Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
Producer Walter Shenson tells how he gave director Richard Lester a ticket to ride. (The band just acted naturally.)
Dec 7, 2000 | Thirty-seven years ago, late producer Walter Shenson told the New York Times that the Beatles never wanted to appear in a "rags to riches" story or, he went on, "the one about the record being smuggled into the studio in the last reel and put on by mistake."
Instead, he, director Richard Lester and screenwriter Alun Owen keyed themselves into the team's joyous group vibrations and produced "A Hard Day's Night." In it, we see the Beatles establish an unmatched rapport with their audience. Their young female fans catch fire from their pop sensuality, and their young male fans soak up confidence from the group's freewheeling exuberance.
And, apparently, still do. In the opening weekend of its current rerelease, "A Hard Day's Night" grossed a jaw-dropping $50,000 in two theaters, one in New York and one in Los Angeles. Miramax president Mark Gill told me Monday, "We got astonishingly high audience surveys -- second only to the ones we got for 'Good Will Hunting.' It doesn't mean that we'll get as big an audience as we got for 'Good Will Hunting,' but it does mean that the people who come into the theater will walk out the door and tell other people that they love it. It's encouraging that not all of them identify themselves as Beatles fans. We're also getting nonfans, or people who are not yet fans, and they love the movie too."
Gill says a lot of blind luck went into the timing of this rerelease. Shenson, who owned the copyright, originally shopped for a new distributor amid the euphoria surrounding the Beatles' 1995 "Anthology" TV and CD series. I talked to Shenson, who died in October at age 81, and the film's restoration honcho, Paul Rutan Jr., when the film began to weave its way around the festival circuit in 1998.
But Miramax wanted to wait for Shenson's foreign and video deals to lapse so it could acquire clean distribution rights. By the time that happened, says Gill, he could see both the new "Anthology" book and "1," the Beatles' hit singles album, on the horizon and decided, last July, to delay the movie's rerelease until now.
In a way, it's ironic that Gill is giving the movie the sort of sophisticated platform that's usually reserved for art-house classics. (It will hit the top 10 markets Friday.) In the fall of 1963, when United Artists approached Shenson about making a movie with the mop tops who were sweeping the United Kingdom and the Continent, UA was thinking exploitation. The company never expected a Beatles vehicle to play in more theaters simultaneously than any other film of its time, or to win terrific reviews, or to return a blockbuster $13.5 million on a $560,000 investment.
The group had yet to cross the Atlantic. By the time the Beatles did explode in the United States, Shenson had already signed them to make a low-budget, black-and-white film. United Artists thought the movie would be little more than a promotional tool for the soundtrack album, but Shenson guessed better and with uncanny foresight cut a deal that would return the copyright to him after 15 years.
The film has since been a perennial attention getter. Ever the showman, Shenson kept trying to bring the Beatles' audience something extra whenever he rereleased the film. He opened the 1982 version with "I'll Cry Instead," a song recorded for the movie but not used, and played it out against a montage of production stills; he attached "You Can't Do That," a visually muddy number that had been deleted from the TV-concert sequence, to the end of the print that roamed the festival circuit two years ago.
I prefer the current-release prints, which give us the original pop masterpiece straight, no chaser. In the following interviews, restorer Rutan explains how he got the film back to where it once belonged, and Shenson recalls how he got it made right in the first place.
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In the midst of the frenzy surrounding the filming of "A Hard Day's Night," a reporter on the set described Shenson as "miraculously relaxed." That's how I found him the three times I interviewed him, most recently at his Beverly Hills, Calif., office in March 1998.
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