheater on the coast of Africa at sunrise, with people streaming in like nomads arriving to the Holy Land; another, encouraged by Lennon, imagined a concert on the deck of an ocean liner full of fans at sea.
By the time Lindsay-Hogg screened the first cut of the Let It Be movie for the band—the night Neil Armstrong walked on the moon—there were clear signs that the Beatles were fracturing.
When Lennon and Ono watched the final cut—with Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner and his wife, Jane, in a movie house in San Francisco—they both wept while watching the rooftop sequence.
In the decades since, the Let It Be film was essentially buried.
A significant technical issue also hampered any revival: In 1971, says Jackson, an Apple employee who worked in the Savile Row studio stole 140 hours of the audio, which left only a mono version used for the final cut of the film.
Mark Lewisohn, the foremost Beatles scholar in the world, spent a month listening to the nearly 98 hours of studio recordings the Beatles made in January 1969 and, like Jackson, was amazed by what he discovered, declaring, “It completely transformed my view on what that month had been.” Far from a period of disintegration, says Jackson, “these three weeks are about the most productive and constructive period in the Beatles’ entire career.” The tracks you hear on Let It Be were recorded during this three-week period.
Last year, McCartney told the Sunday Times that seeing uncut footage from Get Back was a relief precisely because it countered his lingering guilt over the breakup of the Beatles: “It was so reaffirming to me.
After talking to McCartney in New Zealand, Jackson went to Starr’s home in Los Angeles to show him the footage on an iPad , and began corresponding with Olivia Harrison, George’s widow, who threw her support behind the project despite the documentation of George’s discontent.
But what of Ono? For decades, she was a vigilant and astute gatekeeper of Lennon’s legacy, a powerful and opinionated voice among the four parties who control how Beatles music and history is curated and reissued.
There’s no denying that the first cracks in the Beatles façade had already appeared by the time of the Let It Be sessions, and that both fans and the press saw Ono as the bête noire in the plotline.
Jackson is cognizant of the delicacy of a project in which he second-guesses another filmmaker’s creative decisions.
Lindsay-Hogg defends his own film as more “original” and “up” than people remember.
As for Jackson, he’s developed a deeper admiration for the original, in part because of the circumstances under which Lindsay-Hogg labored, what with an increasingly acrimonious band hovering around him.
“One of our mantras is that Let It Be is one movie, and our movie is a different movie,” he says, “and we’re trying not to repeat any footage, with one or two tiny exceptions where we can’t do anything else.
Fifty-one years after the group broke up, Jackson’s film is probably the last revelatory document we’re likely to see.
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