All this started with the “Hey Jude” video I directed for the Beatles, in August of 1968. “All this” meaning my film Let It Be, Peter Jackson’s Get Back, and more than 50 years of questioning and puzzlement: What ever happened to Let It Be?
Paul McCartney and I first worked together in 1966, when I directed the videos for “Paperback Writer” and “Rain” with the Beatles. He and I met in London a few days before we were to shoot the “Hey Jude” video.
“There’s one big problem with the song,” I said to Paul.
“What’s that, Mike?,” he asked. I always knew when he called me “Mike” rather than “Michael” that he could be preparing to disagree. Maybe he was thinking I hadn’t understood one of his great lyrics, “The movement you need is on your shoulder.”
“The chorus,” I said.
“What’s wrong with the chorus, Mike?”
“It’s too long, and no matter how charismatic, beautiful, and talented the four of you are, I can’t just be on you lot for four minutes.”
“Any ideas?”
“Yes—an audience, a crowd.”
I explained that I didn’t mean just members of the fan club, the usual suspects, but a mixed group of people—kids, sure, but also housewives, the village postman. Maybe a young guy wearing some sort of uniform—a hotel bellboy, as it turned out—and especially people of color, Black and brown, some wearing that most elegant of headgear, a turban, who would show what England now was, very different from the predominately white society they had grown up in.
Before I had finished, Paul was completing my sentences and I his. We both thought this group of people would take care of the “problem” with the chorus, such as it was.
We did six takes of “Hey Jude,” and between each take the video truck would load a fresh two-inch tape—this was the Beatles, after all—and take 10 or so minutes to do it, checking sync pulses, audio with sound truck, et cetera.
In the first break, the Beatles sat on their little rostrum chatting and smoking, and our very mixed audience did the same, more or less, in their own separate groups.
But in the second break, the Beatles took it in—there were 200 or more people hanging around as they were, and the equation they’d first learned as teenagers kicked in again: Band + Audience = Play.
And they started to play. Not their own songs so much as songs they loved—Buddy Holly, Tamla Motown, Little Richard.
They did this in each break with more and more enthusiasm, them playing and the audience dancing and singing along with more excitement each time.
And here’s the “key point.” The Beatles had stopped touring in 1966 and had not played to any kind of audience since, and didn’t want to. The last tour had gotten too crazy—Beatles records being burned in the South because of a remark John had made, a fan swan-diving off the second tier of a stadium in San Francisco, screaming so loudly they couldn’t hear themselves play.
The “Hey Jude” video did well, with a really good reaction and increased record sales the day after it aired on TV.
Then Mick Jagger asked me to come up with an idea for a TV special for the Rolling Stones and installed me in a nice room in their large office, in Maddox Street. A few days turned into a couple of weeks as I sat there doodling on a pad in front of me, wondering what a Rolling Stones TV special would look like, worrying if I could ever figure it out.
The phone rang. It was maybe early October now. It was Paul, asking if I could come over to the Beatles’ building in nearby Savile Row, a short walk from Maddox Street.
A large multi-purpose room on the first floor. At one end were chairs and a sofa, a table with magazines and music papers on it. Over by the window looking down onto the street was a large round table for lunches prepared by two young women in the adjoining kitchen. There was an executive-type desk in the middle of the room with a pen set for signing contracts and a couple of rotary telephones, and over by the other window, sitting at a small table, were John and Paul.
John was smoking. They were both drinking mugs of tea. Did I want some? No, thanks.
“Well, Michael,” Paul began. “When we did that ‘Hey Jude’ with the audience and we were playing and they seemed to really get into it … and we sort of liked it … well, you know we haven’t played to any sort of audience since we stopped in 1966, but we”—and here he looked at John, who said nothing but took a drag on his cigarette—“we were thinking maybe, just maybe, we could do some sort of a concert somewhere, and would you be interested in doing that with us?”
Over the next couple of months, as I was prepping what now was called The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, I would have irregular meetings with all four Beatles. There seemed to be what I’d call interest in the idea of a new Beatles concert, if not outright enthusiasm. But everyone was on the bus.
Then Paul had an idea that proved to have historic consequences. He said that maybe we should get a couple of cameras to film some of the rehearsals for the concert, and we could use any bits that were fun to make a little trailer which would be shown the week before what was now (in theory) a television special of the concert.
On January 2, 1969, the Beatles; our D.P., Tony Richmond; a two-man film crew and small sound crew; and yours truly gathered in the same Twickenham studio where we’d shot “Hey Jude” five months earlier.
The Beatles adapted to the film crew fairly quickly. I’d instructed the crew to keep a distance, in the early days anyway, to be discreet, and as things went on we could move closer. Except for bits and pieces, no one had ever really filmed the Beatles rehearsing before, and I was conscious that some responsibility was on me.
After 10 days or so, feeling disgruntled and somewhat frustrated by not being able to get his friends Paul and John to really pay attention to his songs, George Harrison quit, walked out.
Then followed several days of the rest of us, Paul, Ringo, and John with Yoko, sitting around, marooned, wondering what we’d do next. The Beatles were talking to George, who’d gone up to Liverpool to see his family, and he said he’d come back, with conditions: no more talk about a concert, or any kind of performance; leave Twickenham and relocate to their basement studio, in Savile Row, and just work on the album.
So what began as rehearsal for a concert of the Beatles performing would now be, what, a documentary?
“We were thinking maybe, just maybe, we could do some sort of a concert somewhere.”
Yes, a documentary, which is very different from preparing for a concert. Watching the Beatles rehearse and work on their songs was, of course, very interesting. But, in my mind anyway, the “documentary” needed somewhere to go, or, to put it better, something to conclude this chapter of their lives.
So that’s why, at a Saturday lunch in Savile Row with the four of them and Yoko, I, feeling like the teenage Mickey Rooney in the Andy Hardy movies—“Hey, kids, this is a swell barn, we can put the show on right here”—spoke to them in the same manner.
I said, “Why don’t we just do it on the roof?”
“Do what on the roof?,” asked Paul.
“A concert.”
And on that cold Thursday, January 30, that’s what happened, and the Beatles were excited and happy to be playing to people as a band again, even if the people were a hundred or so feet below. To make matters better, the police came up on the roof and stopped the concert, good for the film and the Beatles, too, since they’d run through most of the new songs.
The next day we did the ballads in the basement studio, and that was it for the filming.
I edited it and had a rough cut to show them on July 19, 1969. Everyone seemed to like it, although we all agreed it seemed a little long. Then Paul and Linda; John and Yoko; Peter Brown, from Apple, the Beatles’ company; my girlfriend, Jean Marsh; and I went out for a late dinner. We didn’t talk much about the movie, regarding it as a promising work in progress, more about our varying childhoods, theirs in Liverpool, Jean’s in London during the Blitz, and mine in New York and Ireland. The next morning Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon.
In November of that year, the final cut was ready. After we’d screened it, three of the Beatles, plus their wives and girlfriends, their manager Allen Klein with a lawyer, their producer Neil Aspinall, their logistics manager Mal Evans, Jean, and I had a nice dinner at the Elephant on the River. John and Yoko had seen the movie a week or so before in a screening room. They seemed to like it.
After dinner, we all went down to a discotheque in the basement, had a nightcap, and chatted, Paul saying he thought the movie really worked. Ringo and Maureen jived till the music stopped.
“Why don’t we just do it on the roof?”
Let It Be was ready to be released in early 1970. But tremors were starting to be felt under the foundations of Apple. The Beatles were about to, and then did, break up. The four men who had guided us through the glorious 1960s had legal issues which became personal issues and didn’t want to stay together anymore. And with that enormous personal, musical, and social upheaval going on, Let It Be was not really a concern. It was released in May 1970, a month after the Beatles had made it official—they were finished.
None of them attended any screenings, in London, New York, or Los Angeles. And Let It Be was seen as the breakup picture, although when we shot it, edited it, screened it, edited it some more, and screened it again, all four Beatles were together. But no one told the audience that.
In the early 1970s, the BBC screened it around Christmas, I think, and then a VHS was released by Apple and quickly withdrawn because of an issue to do with who owned the music rights on VHS.
And that was it. It was never seen again, except as scratchy, dark, third-generation bootlegs with bad sound. I suppose you could look at it as collateral damage from the breakup.
Also, the thing to remember is that Apple is not a movie company. It is a music company whose main business is releasing Beatles music and music from those who were Beatles. And, further, since Let It Be was made when they were still together, now that they were not together, there was no appetite to revisit it.
But I was proud of Let It Be and how we pivoted from a concert film to a documentary, telling the story of the Beatles at a key moment in their lives, concluding with the (seemingly) impromptu rooftop final performance.
After the Beatles’ breakup, I did videos for Paul’s new band, Wings, which he formed with his first wife, the smart and funny Linda, and Denny Laine. Paul and I talked every so often about Let It Be coming out again, and he said it would, he hoped, after some unspecified problems were cleared up.
When we were in Scotland doing the video for Paul’s wonderful, rousing embrace of a song “Mull of Kintyre”—with bagpipers on the beach—I like to think it was only my imagination that has Paul backing away from me as I approached to say “good morning,” as though apprehensive I was going to ask him again about Let It Be. I was always agitating for it to be released again, especially once video stores started to proliferate, in the late 1980s.
Miss Flite is a character in Dickens’s Bleak House who attends court every day for years in the hope that a case will soon be settled in her favor. She is a kindly and demented old woman whom her friends humor, knowing it’s unlikely things will work out as she wants. You draw the parallel.
And then, riding in from New Zealand, came Peter Jackson.
Let It Be was ready to be released in early 1970. But tremors were starting to be felt under the foundations of Apple.
I, with my wife, Lisa, met Peter for the first time at the Peninsula hotel in Beverly Hills in late December 2018. I wanted her with me because I felt he just might be an important person in our life.
An immediately beguiling character, he was rumpled in a general way, bearded—if not wearing pajamas, he might as well have been—barefooted. Inquisitive, quick-thinking and -talking, funny, and kind in his manner. He presented himself as friendly, and I have always found him so. And, oh yes, a wonderful director.
He asked me to tell him the “story” of Let It Be, since it would be all the footage that I shot for Let It Be—57 hours’ worth—that he would use to craft his documentary series Get Back. I told him what I regarded as the whole story, including its more or less abandonment after the breakup and my efforts to try to give it a life again.
“So, if it weren’t for you, Let It Be would be an orphan?,” he asked.
I remember today, years later, the effect “orphan,” that word, had on me. How his understanding, 20 minutes or so after we’d met, director to director, let him find the exact word surprised and heartened me.
Then he went back to WingNut, his studio in New Zealand, and went to work with his hammer and chisel for several years, encouraged by Paul and Ringo, and John and Yoko’s son, Sean Ono Lennon, and George’s wife, Olivia Harrison, and hewed out the great, muscular epic Get Back.
We’d communicate every so often. Him to me: “Day six. What was going on that day? Can’t figure it out.” I keep a diary and was able to fill him in a bit on the “subtext” of day six.
And then he’d send examples of the technical achievements WingNut was able to make. One of the most stunning for me, who did not have those resources in 1969, was how he’d managed to separate the audio track, the voice, from the acoustic, the guitar, underneath. One of the annoying habits of guitar players, on film anyway, is how, if they’re just having a chat, they’ll be playing, just noodling, at the same time.
Over this time, three years, maybe, when we’d talk or e-mail, Peter would say, “I looked at Let It Be again fairly recently and I think it really needs to come out again. Mine and yours, the similarities and differences, they’re part of the same Beatles story.”
So here we are, 55 years after I made it, 50 years since it was last available to be seen.
Thanks are due: to Paul and Ringo, George and John and Yoko. Peter Jackson, Clare Olssen, and the team in New Zealand. Jonathan Clyde at Apple.
And, yes, to me too.
A restored version of the original film Let It Be premieres on Disney+ on May 8
Michael Lindsay-Hogg is the director of the original Brideshead Revisited TV series as well as The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus concert film