All you need was money and cameras, and someone saying, ‘Action!’” (314). Filmmaking, as they well knew, was easy enough. They planned, according to Philip Norman, to “make a film unhampered by Walter Shenson, Dick Lester, and all the petty restraints which had made Help! and A Hard Day’s Night ultimately tedious and disappointing. The Beatles hoped that this “organic” approach to the medium would improve upon their previous filmmaking experiences. However “mapped” out the film’s structure was, the group still had no intention of following any rigid guidelines or “rules” of filmmaking during production. If somebody wanted to do something we hadn’t planned, they went ahead. Lennon also remembered plotting the film’s structure: “We knew most of the scenes we wanted to include but we bent our ideas to fit the people concerned, once we got to know our cast. It was a case of: ‘We can have a song here, and a dream sequence there,’ and so on. “They drew a circle, and then marked it off like the spokes on a wheel. John’s Wood,” recalled Neil Aspinall in The Beatles Anthology. “Paul and John sat down in Paul’s place in St. As free form as this concept sounds (or may appear upon viewing the final product), the project was in fact partially outlined, to a certain extent at least. McCartney’s idea for the Beatles’ film was simply to fill a colorful bus with assorted actors, friends, and oddballs (much like the actual Pranksters), ride out to the English countryside, and film whatever happened. The real-world inspiration for Magical Mystery Tour was, of course, Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters who were, according to Philip Norman in Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation (New York: Fireside, 1981), “an American hippy (sic) troupe which, two years earlier had journeyed by bus through the Californian backwoods, buoyed up by LSD diluted into thirst-quenching Kool-Aid” (313). McCartney had developed the basic concept of the film with the help of longtime Beatles’ roadie Mal Evans. The “Magical Mystery Tour” album/soundtrack. “It could have been mine…we were all in on it – but a lot of the material at that time could have been my idea, because I was coming up with a lot of concepts” (120). “I’m not sure whose idea Magical Mystery Tour was,” he states in The Beatles Anthology (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 2000). Having assumed a sort of defacto leadership role within the group following the loss of Epstein, McCartney suggested the musical, fantasy film he had concocted as their next project. However, when it became clear that the track was not appropriate for that project, it was shelved and quietly forgotten until the Beatles convened in September 1967 to discuss how to proceed with the business of being the Beatles. Paul McCartney had originally written the “Magical Mystery Tour” song for inclusion on the Sgt. Distancing themselves from their public image seems to be precisely what the Beatles had in mind for their next film project as well. Like the group, he had also hoped to find a vehicle wherein the Beatles would not have to play themselves (as they had in their earlier films) but rather, as noted in The Beatles at the Movies, “four characters who look, think and talk like the Beatles but are different characters” (92). It is interesting to note that just prior to the production of Magical Mystery Tour, Walter Shenson (the producer of the two previous Beatle films – A Hard Day’s Night and Help!) had been actively searching for a third film project for the band. The four Beatles planned to make their new film entirely on their own free from the studio system, the producers, the directors, or anyone else that might hinder the creative processes or perpetuate the mop top image that their previous movies had ingrained in the public consciousness. Unfortunately, as Beatles’ producer George Martin explains in Roy Carr’s The Beatles at the Movies (New York: HarperPerennial, 1996), things did not turn out that way and “if the Beatles’ professional career were to be plotted on a graph, Magical Mystery Tour was definitely a dip” (113). Or, at least that was how they envisioned it. It would be an extravagant film, every bit as colorful, interesting, and original as their music. Then, in early September, just a few weeks after the death of their manager, Brian Epstein (the victim of an accidental overdose of prescription-drugs on August 27, 1967), the Beatles began work on their next project – a film for television entitled Magical Mystery Tour. They were, by all accounts, perceived as infallible. Since the record’s June release, the group had become cultural and musical icons and had attained a form of rock sainthood. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album and looking for a follow-up. The fall of 1967 found The Beatles feasting on the critical and commercial success of the Sgt.
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