There is certainly no shortage of material about The Beatles out there. We’ve got feature films, documentaries, biopics, books, magazine articles, and more going back decades. Surely we must have seen everything there is to see, right?
Wrong, apparently. A new documentary coming to Disney+ boasts intimate, never-before-seen footage of the iconic band that’s been locked away in a vault for half a century. Hours and hours of it.
The trailer for “Get Back” begins with intrigue. “In January 1969, a film crew was given unprecedented access to document The Beatles at work,” it says. “This resulted in over 57 hours of the most intimate footage ever shot of the band.”
“The footage has been locked in a vault for over half a century. Unseen…until now.”
The documentary series “The Beatles: Get Back” will be a 3-part event airing November 25–27, with each episode running two hours. The series was directed by Peter Jackson of “Lord of the Rings” fame, and covers a three-week period in which the band had to write and record 14 songs leading up to their first live performance in three years. Jackson is the only person to have been given access to the footage, which has been painstakingly restored, in over 50 years.
There is so much lore and legend wrapped up in The Beatles’ history, it’s quite lovely to see candid footage of them working together behind the scenes and even more of a treat to see some of the world’s most beloved songs come together.
The Beatles: Get Back | Official Trailer | Disney+
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The year 1969 would be a big one for The Beatles. It’s the year John Lennon and Yoko Ono got married, the album Abbey Road was released, and the band ultimately broke up. So the timing of this footage early in the year gives us a glimpse into the creative genius and turmoil that came to define that year for the group.
(And in a final full-circle bit of irony, according to The Chicago Tribune, The Beatles had wanted to make and star in their own “Lord of the Rings” movie musical back in the 1960s. They wanted Stanley Kubrick to direct it, but he turned them down. Even if he had agreed, though, J.R.R. Tolkien apparently wasn’t a fan of The Beatles and didn’t want to give them the rights to it, so the idea was dead on arrival anyway. How funny that Peter Jackson, who created the epic “Lord of the Rings” film trilogy, ended up getting exclusive access to footage of The Beatles for this documentary.)
The doc series looks awesome. Watching four of the world’s most famous musicians creating the songs we know and love will be a treat. (How about George Harrison not being able to figure out what lyrics should come after “Something in the way she moves…” and John Lennon telling him to sing “like cauliflower” until the right words came to him?) They were brilliant together, but it wasn’t effortless. They worked hard on their craft, trying different things until they got it just right.
How fun that we get to see something new from The Beatles when we thought we’d seen it all.