Beatles Live Project update

The Beatles Live – news trickles in slowly.

A Beatles news page of the Japanese Universal Music site now has a few details regarding “The Beatles Live Project”. The “project” part of the title has been dropped, and THE BEATLES LIVE is the current working title. The page also has the autumn of 2016 as the approximate time of the film’s release.

Translating somewhat awkwardly from Japanese, using Google Translate, the page goes on to say that “The Beatles Live” covers the Liverpool era of the band, and chronicles the tour years from 1963 onwards, spanning 15 countries, 90 cities and 166 performances and ending with the August 29, 1966 concert at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park. The film interweaves filmed concert footage with interviews with celebrities and officials, exploring the evolution and phenomenal popularity of the group.

The news item goes on to list film credits:

Director: Ron Howard.

Producer: White Horse Pictures’ Nigel Sinclair and Scott Pasukutchi. Imagine Entertainment’s Brian Grazer.

Executive producers: Apple Corps Ltd. represented by Jeff Jones and Jonathan Clyde, Imagine Entertainment represented by Michael Rosenberg, White Horse Pictures represented by Guy East and Nicholas Ferral.

The production crew has been pretty tight lipped about what’s in the film, if there’s going to be spin-off products etc. Here’s what White Horse Pictures writes on their website:

“The Beatles Live Untitled Project” is a feature-length documentary focused on The Beatles’ touring years, from the early days of the Cavern Club in Liverpool and engagements in Hamburg in the early ’60s to their last public concert in Candlestick Park, San Francisco, in 1966. By their last tour date in August of 1966, The Beatles had performed 166 concerts in 15 countries and 90 cities around the world. The cultural phenomenon their touring helped create, known as “Beatlemania,” was something the world had never seen before and laid the foundation for the globalization of culture.

Beatlemania was not just a phenomenon. It was the catalyst for a cultural shift that would alter the way people around the world viewed and consumed popular culture. At its core the film will be a piece of raw entertainment that includes an undercurrent that explains the climate that allowed for this cultural pivot point to occur. The unique conditions that caused technology and mass communication to collide. The film will also explore the incomparable electricity between performer and audience that turned the music into a movement – a common experience into something sublime. Most of all, the film will aim to illuminate what it was about the band itself – both the music and the musicians – that made the world fall at their feet, to unfurl itself in a joyful wave of youthful revolution that would reverberate through the ages.

Here at the Wogblog headquarters, word has reached us that a two hour plus “rough cut” of the film was screened in Los Angeles this month, and only to people involved with the film project. Still, the fact that Universal Music in Japan now has a news item about it, is perhaps is a sign that we are about to get some more detailed news from the official sources.

As fans of The Beatles, all we need to see is a multi-disc video collection stringing together all available performance footage in chronological order, perhaps linked with a few comments by the Fab Four themselves and Brian Epstein, taken from sixties interviews and press conferences. But that’s not a likely scenario. This will be a film targeting a broader audience, and we must prepare ourselves for an ordinary documentary with talking heads and some edited performances from televised concerts, video taped concerts or home movie footage from concerts. If we’re lucky, we’ll get to see some stuff we didn’t know existed. But we’d surely wish that Apple Corps would bring out full concert home video discs as spin off products for the fans. The Beatles’ legacy deserves that kind of treatment.

Links:

Official website