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For decades, the attitude toward documentary “Let it be” in the Beatles‘ The camp seemed to be: May he rest in peace. But eventually the film will be seen again. A restored version of the 1970 film is coming soon. Disney+the same service that brought fans “The Beatles: Get Back” in 2021 Peter Jackson docuseries that used director’s outtakes Michael Lindsay HoggThe original movie.
The documentary will be re-released on Disney+ on May 8, which is sure to be an important day for Beatles fans who have spent most of their lives wondering if they would ever come out of the vault again. The 1970 film has not only been dusted off, but has been restored by Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post Production using the same technology used to make the old footage of “The Beatles: Get Back” look and sound as revitalized as it did. .
The original film was notable for being the only element of the Beatles’ catalog that Apple seemed to want to suppress rather than exploit. “Let It Be” has not been officially in circulation in any form since the early 1980s, although shady-looking bootlegs have been widely available. Those boots arose from the VHS and laserdisc versions that appeared in the early days of the home video revolution; The film was never released in the DVD era, much less on Blu-Ray or streaming.
Jackson used hours of outtakes from Lindsay-Hogg’s footage to put together “The Beatles: Get Back.” During that project’s publicity campaign, he repeatedly promised that his new treatment of the material was intended to complement the original film, not supplant it forever, and that the original documentary would eventually be revisited so they could serve as companion pieces.
“I am absolutely thrilled that Michael’s film, ‘Let It Be,’ has been restored and is finally being re-released after being unavailable for decades,” Jackson said in a statement. “I was very lucky to have access to Michael’s outtakes for ‘Get Back,’ and I always thought that ‘Let It Be’ was necessary to complete the story of ‘Get Back.’ In three parts, we show Michael and the Beatles filming a groundbreaking new documentary, and ‘Let It Be’ is that documentary, the film they released in 1970. I now think of all of this as an epic story, finally completed after five decades. The two projects support and enhance each other: ‘Let It Be’ is the climax of ‘Get Back’, while ‘Get Back’ provides vital context missing from ‘Let It Be’. Michael Lindsay-Hogg was unconditionally helpful and kind while making ‘Get Back’, and it’s only fair that his original film has the last word…it looks and sounds so much better than it did in 1970.”
During the “Get Back” campaign, Jackson said Variety who thought “Let It Be” had been unfairly characterized as depressing, partly because it came out immediately after the Beatles broke up, but also because the color scheme of the 16mm film, released in 1970, had a bleak look . that lent itself to a pessimistic interpretation. “Get Back” had a more colorful look, and that seems to be true for what Jackson’s team has now done with the original elements of “Let It Be” as well.
Additionally, Jackson’s team has had a new opportunity with the audio of the 1970 film. A press release says that “with the full support of Lindsay-Hogg, Apple Corps asked Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post Production to dive in in a meticulous restoration of the film from the original 16mm negative, which included a loving remastering of the sound using the same MAL downmix. technology that was applied to the documentary series ‘Get Back’.”
Lindsay-Hogg expressed her approval of the new efforts in a statement. “’Let It Be’ was ready for release in October/November 1969, but it didn’t come out until April 1970,” she recalled. “A month before its release, the Beatles officially broke up. And then people went to see ‘Let It Be’ with sadness in their hearts, thinking, ‘I’ll never see the Beatles together again.’ I’ll never have that joy again,’ and that really darkened the perception of the film. But in fact, how often do you see artists of this stature working together to turn what they hear in their heads into songs? And then you get to the roof and see their enthusiasm, camaraderie and pure joy in playing together again as a group and you know, as we know now, that it was the last time, and we see it with full understanding of who. They were and still are and a little touching. “I was flabbergasted by what Peter was able to do with ‘Get Back,’ using all the footage he had filmed 50 years earlier.”
Lindsay-Hogg gave more details about the new restoration in a interview with the New York Times published on Tuesday. “When Peter first showed me some restored footage from the film, one was of a couple of Beatles from behind, and in the original their hair looked very messy,” the director noted. “Then he said, ‘Now let me show you what we’ve been working on.'” It was the same shot, but you could see the individual strands of hair. The new version is a 21st-century version of a 20th-century film. It’s certainly brighter. and animated than what ended up on video. It now looks like it was intended to be seen in 1969 or 1970, although at my request Peter gave it a more cinematic look than ‘Get Back’, which had a slightly more modern and digital look. “.
It wasn’t just some viewers of the 1970 film, but some of the Beatles themselves who seemed to take a dim view of his portrayal of some tense interactions during the making of what ended up being the “Let It Be” album. It will be interesting to see if Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr could now offer a more positive assessment closer to Jackson’s praise of recent times.
Other restoration efforts on the film had reportedly begun in the 1990s and again in the 2000s, with an eye toward a possible DVD or theatrical release. Although abandonments of previous restorations were widely attributed to the disinterest of the surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney said in a 2016 interview that he was not the heist and that he encouraged efforts to make the documentary available again.
