Breakup of Beatles, In Intimate Detail
It is a cold January morning in 1969, and three of the four Beatles are assembled in a film studio in London, with cameras and microphones everywhere. “Lennon’s late again,” Paul McCartney says.
With Ringo Starr and George Harrison sitting groggily before him, Mr. McCartney starts to strum and sing, searching for inspiration. Within minutes, a mid-tempo groove takes shape and a familiar vocal melody emerges. “Get back,” he sings in a faint howl. “Get back to where you once belonged.” A Beatles classic forms out of nothing.
Later that day, after John Lennon arrives, the four bicker. They have loose plans for a concert TV special featuring new songs, but most of the men appear to be dreading it — and maybe one another, too. Mr. Lennon declares vaguely that “communication” with an audience is his only aim, while an impatient Mr. McCartney challenges his bandmates to show some enthusiasm for the project or abandon it. Mr. Harrison blurts out what they may all be thinking: “Maybe we should have a divorce?”
Those scenes in Peter Jackson’s documentary series “The Beatles: Get Back,” being shown on Disney Plus, encapsulate the twin sides of the most contested period in Beatles history — the glory of artistic creation and the grueling conflicts that led to the band’s breakup.
“It’s sort of that one impossible fan dream,” Mr. Jackson said in an interview from Wellington, New Zealand. “I wish I could go in a time machine and sit in the corner of the stage while they were working,” he said, describing a lifelong dream. “And I’ll be really quiet and sit there.”
“Well, guess what?” he continued. “The time machine’s here now.”
Mr. Jackson’s film is also a volley in one of the longest-running debates in Beatles scholarship. The band’s journey in January 1969 began with pressure to put on a high-concept live show and ended with something wonderfully low-concept: an impromptu performance on a London rooftop.
That period was already the subject of “Let It Be,” a 1970 vérité film by Michael Lindsay-Hogg; its soundtrack was the Beatles’ final studio LP. In time, that film took on a reputation as a joyless document of the band’s collapse. Mr. Lennon described the sessions as “hell,” and Mr. Harrison called them the group’s “winter of discontent.”
Yet that narrative has long been challenged by some Beatles aficionados. Mr. Lindsay-Hogg’s film, they argue, was selectively edited for maximum dreariness, perhaps to retroactively explain the breakup — “Abbey Road,” the Beatles’ true swan song, was made after “Let It Be” but released first — while evidence from bootlegged tapes suggests a mixture of pleasure and frustration familiar to any musician. The mere existence of “Get Back” is a sign that, more than half a century after the Beatles disbanded, their history is still unsettled.
Mr. Jackson, the Oscar-winning director of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy — and an avowed Beatles nut — was given access to nearly 60 hours of previously unseen footage by Apple Corps, the Beatles’ company, to tell the full story.
The Beatles, or at least their corporate surrogates, have embraced Mr. Jackson’s retelling, and a preview of the film highlighted moments of brotherly silliness, like
the band’s dancing and clowning in the studio. At a music industry event last year, Jeff Jones, Apple Corps’ chief executive, said the new film would “bust the myth” that these sessions were “the final nail in the Beatles’ coffin.” Yet Mr. Jackson said the band has had no influence over his work.
“Everyone sort of thinks it’s a whitewash” because the Beatles have authorized the film, Mr. Jackson said. “But actually it’s almost the exact opposite. It shows everything that Michael Lindsay-Hogg could not show in 1970. It’s a very unflinching look.”
Of course, the Beatles did not disband in January 1969. They went on to record “Abbey Road” later that year.
But Mr. Jackson’s film makes clear that the end was nigh. If there is a true culprit in the breakup, it was the business conflicts that ensued during 1969, when the group tussled over its management.
“There’s no goodies in it, there’s no baddies,” Mr. Jackson said. “It’s just a human story.”