“I was always moaning about the original film, because there was no real joy in it,” Ringo Starr recalls to The Daily Beast of the 1970 documentary film Let It Be, which was released just weeks after news of the Beatles’ split had hit the press.
Since Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary premiered on Disney+ in 2021, even the most casual Beatles fan knows what Starr is talking about. The Let It Be film and album were a dismal affair for all involved. Salvaged from the ashes of Paul McCartney’s idea for the Beatles to “get back,” literally, to their roots by writing and recording a new album, the nearly 60 hours of footage filmed by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg during January 1969 chronicled the end of the greatest creative collaboration of the last century.
But Let It Be got only a limited theatrical release in 1970. Now, at long last, a restored version arrives on Disney+ this week.
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“All these years, did I wish it to come out? Of course. Did I hope it would? Well, you know, hope is a like a candle: sometimes it flickers and sometimes it’s bright and sometimes it goes out,” Lindsay-Hogg admits. Dressed nattily and holding forth in a Disney conference room in midtown Manhattan, the 84-year-old director looked preternaturally youthful when we recently met to discuss Let It Be, which has been wonderfully restored by Jackson’s team after he used Lindsay-Hogg’s footage for Get Back. “The catalyst, really, was Peter Jackson. Right from the beginning, he was very direct and very respectful.”
Of course, back in 1969 and ’70, things didn’t go according to plan, either. John Lennon was preoccupied with his then-blossoming relationship with Yoko Ono (and dabbling in heroin), and George Harrison had finally had enough, having just returned from a visit with Bob Dylan and the Band in Woodstock, where he had been treated with the respect he no doubt felt he deserved. Even Starr, frustrated by the ever-increasing tensions among the band members, had struck out in films and began contemplating a solo career in earnest.
Meanwhile, as seen in Let It Be, McCartney had become the quartet’s de facto leader, much to the growing annoyance of his bandmates. It was a role he’d filled to an increasing degree since manager Brian Epstein’s death in August 1967, but by January 1969, with the others’ interest in the group waning, the Beatles had essentially become, for better or worse, his band.
“It was always Paul who would want to get back to work,” Starr recalls. “I lived near John, and so I’d be at his place, lounging and having a bit of a smoke in the garden, and the phone would ring. We’d know even before we answered that it was Paul, saying, ‘C’mon, let’s get in the studio and make a new record.’”
But this time, it was not just a new record he was after. McCartney wanted the band to get back on the boards, performing to a live audience for the first time since their last concert at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park in 1966, for a television special to be broadcast worldwide. With a director needed to helm the special—as well as footage of the band rehearsing for promotional advertisements—he turned to a familiar face. “They had me shoot the promotional films for ‘Revolution’ and ‘Hey Jude,’ which was the first time they’d been in front of a live audience in almost three years,” Lindsay-Hogg recalls. “They really enjoyed it. And not long after, Paul called me and asked what I was doing in January.”
But the long hours of rehearsing a concert built around all-new material—which began just after the New Year in 1969 on a cold soundstage in the London suburb of Twickenham, at the very un-rock ’n’ roll hour of 10 a.m. each day—tested the patience of everyone involved.
“The issues they were having were that they were growing up, and they were making different choices in their lives as adults than they had made as teenagers, which affected their lives artistically, as well as the whole business dynamic,” Lindsay-Hogg remembers. “So even if we’d been in a warm, comfortable space, I don’t think the atmosphere would have been great. But Twickenham was a miserable experience for all of them, no doubt about it.”
“The history was always very negative,” adds Giles Martin, the son of Beatles producer George Martin and the band’s go-to producer since 2006’s LOVE remix album, whose audio restoration work on the restored Let It Be is some of his finest to date. “Paul hated the finished product, and the album came out when they were suing each other.”
“It was all based on this little downer incident,” is Starr’s take, as he recalls a fight between Harrison and McCartney that was caught on film and was much discussed in the wake of the initial release of Let It Be (and then given more context in Jackson’s Get Back.) “But that’s just how it was; four guys in a room, you know?” he adds with a laugh. “You’re bound to have a few ups and downs.”
Lindsay-Hogg agrees. “They never commented on that scene as being in any way making the Beatles look bad, or making Paul look bad,” he says of the rough cuts he showed the band members before the film’s release. “Because it was just two musicians talking about the best way to work on a song, like actors do with a scene.”
In fact, he says, the Beatles were fully behind the film after he screened a lengthy rough cut for them in July of 1969.
“George came with his father, John and Yoko, Paul and Linda, Ringo and Maureen Allen Klein, and the Apple team,” Lindsay-Hogg remembers. “Then, at the end of the evening, Paul asked me, ‘What are you doing? Why don’t we all go have dinner?’ So, dinner was Paul, Linda, John, Yoko, Peter Brown from Apple, and me and my girlfriend Jean. And we didn’t talk much about the movie, actually, because we all sort of regarded it as a promising work in progress. But if they hadn’t liked it, there would have been no dinner. And so I had a sense that everything was OK. In fact, they never interfered. I can’t think of anything, really, that they asked to be changed that I didn’t agree should be changed.’”
So what happened along the way to sour the band on the project?
“By the time it came out, in May 1970, the atmosphere had become poisoned,” Lindsay-Hogg says. “What was going on internally, which by then had become external, with the Beatles’ breakup, meant they didn’t support the movie at all. There was a screening in London, and in Los Angeles too, and none of them showed up. But it wasn’t because they didn’t like the movie. It was because they didn’t want to be with each other.”
Lindsay-Hogg adds that, if anything, Let It Be is proof that whatever was going on behind the scenes, once the Beatles strapped on guitars and stepped in front of a camera and an audience, they were an undeniable force.
“All that had been going on before—them not getting on or them having spats, like people who work together often do—[when] they started really playing and they knew there was a crowd down below, they were 16 again,” he says of the concert performed on the rooftop of the Beatles’ Apple Corps headquarters, which closes out Let It Be. “Once I got them on the roof—and that was the hard part, because they didn’t really make up their minds until they were standing down in the little cubby hole of a room about to go on the roof—they were great.”
It’s an arresting scene, especially after 50 or so minutes of meandering rehearsals, rough and ready run-throughs of half-formed originals, and 1950s cover songs. It’s also undeniable evidence of how remarkable the Beatles were as a live band, despite the January chill and the ramshackle, makeshift setup.
“Always, the Beatles were going to go to Turkey somewhere, or up Everest, or in a desert, or Hawaii. And then, suddenly, ‘Let’s just walk across the road,’” Starr says with a laugh of the way they ended up playing on the roof of their London HQ, which is broken up by police officers responding to noise complaints from other tenants in the bustling business district. “With this one, it was just, ‘Let’s do it on the roof.’ And that’s what we did. And it was great. I mean, the police played a huge part. Not that they did anything. But they were moaning at us. And they look really silly in the film now.”
The documentary’s re-release is just the latest in a spate of recent Beatles treasures. The Let It Be album, too, was recently given a full-scale restoration, courtesy of Giles Martin, and there was also a coffee table book full of photos by Ethan Russell and Linda McCartney showing the band at work during the making of Let It Be, and featuring transcripts of the hundreds of hours of audio captured by Lindsay-Hogg’s crew. Still, while Jackson’s Get Back is crucial to understanding the nuances of what was going on between John, Paul, George, and Ringo, it’s Lindsay-Hogg’s Let It Be that, after nearly half a century out of print, is finally taking its place as the centerpiece of these many releases.
“If we hadn’t met Peter Jackson, and if he and his team hadn’t developed the amazing technology they developed to restore the picture and sound of the original film we shot, I’m not sure how we would talk about Let It Be,” Lindsay-Hogg says, underscoring that, now, almost everyone who sees his 1970 film will be almost an expert on the period, and will be able to understand it better, free from the drama surrounding the band’s split at the time of its release. “Now, we talk about it in the context of Get Back. Peter said to me, ‘What I’m doing is making a documentary about making a documentary.’ And that’s what Peter did. So he did a lot of the legwork for the rest of us.”
Starr echoes that sentiment, saying Get Back finally set the record straight. Sure, it was the beginning of the end of our love affair with the greatest rock ‘n’ roll group ever, but it also showed the intimacy and comradery that made everything the Beatles accomplished possible. Seen alongside Let It Be, he says, Get Back gives a more complete picture of the iconic band.
“Now it’s got a start, a middle, and a finish. The start is very slow, and then we get into creating, and then we’re at it and then we’re out,” says Starr. “I love it. But I’m in it, of course, so six hours is never long enough.”
“I’d seen that cut that Apple had done about 25 years ago, and it was really shitty,” Lindsay-Hogg adds. “It was dark and boring and the sound was bad. And I was depressed about it. So the fact that it looks and sounds so great has a lot to do with Peter. It’s really helped Let It Be to have Get Back.”
Of course, the Beatles were in tatters by the time Let It Be was initially released. Still, Lindsay-Hogg was surprised by the eventual reaction to the film, recalling, “It really wasn’t a bad experience making Let It Be. But partly because of the way the band were treating each other in the press at the time, I think people saw it as very negative.”
And so, more than 55 years since the original filming began, and over 40 years since even the sub-par home video releases went out of print (“They were just awful,” Lindsay-Hogg says), Let It Be is finally back, for all the world to see.
“No, I’m happy with the balance,” Lindsay-Hogg replies when I ask if he’s now tempted to smooth out any of the film’s rough edges, or even revisit it for a director’s cut. “What I thought was right at the time is Let It Be. And I think the proportions are just about right. Besides, it wouldn’t be very smart to revisit the decisions of a 29-year-old, 55 years later.”
