By Ed Symkus

The most recent in an apparently boundless reservoir of Beatles documentaries will “please please” their fans.

Beatles ’64 is directed by David Tedeschi, and produced by Martin Scorsese and Margaret Bodde. It begins streaming on Disney+ on November 29.

You might think that people have had their fill of documentaries about the Beatles after the 2021 release of Get Back, Peter Jackson’s sprawling extended edit of Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 fly-on-the-wall film Let It Be. There were also the earlier documentaries The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit (1991) and The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years.

You might think that, but you’d be wrong. There will never be enough for Beatles buffs, music fans, historians, and pop culturalists. Especially if filmmakers keep finding new and noteworthy elements to add to the mix.

Aside from the previous films, reams of pages have been written in books, newspapers, and magazines about the band’s initial two-week visit to the States in February, 1964, consisting of three appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and concerts in Carnegie Hall and the Washington Coliseum. That fortnight has become known as the official start of Beatlemania in America.

And the Fab Four’s kickoff is the focus of Beatles ’64. The doc makes ample use of footage shot by documentarians Albert and David Maysles – which was first seen in The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit — and then some. Director David Tedeschi (a longtime cohort of this film’s co-producer, Martin Scorsese) expands on the impressive scope of the Maysles’ original close-up and personal look at the Beatles in hotel rooms and on the streets of New York with their fevered fans. The Maysles followed the Beatles during the group’s trip and shot 11 hours of material. Scorsese and Tedeschi have gone back to all that 16mm footage and found segments to add.

Tedeschi’s other contributions include current interviews and chats with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, archival talks with George Harrison and John Lennon (his ’70s appearance chatting with Tom Snyder on The Tomorrow Show gives us a laid back, thoughtful, and informative Lennon). Other additions include contemporary talking head segments featuring, among many others, director David Lynch, who was at the Beatles’ first American concert in DC, and Smokey Robinson, who is still elated that the band chose to cover his song “You Really Got a Hold on Me.” He credits their success to bringing “rock and pop and rhythm & blues, all together.” Also heard from: Ronnie Spector, who, with the Ronettes, was a friend of the Beatles before they came to the States, and music producer Jack Douglas, a stalwart Beatles fan who worked on Lennon’s Imagine and Double Fantasy.

Footage by Albert and David Maysles in Beatles ’64. Photo:  APPLE CORPS, LTD.

At its core, the film is about how the Beatles and their songs affected the folks we see being interviewed, and about how that crazed two-week visit to the States affected the Beatles. The intimacy of the Maysles’ footage chronicles the ordeals they had to put up with — from phone interviews, TV interviews, and press conferences to making their way through crowds, constantly being touched by fans, at times being trapped in hotel rooms. It’s clear that the lads were trying their best to put up a positive front and enjoy it all, but there are times when they look like they would much rather be elsewhere.

A major bonus is that, through the magic of Peter Jackson’s company Park Road Post, the sequences shot by the Maysles have been restored in crisp 4K, and the superb performance segments on the Sullivan show and at the DC concert were “demixed” by Jackson’s WingNut Films, then remixed by producer Giles Martin.

Speaking personally, as an unshakable Beatles fan who is old enough to remember watching them on that long-ago February Sunday night, my two favorite moments in Beatles ’64  both involve John Lennon. On a train ride from New York to Washington he remarks, “This is what our film [the yet-unmade A Hard Day’s Night] will be like”; and in one of the hotel room scenes — at the 52:35 mark — he’s passing the time playing a melodica, messing around with a musical idea that would undoubtedly become the opening phrase of “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

Ed Symkus is a Boston native and Emerson College graduate. He went to Woodstock, interviewed Amanda Palmer, Dan Hicks, Colin Farrell, and George Romero, and has visited the Outer Hebrides, the Lofoten Islands, Anglesey, Mykonos, Nantucket, the Azores, Catalina, Kangaroo Island, Capri, and the Isle of Wight with his wife Lisa.