It’s likely that most people have seen iconic footage of the Beatles performing on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” But how many saw Paul McCartney during this same trip to the United States feeding seagulls from his hotel balcony?
That moment — along with George Harrison and John Lennon having fun swapping jackets — is part of the Disney+ documentary “Beatles ’64,” an intimate look at the English band’s first trip to America that uses rare and newly released footage restored. It airs Friday.
“It’s so much fun to be the fly on the wall in these really intimate moments,” says Margaret Bodde, who produced alongside Martin Scorsese. “It’s just an incredible gift of time and technology to be able to see it now with decades of time removed so you really feel like you’re there.”
“Beatles ’64” draws on footage from the 14-day trip filmed by documentarians Albert and David Maysles, who left behind 11 hours of the Fab Four having fun in New York’s Plaza Hotel or to travel. It was restored by Park Road Post in New Zealand.
“It’s beautiful, even though it’s black and white and it’s not widescreen,” says director David Tedeschi. “It feels like the film was made yesterday and it captures the youth of the four Beatles and their fans.”
The footage is complemented by interviews with the band’s two surviving members and people whose lives were touched, including some of the women who, as teenagers, stood outside their hotel hoping to catch a glimpse of the Beatles.
“It was like crazy love,” fan Vickie Brenna-Costa recalls in the documentary. “I can’t really understand it now. But back then it was natural.”
The film shows the four idols flirting and dancing at the Peppermint Lounge nightclub, Harrison noodling with a Woody Guthrie riff on his guitar and tells the story of Ronnie Spector sneaking the group out of a hotel back exit and up ‘to Harlem to eat barbecue.
The documentary coincides with the release of a vinyl album box set bringing together the group’s seven American albums released in 1964 and early 1965: “Meet The Beatles! “, “The Beatles’ Second Album”, “A Hard Day’s Night” (the original soundtrack), “Something New”, “The Beatles’ Story”, “Beatles ’65” and “The Early Beatles”. They had been out of print on vinyl since 1995.
The Beatles’ 1964 visit to the United States also included concerts at Carnegie Hall, a concert at the Washington Coliseum in Washington, D.C., and a visit to Miami, where the group met Muhammad Ali. The documentary shows members of the group reading articles about themselves in newspapers.
Viewers may learn that the Beatles – now revered – were often ridiculed or rude by the older generation. At the British Embassy in New York, the four men were treated as lower class, while famous broadcaster Eric Sevareid, in a report for CBS, compared the reaction to the Beatles to German measles.
“There’s just four Elvis Presleys of you,” a reporter told them at a press conference, to which the boys began gyrating good-naturedly while Ringo Starr shouted “That’s not true!”
“For me, it’s a mystery why the establishment was against them,” Tedeschi says. “I think older people believed that music would return to big bands.”
Musicians like Sananda Maitreya, Ron Isley and Smokey Robinson also discuss the Fab Four and what they learned about black music. There are also interviews with Harlem residents, critic Joe Queennan and filmmaker David Lynch, who saw the Beatles play at the Washington Coliseum.
“Beatles ’64” attempts to explain why young people were so fascinated by John, Paul, George and Ringo. Their visit took place just months after the assassination of President John. F. Kennedy and Tedeschi argue that Beatlemania was a balm for a nation in mourning.
“Part of it is that I think the lights were just out. They were depressed. Everything was dark. And ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ lit them up,” Tedeschi says.
As McCartney says in the documentary: “Maybe America needed something like the Beatles to bring it out of its grief and just say, ‘Life goes on.'”
