In the meantime, bootleggers published nearly all of its audio.
The Beatles’ own traumatic memories of this period kept the raw footage from this project in the vaults for over 50 years. The Andy Warhol-esque, so-real-it’s-boring verité style – the non-narrative approach then in vogue – flummoxed even 1970 audiences.īut because the “Let It Be” album and film came out after “Abbey Road” – which was released in September 1969 – it quickly got mistaken for telegraphing their breakup, a belief that the Beatles themselves seemed to internalize. For decades, the only way you could get a glance of it was through a black market copy. Only in May 1970 did the “Let It Be” album and film come out, with the band’s messy divorce as the backdrop.Īfter the initial theater run, “Let it Be” fell from view. Harrison even wrote a song called “ Sue Me Sue You Blues.” Then, in March 1970, McCartney publicly proclaimed he was “leaving the Beatles” to release his first solo album.Īn epic descent into suits, countersuits and press squabbles ensued. The split actually came at a September 1969 meeting, when Lennon told the others he wanted a “divorce.” They persuaded him to keep his departure quiet until the band completed some contract negotiations. The band then put these tapes aside to work on the larger project they intuited from this material, “ Abbey Road,” which they completed seven months later. “Let it Be” was shot in January 1969, just weeks after the “ White Album” hit stores. The timing of the theater release of the “Let It Be” sessions seeded confusion over how the group unraveled. (Lennon and McCartney singing “Two of Us” in grandiose Scottish brogue almost steals Part Three.) But in their interviews, Jackson and McCartney accentuate the positive as if to paper over the acrimonious history of lawsuits, the loss of the Lennon-McCartney publishing catalog and the lurching solo careers that followed.
It seems to be working: A recent New York Times headline proclaimed, “Know How the Beatles Ended? Peter Jackson May Change Your Mind.”Ī lot of these sessions contain the irrepressible gags that made the Beatles famous. “I’ll tell you what is really fabulous about it, it shows the four of us having a ball,” McCartney told The Sunday Times after seeing the film. “I kept waiting for all the nasty stuff to start happening, waiting for the arguments and the rows and the fights, but I never saw that,” Jackson told The Guardian and others. In their press rounds, both Jackson and McCartney have been eager to recast the legacy of this period. Over the course of four years, he edited it into an eight-hour, three-part series, thanks to a streaming deal with Disney+. In 2016, Jackson gained access to Lindsay-Hogg’s original footage. Many filmgoers at the time assumed this depicted the days and weeks during which everything fell apart.īy the time it hit theaters, nearly 16 months after filming, this rehearsal footage got mistaken for a completely different time frame.
Why was the song black beatles named black beatles movie#
The movie depicted George Harrison arguing with Paul McCartney – and it hit theaters shortly after news of the band’s breakup emerged. In 1970, Michael Lindsay-Hogg released “ Let It Be,” a film documenting the band’s recording sessions for their eponymous album. In the new film “ The Beatles: Get Back,” “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson tries to dispel the myth of the the Beatles’ breakup. Did Paul McCartney, right, and Ringo Starr hire Peter Jackson for a rescue operation? Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images