Film, which includes rare footage and new interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, will premiere on Disney+ next month
A new documentary produced by Martin Scorsese will celebrate Beatlemania’s diamond jubilee. Beatles ’64, which will debut on Disney+ on Nov. 29, will feature new interviews with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and the Beatlemaniacs who followed them, paired with footage of the band’s first U.S. concert and Ed Sullivan Show appearance. All of the archival footage has been restored in 4K, and the audio for the live footage was demixed by WingNut Films and remixed by Giles Martin, who was the music supervisor for Peter Jackson’s Get Back docuseries.
Filmmaker David Tedeschi, who co-directed a doc on the New York Dolls’ David Johansen and was nominated for Emmys recognizing docs he worked on about George Harrison and Bob Dylan, directed the picture. It includes footage by documentarians Albert and David Maysles and traces the group’s heroes’ welcome at New York’s JFK airport on Feb. 7, 1964, and the crowds that followed them. On Feb. 9, they performed three songs on The Ed Sullivan Show to a television audience of 73 million viewers. Two days later, they performed their first-ever concert in the United States at Washington, D.C.’s Washington Coliseum. The filmmakers promise to include behind-the-scenes footage of how the quartet handled instant fame.
In addition to Scorsese, the list of the film’s producers includes McCartney (who released a photo book of the Beatles in 1963 and 1964 last year), Starr, Olivia Harrison, and Sean Ono Lenon, among others.
In a 1979 Rolling Stone interview, George Harrison expressed ambivalence about Beatlemania. “We were just four relatively sane people in the middle of madness,” he reflected. “People used us as an excuse to trip out, and we were the victims of that. … A lot of the time it was fantastic, but when it really got into the mania it was a question of either stop or end up dead. We almost got killed in a number of situations — planes catching on fire, people trying to shoot the plane down and riots everywhere we went. It was aging me. But we had a great time.”
