Alvin and the Chipmunks sing A Hard Day's Night

And yes: There's more where that came from.

A sobering thought about A Hard Day's Night

After the 1 pm Thursday screening of A Hard Day's Night at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, I am going to host a brief dialogue with high school students (and anyone else who wants to stick around after the closing credits). And I can't help thinking: If someone had shown me a 50-year-old film when I was a high school student -- it would have been a silent movie.

Like this one, with Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle:


Or this one, with Mary Pickford:


Or this one, with Charlie Chaplin (and a musical score later added by Chaplin himself):

My 1979 chat with George Harrison (thanks to 2 Pythons)

George Harrison (left) and some other famous guy
So there I was, seated with Eric Idle and Michael Palin, lunching at a posh Manhattan eatery in the fall of 1979. Warner Bros. had taken over the place for an entire day, so ink-stained wretches like myself could have quality time with assorted members of the Monty Python ensemble prior to the national release of Life of Brian.

And I’m not going to lie: I was feeling pretty damn good about myself, since it was only me seated at the table with Idle and Palin. (Remember: This was 1979, back when print journalists -- even print journalists from Flyover Country -- got to enjoy lengthy hobnobs with the stars during junkets.) And I felt even better when one of the Life of Brian producers strolled into the restaurant, ambled over our table, and asked: “Do you mind if I join you?”

The producer was George Harrison.

(Years later, when I reminded Eric Idle of this episode, he quipped: “Yeah, what we should have told him was, ‘Aw, piss off, George. We’re trying to talk here.’” That Eric. Always the kidder.)

What follows is a slightly revised excerpt from a piece I wrote a few weeks after my close encounter with the late, great former Beatle. Please understand: I’m recycling the article not to show off – well, OK, not only to show off – but rather because some of what Harrison had to say strikes me as especially relevant while A Hard Day’s Night takes a 50th anniversary victory lap though venues nationwide this week.

At first, Harrison – then 36 – was understandably eager to join Idle and Palin in discussing Life of Brian, which already was generating outrage among the easily affronted. (A true story: Just a few days after my return to Dallas, where we were living at the time, my wife and I had to struggle to keep from laughing out loud during a Sunday mass while the presiding priest, obviously inflamed by hearsay, devoted most of his sermon to condemning the not-yet-released Python picture.) Once that topic of conversation was exhausted, however, the talk turned to his often frenetic days with The Fab Four.

Did he miss that eventful era? “Well, yeah,” Harrison conceded as the waiter cleared the table. “When you’re in a group, you have problems, you know, conflicts. But at the same time, you would have good moments. You’ve got some pals to hang around with, and you’ve got some more strength in a way.

“You can draw strength, and you can also get some feedback, from each other, when you’re writing and recording together. I miss all that side of it…

“You know, when we first started out, it was fun just being in a band. We weren’t trying to be rich, we were just having fun. I miss all that side.

“Fame is the thing that screwed it all up, really, as far as I’m concerned. We wound up going around the world singing the same old tunes, just to different people.”

Even so, Harrison recalled with a smile, the Beatles tours were not without random pleasures. “The only thing that spoiled the tour was that we had to go and play at the end of the day. If we just toured the cities of the world, checking into hotels and all that, it would have been okay.

“We had great fun in the bathrooms of all the hotels of the world, because that was the only place we could go, with all the crowds everywhere else.”

Harrison would not definitely rule out a Beatles reunion, but he was not holding his breath while waiting for it to happen. And he was not particularly pleased by the efforts of moviemakers and theatrical producers to keep the Beatles legend alive. (Though he had not yet seen either the movie I Wanna Hold Your Hand or the Broadway show Beatlemania at the time of our 1979 encounter, he dismissed both as “a lot of junk… I wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole.”)

As far as Harrison was concerned on that afternoon all those years ago, his stint as a Beatle was something rapidly receding into the distant past. He didn’t seem to mind if it stayed there.

“It was like another lifetime, you know? Some previous incarnation. It’s been a long time. It’s been 10 years since we split up – and we were splitting up for five years before that.

“In actual fact, we’ve been split up longer than we were together. We were only together a short time, really. I mean, in the length of my life, the Beatles was just a very little part of it.”

A part, Harrison claimed, that many people already were forgetting – or never knew about in the first place.

“You know, they asked kids in England – mind you, they asked 6-year-olds – but they gave them our names and they asked them if they knew who we were.” The result of the inquiry? “They said, ‘Oh, yeah, wasn’t he a famous doctor?’ Or something like that. ‘George Harrison, wasn’t he a famous doctor?’ Ringo Starr? ‘He was one of the Muppets, wasn’t he?’”

(Postscript: As Paul Harvey might say, here’s the rest of the story. At one point in our discussion of Life of Brian, I blithely began a question with, “I know you guys don’t have any sacred cows…” And Harrison, with a perfectly straight face, interrupted by saying: “But I do.” It shames me to say that, even after he, Idle and Palin began chuckling, it took me about five seconds to remember that Harrison had converted to Hinduism years earlier. But what the hell: I can honestly say that, even if had to make myself the butt of the joke, I got a good laugh out of a Beatle and two Pythons, all at the same time.)

Flashback: Richard Lester on A Hard Day's Night

Note: Back in October 1985, director Richard Lester -- the bloke being poked by John Lennon in the above photo -- came to Houston for a retrospective of his films at the Rice University Media Center. I had the pleasure of interviewing him before he arrived in H-Town -- and the privilege of conducting a Q&A with him after the Media Center screening of A Hard Day's Night. We talked a lot about that seminal cinematic treat -- and its influence on a then-trendy phenomenon known as MTV. Starting July 4, several venues nationwide will celebrate the 50th anniversary of A Hard Day's Night by screening a newly spiffed-up version of Lester's merry masterwork. So I thought it might be a good time to recycle my 1985 feature story about the man behind the merriment.

If A Hard Day's Night didn't exist, someone at MTV might have tried to invent it by now. But it does exist, thank heaven, and it remains as vibrantly fresh as ever, more inventive and exhilarating than 99.9 percent of the music clips introduced by cable VJs. The larky musical-comedy showcasing The Beatles will be on view at the Rice Media Center as part of a two-week retrospective tribute to its director, Richard Lester. After the screening, Lester will be on hand to answer questions about his life, his films -- and his work with The Fab Four.

Earlier this week, Lester laughed politely at the suggestion he created the world's first, and longest, music video when he directed A Hard Day's Night.

''Fortunately,'' he said, ''I didn't know I was doing that. I plead total innocence. But I must say, it was very kind of the MTV people: Apparently, I was their first inaugural Hall of Fame member.

''Of course, I didn't really know there was a Hall of Fame for MTV.''

Lester, a Philadelphia native, had only two features to his credit when producer Walter Shenson tapped him to direct A Hard Day's Night in 1963. At that point, The Beatles were only slightly less obscure than Lester in the United States. By the time the film opened, however, the boys from Liverpool had already launched their first assault on America. Most film critics of the time expected the worst from A Hard Day's Night, which threatened to be just another quickie rock-music exploitation film. But the reviewers were pleasantly surprised. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called the movie ''a whale of a comedy... much more sophisticated in theme and technique than its seemingly frivolous matter promises.''

Much of the credit for the film's success went to Lester, whom Crowther praised for directing the musical madness ''at such a brisk clip that it seems to come spontaneously.''

Almost overnight, Lester established himself as one of his generation's most innovative filmmakers, a wildly eclectic virtuoso who merged the gracefully zany farce of silent-movie comedy with state-of-the-art editing and cinematography techniques. Just as important, Lester -- who began his career as a director of live television programs, then worked his way into the quick-cut, hard-sell world of TV advertising -- somehow had devised the perfect visual style to accommodate the flashy, frantic ambiance of what was then being hyped as the era of Swinging England.

Modestly, Lester insists his stylistic approach to A Hard Day's Night sprang from necessity, not inspiration: ''Generally -- and I think this is true of almost everybody who tries to earn a crust of bread -- I was just trying to find solutions to problems. And the solutions came out of the set of circumstances given to me.''

In this case, Lester said, he was charged with making a film that would reflect the frenzy of Beatlemania, contrasted with the ironic calm of the four lads -- John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr -- who were generating all the excitement. To get a first-hand glimpse at the phenomenon, Lester accompanied the Beatles on a tour of Paris. He didn't see much in the way of glitz and glamour -- but he did notice The Beatles had to barricade themselves in hotel rooms to hide from zealous fans.

''That weekend,'' Lester remembered, ''the film wrote itself. John mentioned that they'd just come back from Sweden, so I said, 'Well, how did you like Stockholm?' And he said, 'It was a car and a room, and a room and a car.' Well, that was the film. The means of making the music continue the mood of the piece -- all that seemed to grow out of that weekend. Because I saw their behavior was musical, and their music was behavioral. It was easy.''

It was also, in many scenes, improvised.

Essentially plotless, A Hard Day's Night follows The Beatles as they hide from fans, travel by train, hide from fans, rehearse for a concert, hide from fans, perform in concert, and hide from fans some more. One of the film's best production numbers, ''Can't Buy Me Love,'' serves as a liberating break from the rigorous routine.

''All that page of the script said was, 'The boys escape by playing in the field.' So we ad-libbed on three different locations, each two hours long. The circumstances of some shots were dictated by the fact that Paul got drunk one night, and was very hung over -- and didn't show up for filming. So I put on a pair of his boots -- I happened to be wearing black trousers, anyway -- and hand-held the camera, and used my feet as the fourth member of the group. Otherwise, I think the brighter members of the audience might have noticed that 25 percent of the group was missing.

''Expediency does count a lot in art. I think anytime you ask an artist, 'Why that yellow?' he'll probably say, 'I'd run out of blue that day.'''

Ironically, the ''Can't Buy Me Love'' sequence often is excerpted and shown nowadays as a music video -- much to Lester's chagrin.

''Until that point in the film, the boys were in very confined spaces, and being told to go here, do that. They were managed and organized, pushed into this and that, told they should rehearse, go into this hotel room. And, no, you can't get out of the car because the crowd's here.

"So I wanted that scene to be an explosion of absolute exuberance, as they escape into open air. That piece of film works best when you have four reels before it with low ceilings. I don't take offense, but, really, taken out of context and just put on as a rock video, it has less impact emotionally than it would have in the movie.''

With A Hard Day's Night, Help! (another Beatle comedy, and in many ways a much better film) and The Knack, Lester almost single-handedly created in the mid-1960s a new cinematic syntax that was quickly and widely emulated -- most notably, by the producers of The Monkees -- but rarely used with the same kinetic imagination and giddy effervescence. He later polarized audiences and critics when he brought this same flamboyant visual flair to How I Won the War, a scathing anti-war satire, and The Bed-Sitting Room, an episodic black comedy about life after a nuclear holocaust.

Lester matched style and content perfectly, even brilliantly, in Petulia, an unexpectedly moving romantic comedy about two rational adults seeking love in a totally irrational '60s San Francisco. And his romantic streak appeared even more pronounced in his glorious Robin and Marian. In recent years, Lester has toned down the visual pyrotechnics. But his better films -- The Three Musketeers, Juggernaut, The Ritz -- reveal him as a moviemaker blessed with impudent wit, an iconoclastic disdain for genre conventions, and a fondness for inspired offbeat casting.

And, no, he's not interested in offers to direct music videos.

Across the Universe bestrides a generation gap?

I'll be curious to see if there's a generational divide in the critical and audience reaction to Across the Universe as it progresses along its post-Toronto Film Festival platform release. That is: If, like me, you're old enough to have bought Beatles albums when they were first released, while you still were in your teens, will you respond to the film more passionately, more approvingly, than twenty- and thirtysomethings? If you’re not among those of us with a living memory of that music as, quite literally, the soundtrack of what was going on in the world during the turbulent 1960s -- will you love the movie as much as I do, and Roger Ebert does? As Stephen Holden does?

Director Julie Taymor – who, at 54, is scarcely four months younger than I am -- does a magical mystery tour through the Beatles catalogue to fashion an impressionistic musical fantasy about wild times, civil unrest, tradition challenging, envelope pushing and political radicalization at time when Americans were polarized by disparate attitudes about race, sex, drugs and the Vietnam War. And while tight-assed naysayers might be turned off by the very notion of a musical using Fab Four songs to underscore and illuminate both the giddy exuberance and angry discordance of the ‘60s, Taymor, to her credit, is sufficiently smart and serious to give epochal events their full weight, even while offering an audaciously stylized and optimistically celebratory extravaganza that leaves you joyous and grateful. To be sure, some critics are spot-on when they complain that some of Taymor’s matching of music and imagery is literal-minded at best, heavy-handed at worst. Ultimately, however, Across the Universe commands the same response as The Borg: Resistance is futile. It’s a happening, baby, and you should allow it to happen to you.

It was 40 years ago today...

Thanks to iPods, TiVo and other dubious miracles of modern technology, many moviegoers are content to wait before sampling even the biggest summer blockbusters. But when The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band 40 years ago today, millions of my generation came together as one to simultaneously experience the sound of innovation. The No. 1 album of all time can still dazzle fans -- and even impress the uninitiated -- according to Rafer Guzman of Newsday (even though Jon Wiener claims only one cut on the classic LP has an undiminished impact to astonish).

And if you've always wanted to know what those lyrics really mean, check this out.

TV or not TV

With equal measures of misty-eyed nostalgia, socioeconomic savvy and common-sense insight, USA Today writer Robert Bianco offers some provocative suggestions for improving the future of television by borrowing a few pages from the medium's past. He's especially spot-on while discussing the undervalued worth of variety shows:

"There were obviously downsides to the old days of three networks per TV and one TV per household, but the combination did force us all to learn something about each other's tastes. Ed Sullivan offered The Beatles for the kids, Judy Garland for their parents and opera for their grandparents. To get to one, you had to sit through the other. It broadened the younger generation's musical tastes, and it gave the older generation some clue as to what their kids were listening to up in their rooms.

"Both would still be very good ideas."

A little less cultural insularity -- if not a lot less of what academics describe as demassification -- might be good for all of us.