LET IT BE SEEN

First look at historic doc on Beatles’ final chapter

Peter Jackson got it back.

The “Lord of the Rings” director has been sifting through 56 hours of previously unseen footage of the Beatles rehearsing and horsing around from their final months playing together.

Those moments led up to the group’s final public performance — on the rooftop of their Apple Corps record label’s headquarters on Savile Row in January 1969.

On the heels of the 40th anniversary of John Lennon’s assassination, Jackson is giving fans a “sneaky preview,” as he called it, of his years-inthe making documentary, “The Beatles: Get Back.”

The unearthed footage was salvaged from Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s long-lost “Let It Be,” a 1970 television documentary charting the squabbles and tension leading up to the concert and during the recording of band’s last released album.

Rumor has it band members Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr blocked the wider release of that film, complaining that it featured frontman John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, too prominently.

Jackson’s take on the band’s final chapter is expected to be less contentious. The filmmaker, 59, has been editing the project at his New Zealand studio.

“This film was due to be finished about now,” says Jackson in a Web preview. He had been forced to delay production due to the pandemic.

He calls the footage “great stuff ” and presents fans with a roughly four-minute montage to get a “sense of the spirit” and the “vibe and the energy that the film’s going to have.”

“And now, your host for this evening, the Bottles,” jokes a long-haired John Lennon in one clip.

In another, the British bandmates read aloud from a newspaper column about George Harrison facing jail time in France.

McCartney’s wife, Linda Eastman, daughter Mary, Ono and fashionable sets of groupies, producers and executives feature as the rock stars play.

Jackson says the finished product will be out in 2021. Official trailers will be out next year, too. For now, Beatlemaniacs will have to be content with his “montage of moments.”

“Hopefully, it will put a smile on your face in these rather bleak times that we’re in.”

LORD OF THE RINGO: Director Peter Jackson remastered this intimate, long-shelved footage of Paul McCartney, John Lennon (plus wife Yoko Ono) George Harrison and Ringo Starr recording the Beatles’ final album, “Let It Be.”