In the film Goldfinger, James Bond infamously says that some things are not done, like listening to The Beatles without earmuffs. Clearly, he means at their concerts when teems of screaming teens were louder than the band.
That’s clearly in evidence in Ron Howard’s fab documentary of the Fab Four, EIGHT DAYS A WEEK: THE TOURING YEARS.
Arguably, director Ron Howard’s best work in feature film narrative have been movies based on real events and real people: Rush, Frost/Nixon, A Beautiful Mind and Apollo 13, and here he brings all his narrative skills to the screen to create a superlative documentary.
“As I looked at those touring years, I began to see it as a kind of adventure, a survival tale of this incredible journey they were on,” he recalls. “I thought that was the story I could tell, a cousin to Apollo 13 in a way that would reflect the culture of the times. At the same time, we could explore the dynamics of The Beatles as a band — a brotherhood of sorts — but also as individuals, because they definitely grew, evolved and changed as they were tested as individuals and as a group.”
The film captures the exhilaration of The Beatles’ phenomenal rise to fame as well as the toll it eventually took on the band members, prompting them to stop touring altogether in August 1966 and devote their prodigious musical energy to the series of ground-breaking studio recordings for which they are best known today.
EIGHT DAYS A WEEK chronicles the period from June 1962 to the time the band quit touring in August 1966, a period during which the group performed 815 times in 15 different countries and 90 cities around the world.
Drawing from more than 100 hours of rare and unseen footage collected from fans, news outlets and national archives, as well as the Beatles’ private collection, EIGHT DAYS A WEEK crafts a cinematic experience unlike any Beatles film that has come before.
In addition to multiple new and in-depth interviews with the two surviving members of the band, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, as well as a host of names with direct experience of the times — Whoopi Goldberg, Elvis Costello, Larry Kane, Dr. Kitty Oliver and Sigourney Weaver — the film also includes 12 full and partial performances from the concerts. These have been elegantly re-cut and re-mastered in high definition and 5.1 surround sound.
A key voice in the film is journalist Larry Kane. As a 21-year-old reporter, he travelled with The Beatles to every stop on their 1964 and 1965 U.S. tours. Kane, who later went on to become a respected TV news anchor in Philadelphia for nearly 40 years, developed a close relationship with the band members. His stories, especially about the shooting of their second film, Help!, are extraordinary.
There are also reflections from Ed Freeman, one of the roadies from the band’s final tour in 1966. He tells stories in the film about how chaotic it was and how they couldn’t hear themselves and how crowd control was becoming a huge problem.
The term “event film” has somewhat lost its currency being synonymous with some special effects super hero franchise. EIGHT DAYS A WEEK deserves the title, genuinely, for being entertaining, informative and engagingly emotional. Its eight day cinema engagement also comes with their entire set at Shea Stadium. An event indeed!