Get Back sneak peek
Showing off the positive mood that was also part of the Get Back sessions, Peter Jackson has given us a great Christmas present with this clip. And in stunning quality!
Press release: Acclaimed filmmaker Peter Jackson has released an exclusive sneak peek of his upcoming documentary “The Beatles: Get Back” for fans everywhere to enjoy.
The 5-minute special look is available to fans worldwide on TheBeatles.com and streaming on Disney+.
Jackson said, “We wanted to give the fans of The Beatles all over the world a holiday treat, so we put together this five-minute sneak peek at our upcoming theatrical film ‘The Beatles: Get Back.’ We hope it will bring a smile to everyone’s faces and some much-needed joy at this difficult time.”
Acclaimed filmmaker Peter Jackson’s “The Beatles: Get Back” is a unique cinematic experience that takes audiences back in time to The Beatles’ intimate recording sessions during a pivotal moment in music history. The film showcases the warmth, camaraderie and creative genius that defined the legacy of the iconic foursome.
Shot in January 1969 and compiled from over 60 hours of unseen footage (filmed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg) and more than 150 hours of unheard audio, all of which has been brilliantly restored, “The Beatles: Get Back” is the story of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr as they plan their first live show in over two years and charts the writing and rehearsing of 14 new songs, originally intended for release on an accompanying live album.
The film features – for the first time in its entirety – The Beatles’ last live performance as a group, the unforgettable rooftop concert on London’s Savile Row as well as other songs and classic compositions featured on the band’s final two albums, Abbey Road and Let It Be.
An exciting new collaboration between The Beatles and three-time Oscar®-winning filmmaker Peter Jackson (“The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, “They Shall Not Grow Old”) presented by The Walt Disney Studios in association with Apple Corps Ltd. and WingNut Films Productions Ltd., “The Beatles: Get Back” is directed by Jackson, produced by Jackson, Clare Olssen (“They Shall Not Grow Old”) and Jonathan Clyde (“Eight Days A Week”), with Ken Kamins (“The Hobbit” trilogy) and Apple Corps’ Jeff Jones (“Eight Days A Week”) serving as executive producers. Jabez Olssen (“Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”) serves as the film’s editor, and the music is mixed by Giles Martin (“Rocketman”) and Sam Okell (“Yesterday”).
Fantastic! Great……
From the looks of the film quality, I think they got a bit heavy on the denoising. It’s made the picture a bit soft. But, the color looks good. Plus, the footage itself is fantastic.
Plus, this is being blown up from 16mm film stock. Remember 35mm film, it’s half that size. There’s simply not enough information there to make a BluRay quality film. Or, maybe I’ll be proven wrong! I spent enough years converting 8mm film to VHS!
I hope I’m wrong! I will see this film, several times, and buy whatever versions they decide to release on home video!
2 dimensions, recall, so the ratio of film area from 16mm to 35mm is something like 1:4.5. It can’t have been filmed on super 16mm because that was introduced in 1969. For reasons I don’t really understand, the conversion from 16mm to 35mm is not supposed to lose too much detail. This is what happened with the original theatrical release.
But in this case there will be no conversion as such because each frame will be scanned with state of the art digital equipment. I suspect the quality will surpass expectations. It looked good on the Anthology releases; it will be better now, as this excerpt suggests.
They didn’t look like they were going to break up
Then Allen Klein turned up. He made the original film the way it was. He insisted all people who weren’t Beatles were cut out (very awkward anyway, with so much footage of John with Yoko) and any happy scenes were mostly removed. Because of the original film and the time it was released, a lot of people have bought into a myth about January 1969. Even the Beatles themselves (with John calling the sessions ‘the most miserable on earth’). I also don’t get why the Paul and George bit (‘I’ll play whatever you want me to play’) is seen as a major row. It looks like a slight disagreement handled calmly, and yet it is still portrayed as this blazing argument that made George quit the band, which is another untrue myth. It is great to see this footage and all the ‘they hated each other’ and ‘Yoko hated them’ myths and all this other nonsense is finally being put to bed. It also looks like the tales of John being strung out and disinterested and the Yoko and Linda ‘feud’ were more fairy stories.
So I say well done to Peter Jackson. There are fans and critics who are already saying ‘Get Back’ is re-writing history. But what if that history we’ve grown up with wasn’t as authentic as we first thought?
“But what if that history we’ve grown up with wasn’t as authentic as we first thought?”
If the original “Let It Be” movie showed a false portrait of the Beatles so every other footage (mostly political and historical stuff) can as well. This will lead to people completely losing trust in any historical footage and the media will support it by spreading new lies about history in general. Next they will come up with is that George Washington was a black person (far-fetched but you will catch my drift) and take the history away from us.
It’s very recent that a lot of things get changed because of how it was presented from the media. Street names get changed, books & movies and people get banned, Uncle Bens rice will lose it’s mascot soon and on and on….
I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. They were miserable at Twickenham because of the situation, and the business issues were weighing on them, but there was also moments of happiness in the sessions which were cut out because (a) the band was broken up and this was a great way to show ahead of time that there were fractions within and (b) by having Paul and George row, it helped frame Paul as the villain of the entire thing.
Personally, I am going to put the two side by side with Anthology to get a fuller picture of that month. What’s really going to matter is the musical boxed set which accompanies this film, since that will show us how much this project is valuable in either state.
If you have seen The Anthology, George and John were very clear about the bad mood of the Get Back sessions, This is a true fact, I think. Than, it is normal that in the space of one month the band could have had some good moment, but I think it is a little rewriting history. However the quality of the images is fantastic, and I can’t wait to see it.
With 60 hours of footage, you can apparently edit an hour with happy faces. Another “misguided act of Beatle revisionism [and] an attempt to rewrite history”. (Elliot Mintz)
Mark Lewisohn reviewed ALL the available audio tapes of that month, listening to each day in real time on its exact 50th anniversary. He concurs that the earlier negative understanding we had was largely false and that the sessions, although at times unstructured, were in large part held in a positive spirit. Mark has no particular axe to grind either way…other than being studiously honest to the source information.
Hello Mark, nice to see you here 🙂
Ha – it could be Mark!
One of the things I did during the first lockdown was to listen to virtually all Mark’s interviews which someone has kindly collected together on YouTube. Fascinating stuff, and one gets an insight into Mark’s thinking. In one interview he discussed his impressions of the 60 hours of Nagra tapes and they are just as FraFo describes: largely positive. Obviously there were tensions, but in another really insightful interview Mark mentioned that certain events in 68, which he didn’t expand upon, sowed seeds of discord. In short, the underlying tensions began by 68 at the latest, and were still manageable up to the summer of 69 when the release of the Apple tape demonstrated that they were still thinking in terms of another album.
I take three things from all the listening I did:
1. the January 69 sessions were not decisive in terms of the eventual split
2. That the narrative that the Jan 69 sessions were really unhappy is not entirely accurate
3. Mark needs to get his books finished!
Jackson will have seen nearly 60 hours of this stuff — I’d say he has a better overall “fly on the wall” impression of the mood and atmosphere than any of us who have only seen the authorized film or what we’ve garnered from bootlegs and all the various books or interviews.
That’s why I want to see all 60 hours.
When I finally got to see «Let it be» in the mid-eighties I was relieved to find out that all reports about how negative the film was, was blown completely out of proportions. One journalist wrote that George never smiled once during the film. Upon finally getting to watch the film, I found that George broke into a big smile the very first time he appears on the screen. Around 2004 I also got to watch the film together with a couple of young fans in their early twenties, girls who hadn’t read all the bad reviews and therefore weren’t biased about what they were going to see. They were both thorougly delighted, and especially enthused about the rock and roll jam and the rooftop concert.
It has been a while since I saw it, but I’d agree that the original film doesn’t show a band that is completely miserable or arguing all the time. Michael Lindsay-Hogg was supposed to be making a fly-on-the-wall documentary, so much of this “new” footage with the band playing up to the camera would naturally have been left out. As I understand it, John and George were really talking about the Twickenham filming as being miserable; things picked up when they moved to Apple.
According to Lindsay-Hogg, after the band saw the rough cut, Paul, George and Ringo wanted some of the “dirty laundry” to be removed, and that’s where much of the footage of John went. Who knows whether that’s true or not. Perhaps we’ll find out.
I’m sure Paul and Ringo will spend most of Jackson’s movie explaining how it’s not re-writing history.
Paul made it pretty clear when this project was first announced that he’d have been happy for the original film to come out. It appears to be the John and George camps that have been against that happening. But naturally Paul has been talking the new film up, now that he’s seen it…
Yoko was there too. Maybe she’ll explain.
My comment is really more about the fear of too much commentary than anything else. I’d prefer just Beatles, 1969. No narrative at all. Lindsey-Hogg got that part right.
The footage looked beautiful to me, I’m not a visual expert. It looks very exciting and to think this is a wee snippet, we’re in for a treat.
What confuses me about this period is the narrative we’ve grown to accept is so far away from this new “it was actually a happy time”. The quotes from John about it being so unhappy, from 1970 onwards have to come from somewhere. The band looks very happy in this clip, yet, for more than 40 years, it’s been the Beatles crumbling and their personal relationships with each other breaking down fatally. Even in Anthology they still saw it as a rough time, although Ringo still saw some good bits.
The release of this film and the original and all the other stuff can’t come fast enough for me. Where do we go from here, though? Revolver and Rubber Soul and the other albums being given the deluxe remixed treatment (at least those tracks that were recorded on 4-track). These things will reveal themselves, hopefully.