Another "Hard Day's Night"

So you're saying that because the Beatles were totally untrained as actors, you had to create a context in which their personalities could emerge -- you couldn't just show them standing up and singing?

Absolutely. And as I said, this doesn't happen by chance. We were very fortunate that Alun Owen was the kind of writer who could do it. He knew the Liverpool lingo and the idioms, so they weren't faked, they weren't phony.

He also invented new ones.

He made it easy for the Beatles; they were at ease with his dialogue. And then Dick had a little streak of surrealism. Every once in a while he'd do something that was ridiculous, surrealistic, but always in the tone of the film. Like, in the beginning of the film, you see them sitting on the train and the next thing they're running alongside the train; or John is in the bathtub and in the next cut he's not in the bathtub and he comes in and says, "What are you waiting for? Let's go!" For humor, you know. Nobody expected this film to be a documentary. You didn't have to stay logical all the way through. The point of view was to entertain.

Did Dick Lester ever make you nervous because he was inventing so much as he went along?

No, no. I kept hugging him every day when I saw the rushes. I said, "Dick, it's great, it's great!" There's one good example. There's a song, "And I Love Her," that Paul sings as a solo and Dick covered it with lots and lots of footage, a lot of angles. And one idea that he had was to put the camera operator in a little swing chair that hung from the ceiling of the soundstage and then have one of the crew guys follow Paul's movements around and stay tight on him. We must have had almost a 360-degree version of the shot, going right off the set. Then we had the normal coverage you have, so that when the film was put together it was beautiful to look at while you were listening to this good song. I did get a phone call, when we sent the finished picture to United Artists, from one of the executives, saying, "Oh, are you aware of the fact that in one scene where Paul McCartney is doing a solo, the camera shows the walls of the soundstage?" I said, "Yeah, it took us a half a day to get." So of course I had dead air on the other end of the phone. You know, for a lot of people it's very difficult to accept change and to accept that things are going to work that haven't been done before.

Another executive said, "The picture is great; we love it. Thank you very much. We're getting it out. But are the Beatles going to last?" I said, "I have no idea, why do you want to know that?" He said, "Well, do we make a lot of prints and cash in on their popularity now?" I said, "You're the distributor; they are popular now. Do what you think is right. I can't tell you whether they're going to last or not. But you'll like this film."

Nothing was conventional about this thing. And I think that's why it was so popular when it came out, and it was 35 years ago and it still plays. Nothing has dated. I played this film for film students fairly recently and when I finished I asked, "How many of you have seen the film before?" Maybe half a dozen hands go up out of an audience of 100. They'd never seen the picture before and they were flipping over it. I asked, "Did it seem dated in any way to you?" And the students would say, "Not dated, just British."

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Paul Rutan Jr. has been making films look their best for more than a quarter-century -- as he puts it, "long before there was such a thing called restoration." In 1974, when he started working in the film business for his dad, he specialized in taking obsolete big-screen formats like Techniscope and converting them for television. "We would deliver 16 mm prints to all the little TV stations and 35 mm to the networks," he recalls. Today he runs a restoration center dubbed Triage.

Few cases are weirder than the restoration history of "A Hard Day's Night," which began with a search for decent prints of the second Beatles film, "Help!" (another Shenson-Lester production). I interviewed Rutan at Triage in Los Angeles, around the same time as my interview with Shenson.

What got the ball rolling for the restoration of "A Hard Day's Night"?

It began early in the '90s. I'd worked with Bob Harris and Jim Katz on their restoration of "Spartacus," and I did some work with them on "My Fair Lady." Walter Shenson contacted me because he knew Jim Katz. He'd gone to Jim to ask him for advice on how to get a print of "Help!" out. Walter didn't have the money to hire Harris and Katz to do the job.

Walter needed an element of "Help!" he could use for telecine purposes [the telecine is the machine that transfers movies to video] and, a year later, for a six-theater release in Germany. I think "Help!" is more popular in Germany. I don't know why -- maybe because guys wear lederhosen in some of it. I started out with a lot of Eastmancolor prints that were wrecked. Then I found out that the original negative had tears and rips and horrible scratches in it. But I located an old German dupe negative, and from that I made a low-contrast print. I used sections of that for fixes. It didn't have the physical damage in it that the original negative did.

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