THE BEATLES GET BACK
A Sneak Peek w/ Director Peter Jackson
When Peter Jackson’s new documentary, The Beatles: Get Back, is released this summer, it’ll be a bittersweet moment for some of the band’s most loyal fans. We’ll finally understand what went on during the recording of Let It Be, but we’ll be watching knowing The Beatles are recording their last album.
The making of this album also brought competing feelings. By the time they started recording Let It Be in 1969, tensions had already begun to worm through the cement holding this enormously successful band together.
While recording the White Album, Ringo Starr quit for two weeks because he thought the rest of the band were better off without him. When he returned, John Lennon had started bringing his girlfriend, Yoko Ono, to the studio, which didn’t sit well with the rest of the band. It was becoming apparent that they were growing apart. Not even the songwriting process was the same.
Even though Let It Be is The Beatle’s final album; it was recorded before Abbey Road. Tensions were still high, but there were still some beautiful moments working on the album, then titled Get Back. This project was the album that was supposed to bring them back together. They brought in cameras to document their creative process at the beginning of 1969, but it fell through almost immediately. The result? The band packed up their gear and played a concert on the rooftop of Apple Corps in London. They almost got arrested in the process, but it became one of the most famous moments in Beatle history.
After the concert, The Beatles left engineer Glyn Johns with full reign to finish the album as the four band members had “washed their hands of the entire project.”
Fast forward to a couple of years ago, when Jackson decided to begin the documentary. We know this was a passion project not taken on lightly. Jackson carefully combed through 60 hours of unseen footage and 150 minutes of unheard audio that Michael Lindsay-Hogg captured back in 1969, which he’d been collecting for his documentary at the time. If you’ve watched other famous Beatles documentaries like The Beatles Anthology, you’ll have only seen a fragment of the whole project.
Get Back won’t be like other documentaries. It will feel like you’re there as the band records their final songs, something that will surely give even casual fans chills. But it does make you think; if they went through 60 hours of unseen footage, what happened to all of the clips that didn’t make it? Will this be a four-hour documentary? We’re certainly used to long projects from Jackson. Do we mind, given the subject material? No, Jackson could slap us with a 10- hour-long documentary about The Beatles, and we wouldn’t bat an eyelash. We know we’re in safe hands with Jackson; we can’t wait any longer.
