The Beatles’ ‘64’ Documentary Shows the Group’s Explosive Arrival Into the U.S.: “They Were a Ray of Light”

On February 7, 1964, the United States — and subsequently, the whole world — was irrevocably changed. The Beatles touching down at John F. Kennedy airport, meeting thousands of adoring, screaming fans on the runway altered the brain chemistry of a country in need of something good, and lit the fuse for a cultural revolution.

That is the premise which the Beatles ‘64, a new documentary released by the band’s Apple Corps Ltd., presents to its viewers. In November 1963, President Kennedy was shot and killed during a motorcade in Dallas, and the shocking moment instigated a period of mourning across the nation. Some would never recover from the trauma of seeing such a violent death, beamed into their homes on television. Months later, a new generation couldn’t tear themselves away from the television as The Beatles performed on The Ed Sullivan Show, watched an estimated 73 million people. As interviewee Joe Queenan says, teary-eyed, it was like “the light went on,” and the world was bright and full of colour for the first time.

The new documentary, out now on Disney+, follows the band’s two-week trip to America, their first time outside of Europe. Using archival and newly-restored footage, the Martin Scorsese-produced film follows their journey from the moment they step off the flight to the moment they head home. It features a plethora of interviews with those in the eye of the storm like Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and photographer Harry Benson, alongside the fans who were on the street or obsessing through the tube.

Though the story may be familiar to Beatles fans already, the documentary is unflinching in its depiction of the band’s visit and the context that surrounds it. Archive interviews and clippings see a hostile press compare the group to “German measles,” while at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., the disparity between the working class band and their bureaucratic, stuffy surroundings is laid bare. The divisions in race, class and gender are explored with interviews with Motown’s Smokey Robinson, and Ronald Isley of the Isley Brothers, both of whom The Beatles covered early in their career.

On the eve of its release, director David Tedeschi and producer Margaret Bodde discuss with Billboard about the challenges of making the story fresh again, the surprises in the editing suite and the role Scorsese had in shaping the narrative of the film.

This film comes out 60 years on from their arrival to the US. Why does this story still feel relevant?

Bodde: The interest in them feels unending. When The Beatles’ last single “Now and Then” came out, you had young people and teenagers on TikTok sobbing and talking about them so fondly, and these people weren’t even the grandchildren of the people who first discovered The Beatles in 1964 in America. They have a timeless appeal. 

The fact that they came to America so soon after the assassination of a beloved president and there was a country grieving and in a place of hopelessness, they came in with their personalities and their music. Maybe there’s always times like that — America right now is in a similar place of division where no one can agree on one thing. But when The Beatles came, they were the one thing people could coalesce around this ray of light and their humor and their hopefulness that they brought through their music and their humour and personality.

Compared to Peter Jackson’s Get Back, which shows the group as four separate personalities with shared histories and relationships, Beatles ’64 catches them at quite an innocent time. They’re sort of like one person…

Bodde: They do seem like they’re a single entity. People don’t yet know which one is which. Albert and David Maysles filmed them in New York for that period, and Albert asks John to hit the slate for the mics, and he calls him George instead of John! And you know in six months time no one would ever make that mistake, but it was so new and everyone in the band seemed like they were living a dream that they couldn’t have ever imagined and yet it was happening.

Tedeschi: And it was so unexpected. It was the greatest weapon against the cynicism of the New York press corps. There had been days of stories running about how ridiculous their hair was and the music, they were like the wolves ready for their prey. And then it very quickly became a different kind of story.

Do you think part of the appeal is that they were so removed from US culture?

Tedeschi: They were exotic and familiar at the same time. That’s literally what Joe Queenan says, they were from Liverpool but they might as well have been from Mars.

Bodde: As a rock‘n’roll group they were the first, they came over before any of the other bands like their contemporaries. Their separateness from the U.S. did allow them to have more of an open embrace of the Black music that came out of America like soul, rhythm’n’blues and rock’n’roll; they loved it and that’s why they were so excited to come to America in the first place. They really wanted to meet their heroes and hear this music live, as they’d already seen Motown come through to the U.K. They were opening America’s eyes to the treasure that they already had that wasn’t getting the appreciation that it deserved.

How can you bring something new to subjects that we know so well already?

Tedeschi: Immediately there’s the challenge that we know it’s a very famous story that we know has been told many times, and what is there that’s new? I will say that in large part because of the restoration by [Peter Jackson’s] Park Road Post Production and Giles Martin [son of the Fab Four’s producer George] doing some remixing on the performances, there was material that had never been accessible before. The footage that was shot by the Maysels brothers looks like it was shot yesterday. Even more importantly, the concert at the Washington Coliseum is such an amazing document of who the Beatles were as a live band.

Whilst there are interviews with the band throughout, it’s the fans and their experiences that really stuck with me. There’s an amazing clip of the Gonzalez family and a young girl watching the clip in real time. Why did you want to focus the film on these people?

Bodde: Seventy-three million people watched that performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, and it was a shared moment in American history that was happening right in the Gonzalez family’s small apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. Then you hear Jamie Bernstein [daughter of conductor Leonard Bernstein] speaking about the black and white TV being rolled from the library to the dining room at 8 o’clock to watch while having dinner. Whether you were working class or whether you were privileged, no matter who you were, this was a moment of shared interest and joy that everyone can relate to. 

What role did Martin Scorsese have in the production of the film?

Tedeschi: Both of us have worked with him for a long long time, over 20 years. At the very beginning we talk specifically about these challenges about there being a lot of Beatles films and a lot of material out there, he was very helpful in shaping the throughline and then he would watch cuts. And tell us what was working and what wasn’t.

Bodde: Martin loves music and he talks about how if he had one talent he wished he could have, it would be to play an instrument and be a musician. He finds everything about music fuels his own creativity. He hears a musical movement or a song and it inspires the visual for him and he has the song in his head before he has the pictures. And he’s a preservationist and a historian, so music documentaries — whether he’s directed them or produced them — encompasses a lot of his preoccupations and interests.

One of the things he and David both do so brilliantly is to put historical context around these musical moments and I think that’s what makes the film so fascinating. When you talk about what could you possibly bring to The Beatles, well you can bring the story of America at that time, the story of an impending social revolution and ideas about who women and men are, a race consciousness in general, the idea of everyone who started protesting the Vietnam War, The Beatles were kind of a part of that and integrated into that as individuals and as a group.

Was there anything that surprised you when you went back to this footage?

Tedeschi: The most surprising thing for me was learning that there was an establishment against the Beatles and working actively to make them fail. There’s quite an amazing scene at the British Embassy in D.C. where they’ve thrown a party and they’re horribly mistreated. The staff looks down on them and treats them like they’re low-class. John says that some ‘animal’ came up to Ringo and cut his hair. It’s powerful. I hadn’t expected that kind of reaction.

The film concludes with a look at the generational shift at that time, and Lennon even calls his post-war generation the ones “who were allowed to live”…

Bodde: That footage of John speaking to [Canadian media theorist] Marshall McLuhan in 1969, that was a real revelation. The level of insight and intellectual heft that Lennon had to put that idea together is a surprising notion, that because you weren’t going into the military, you could pick up a guitar or a paintbrush… you could do other things. That’s freedom right?