Nothing captured the sheer hysteria of Beatlemania better than A Hard Day's Night, the Fab Four's first and best film. Andrew Loog Oldham - the moptops' 'manager for a day' - recalls the unique set of circumstances that led to those swirling days being so brilliantly captured

Andrew Loog Oldham
Guardian Unlimited

Friday April 6, 2001

Ever since rock'n'roll raised its pimply head in the mid-1950s, pop fans wanted to see their idols on the big screen and movie producers were happy to oblige. Alas, in almost 50 years of celluloid rock, there are pitifully few great examples of this collaboration. A Hard Day's Night, released in 1964, succeeds by not being a rock film at all in the usual sense. It pretended to be a documentary of a day in their life and, seduced by the wit and cheek of the Beatles, we believed it. It worked then, as it does today.

I think it's time for my cameo. In January 1963 I starred in my own movie with the Beatles. I had left school at 16 in 1960, window-dressed for Mary Quant, bummed around Europe and the south of France, hung coats at Ronnie Scott's jazz club and finally ferreted my way into pop music by becoming press agent for Mark Wynter, a teen idol who'd scored big in the charts with Venus in Blue Jeans and Go Away, Little Girl. One of my duties for Wynter involved accompanying him to Birmingham for the filming of the top pop programme of the day, ABC TV's Thank Your Lucky Stars. Watching from the wings, I was transfixed by this group performing their second single, Please, Please Me. It was a pop epiphany.

The Beatles didn't look that different from the other acts Ð they were all wearing suits and ties, but they exuded an attitude that was blunt and honest as they mimed to the soundtrack of their single. The sound was familiar but this was no mere copy of the American music we all loved; it took it to another level and injected the pentecostal joy back into rock'n'roll. The group would bring this gospel of pop to America and take it into the brave new world of the 1960s. A few months later, the Beatles had taken over the world.

I went over to John Lennon and asked him who their manager was. He stuck his thumb in the direction of an elegant-looking man standing in the hall. Brian Epstein radiated success in his expensive overcoat, paisley scarf and haughty demeanour; a younger Kevin Spacey would have loved to play Eppy in rep. I studied this unpop-looking hotshot for a moment and quickly decided he was worth a hustle. He was a man obsessed, a man on a mission, and I wanted in. We took each other's measure and passed the tests.

Brian complained that the Beatles' record label, Parlophone, were not really helping him promote the group and, perhaps, yes, maybe they did need somebody pounding the pavements for them in . . . London. He pronounced the word London as if he was getting rid of phlegm. The London music business had not been very kind to Eppy and his boys, and Brian Epstein must be remembered as the man who persevered against multi-rejection until he got his lads the record deal that changed the musical century.

In 1963, London was a long way from Liverpool and the 1960s were far from swinging. It was a world in which crooning was a safe-sex condomed exchange, in which long-distance phone calls were almost a vulgarity, save for the occasion of reporting a birth or death in the family.

Brian liked my chops and agreed to a fiver per week, and so I went about heralding the birth of the Beatles. The group came down to London once every two or three weeks, staying for two days in a hotel on Sloane Square adjacent to the Royal Court. I got them lots of ink, which wasn't too difficult. By the early spring both Please, Please Me and From Me to You had zoomed to the top of the charts and the press were primed; they had already smelt pop blue-blood.

Brian was rather snotty about the press so I got to be 'manager for a day' when they came to town. As they greeted me in the lobby of that narrow hotel facing WH Smith's the Beatles were already utterly themselves. We'd cab from Soho to Fleet Street, visiting the pop scribes of the day. We'd ogle and fawn over Disc magazine's Penny Valentine; trade vinyl with DJ Alan Freeman while he contemplated ogling Paul; the group would reveal exclusive recording and on-the-road secrets to the NME's Keith Altham while I hustled Chris Hutchins for the same rag's news-page lead. Lennon was a cute lout, laconic and rude and already taking no prisoners. Paul bopped, weaved and almost curtsied. George was already to the manna born and Ringo nimble and droll.

Had I been a camera, I could have filmed my own hard day's night any afternoon I was with them; the Beatles were always on. A few months later I met the Rolling Stones and said hello to the rest of that life, whilst the Beatles took the leap of faith from vinyl and screams to cinema seats and A Hard Day's Night. The Fab Four lucked out in this venture by being surrounded by yanks: producer Walter Shenson, United Artists UK chief Bud Ornstein and director Richard Lester Ð plus one of their own, scriptwriter Alun Owen, a Liverpool Welshman. Shenson, Ornstein and Lester were transplanted Americans and therein lies the rub. I don't think British movie-makers would have been capable of 'getting' the Beatles, just as most British record companies had failed to 'get' them.

Bud Ornstein made the first overture to Epstein about making a Beatles film and chose Walter Shenson to produce it. And hereby hangs a tale of pop biz serendipity. Shenson had produced The Mouse That Roared (1960) and The Mouse on the Moon (1963); the former starring Peter Sellers, the latter directed by Richard Lester. Lester was a characteristic 1960s blend of craftsman and free spirit. He'd studied clinical psychology at university (a definite plus in dealing with entertainers), composed music, sung with a vocal group, and worked as a stage-hand at a local Philadelphia TV studio. At 20 he was a successful TV director at CBS. Like me, he had bummed across Europe, playing piano or guitar for his supper and, in 1956, settled in England, where he resumed his career as a TV director. A meeting with Peter Sellers led to a number of television assignments and Lester's first feature in 1960, The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film, a fragmented, inventive, slapstick, sight-gag driven affair that featured (and was produced by) Mr Sellers.

And thus it came about that Walter Shenson proposed to Brian Epstein that Richard Lester direct A Hard Day's Night. And Lester brought as mature and diverse a palette to the film life of the Beatles as George Martin brought to Abbey Road.

When the Beatles movie first appeared, critics drew parallels between the Beatles and the Marx Brothers, and whilst it is possible to see the wisecracking Lennon as Groucho and Ringo quasi-Harpo, the thread really belongs to Peter Sellers and the Goons. The mirth and ludicrousness of Sellers, Secombe, Milligan and Michael Bentine was the stuff we rock'n'roll war-babies had been weaned on. Sellers was a quiet but manic force behind the best of the British new wave popular film movement of the late 1950s that preceded the next cultural phase: the fusion of fashion into pop. He was also one of George Martin's Parlophone recording artists, the EMI comedy-based label that finally gave the Beatles a home.

Alun Owen was a seasoned television writer with a gift for the grit and the word; in writing the screenplay, he had the good sense to follow the Beatles around, record what he heard, write it up and let it be. The original title was A Day in the Life, before Ringo came up with A Hard Day's Night. Steven Soderbergh (the same guy who just won an Oscar for directing Traffic), in an interview with Richard Lester for his book Getting Away With It, asked: 'Who exactly decided it should be a day in the life? I've heard Owen say it was him and I've heard you say it was you following Lennon to Paris once.' Lester replied: 'Well, Alun, Walter and I all went and stayed in the George V when they played Paris. They were on the same floor, they had room service, we got into the cars, there was this screaming, we were backstage with them. The film was writing itself in front of us. It would have taken an idiot not to say, "Let's do this". I don't think there was any discussion at all about an alternative way of doing that film.'

In the first week of July 1964, A Hard Day's Night got a royal charity film premiere at the London Pavilion cinema, followed by a party at the Dorchester hotel. One of my lively lads, Brian Jones, attended the Dorchester bash and was welcomed by the Beatles. Mick, Keith and I didn't go Ð perhaps we had the celluloid blues, or maybe Tony Hancock was on the telly. Perhaps that was the night I locked Mick and Keith in the loo with orders to write, and if we had any film, we smoked it.

The Rolling Stones would not fare well on the celluloid trail; we never made a movie-movie. Oh, I went the rounds, made all the noises, and met all the sacred monsters. I first tried to get the rights for A Clockwork Orange, but Anthony Burgess had been, prematurely, told he was dying and had sold the movie rights to Stanley Kubrick for a tawdry five grand, and Mr Kubrick didn't reckon Mick. We settled for a second-best novel called Only Lovers Left Alive and after that too came to nowt, the Rolling Stones' film career was dead.

Mick and I took meetings with writers Willis Hall and Keith Waterhouse Ð it's amazing, in retrospect, how a few years difference in age and a bit of success can cloud one's attitude. We thought they were old farts and they thought us young farts, and inane. We next met with B-actor turned (almost) A-director Bryan Forbes, took tea and lusted after his missus, Nanette Newman. All I remember Forbes asking was whether Mick or I could confirm whether Elvis was gay. The final pit-stop was a dark mews house off Marble Arch where we met with Rebel Without a Cause director Nicholas Ray. Little did we know it then, but 55 Days at Peking (1963) was to be Ray's last film. He was only in his mid-50s but looked a bad 80 and a day. I can still recall the unnerving silence as we sat there with the ghost of James Dean past hovering over the gloom. As we walked away from this encounter, Jagger had me promise never to put him through that hell again. I didn't.

Mick went on to his own cinematic hell, with films as needy as Ned Kelly (1970) and Freejack (1991), while confirming that most pop stars, upon opening their mouth in a movie, lose whatever rhythm, charisma and aplomb they walked on the set with. There are so few successful collaborations between rock and film, mostly because of the difficulty of fitting your average rock star into the Procrustean bed of the movies. Rock is not subtle, it's larger-than-life and your average rock star a ringmaster of over-the-top histrionics. Conversely, the power of a great movie performance is in what the actor withholds. The marriage of film and rock remained strained and spotty until Martin Scorsese nailed the art with Mean Streets in 1973. Being a serious rockhound himself, he knew how rock formed the soundtrack to our lives, and intuitively fused music and film into a seamless rush of sound and image.

Jagger is rightly praised for his role in Performance, but, perhaps because I thought he was playing me, I found James Fox's performance more riveting. Performance is symptomatic of late-60s ennui. Part of its sinister appeal is that it is an ode to excess, drugs, sloth and an inability to produce. Our audience had grown tired of rock and it's poperatics and wanted see its participants fail, get busted and go to jail.

When Soderbergh asks if the Beatles were high while filming, Lester answers: 'A Hard Day's Night was a film, by and large, that wasn't performed under the continuous use of dope.' But then they didn't need to be, did they? By and large they were high on the first giddy roller-coaster of the 1960s that they had built for themselves, and for us.

© Clear Entertainment Ltd. A Hard Day's Night is re-released on April 13. Stoned, the first part of Andrew Loog Oldham's autobiography, will be published in paperback by Vintage in May.