Is it good ?
How strange it is to read so many positive comments about BIRTH OF THE BEATLES almost 30 years on. I played Stu Sutcliffe in the film. It was kind of put together very quickly. Dick Clark ( who none of us knew in the UK as he is only a star in the USA) had just had a success with John Carpenter’s film about Elvis and a follow up film about the Beatles was the obvious choice.
The rumour on the film set was that the writers wrote the screenplay in Dick Clark’s house in Malibu without ever coming to the UK. Even as we shot the film we were all aware of the inaccuracies. All of us actors had all grown up with the Beatles and knew their story well especially John Altman who was a huge fan and went to Henley to meet George Harrison.
Pete Best who we all liked very much was credited as the historic adviser but in reality he was ignored most of the time by the director.
I especially hated the addition of a grave stone with the words Eleanor Rigby written on it. It never existed. It was “an in joke”. As the filming went on we would make up these terribly lines as a joke trying to top each other with the most ridiculous such as The Beatles going for a walk in Penny Lane –
John: “What great name I think we should write a song about it”
Paul: “Yeh, and one about Strawberry Fields”
Ringo: “ Yeh and I think I will write one about that Octopus’s Garden in Lime Street”.
We also had problems with many of the lines we had to say, especially the lack of swear words. As Pete told us for The Beatles, like almost all young people from the 1960’s onwards, swearing was part of their every day vocabulary. Because the film was made for TV in the USA and cinema distribution in the rest of the world the swearing had to go. This was the 1970’s and before the rise of HBO so most US TV the content was sanitised and somewhat lame. From time to time we made the dialogue more authentic but we then had to re-shoot and go back to the script.
In fact we even had to change our accents. An excellent actor called Michael Angelis was employed as our dialogue coach. He did his job so well that when the film was edited and shown to executives in America they could not understand what we were saying. I remember receiving a telex telling me that I would have to post synch my dialogue in a recording studio “to make it more English than Liverpudlian “.
As time goes by I am amazed when somebody I meet says how much they liked it. At the time it was not well received at all, especially by many of us who took part. I hated it. I suppose I should watch it again as I have not seen it since it was first released, I might like it this time....if only I could find a copy!