The Beatles’ 1970 ‘Let It Be’ Documentary, Out of Action for Four Decades, Heads to Disney+ After Being Revamped by Peter Jackson’s Team.

For decades, the attitude toward the “Let It Be” movie in the Beatles camp seemed to be: Let it rest in peace. But eventually the film will be seen again. A remake of the 1970 film will soon be coming to Disney+, the same service that brought fans “The Beatles: The Return,” a 2021 Peter Jackson documentary that used ideas from director Michael Jackson’s original film. Lindsay-Hogg.

The documentary will be re-released on Disney + on May 8, it will certainly be a red-letter day for Beatles fans who have spent most of their lives wondering if it will ever come out of the closet again. Not only has the 1970 film been scrapped, but it has been restored by Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post Production using the same technology used to make the classic “The Beatles: Get Back” look and sound as restored as it did. .

The original film is notorious for being the one item in the Beatles catalog that Apple seemed to want to suppress rather than exploit. “Let It Be” hasn’t been released in any form since the early 1980s, although muddy-looking bootleg copies have been widely available. Those credits were lifted from the VHS and laserdisc versions that came out in the early days of the home video revolution; the film has never been released on DVD, let alone Blu-Ray or streaming.

Jackson used hours from the Lindsay-Hogg film to put together “The Beatles: Get Back.” During the campaign to publicize the project, he repeatedly vowed that his new treatment of the property was meant to complement the original film, not replace it permanently, and that the original doc was it will finally be seen again so they can stand as friends.

“I’m thrilled that Michael’s film, ‘Let It Be,’ has been restored and is finally being re-released after being out of print for decades,” Jackson said in a statement. “I was lucky enough to have had the chance to get Michael’s take on ‘Get Back,’ and I’ve always thought that ‘Let It Be’ was necessary to complete the story of ‘Get Back.’ Over the course of three episodes, we showed Michael and the Beatles taking on a new important film, and ‘Let It Be’ is that documentary – the film they released in 1970. Now I think of it as a story one important one, it finally ended after fifty years. The two projects support and reinforce each other: ‘Let It Be’ is the climax of ‘Khutleta,’ while ‘Khutlela’ provides an important meaning that is missing for ‘Let It Be.’ Michael Lindsay-Hogg was so helpful and kind when I was making ‘Return,’ and it’s only right that his original film has the final say… it looks and sounds better than it did in 1970.

During the “Come Back” campaign, Jackson said Variety that he thought “Let It Be” was unfairly classified as depressing, in part because it came right after the Beatles split, but also because the film’s color scheme 16mm, released in 1970, had an intimidating appearance. that gave little explanation. “Come Back” had a great look to it, and it seems to be true to what Jackson’s band did with the original parts of “Let It Be” and now.

However, Jackson’s team came up with a new sound idea for the 1970 film. The press release says that “with the full support of Lindsay-Hogg, Apple Corps asked Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post Production to immersed himself in painstakingly restoring the film from the original 16mm negative, which involved lovingly restoring the sound using the same MAL de-mix technology that was used in the ‘Get Back’ documentaries.

Lindsay-Hogg gave his endorsement of the new effort in a statement. “‘Let It Be’ was due out in October/November 1969, but it didn’t come out until April 1970,” he recalled. “One month before it was released, the Beatles officially broke up. And so people went to see ‘Let It Be’ with sadness in their hearts, thinking, ‘I’ll never see the Beatles together again. . I’m not going to have that fun anymore,’ and it clouded the mood of the movie. But, really, how often do you see the creators of this scene work together to make that happen what’s going through their heads into songs? Then you get to the roof, and you see their joy, their camaraderie and their joy in playing together again as a team and you know, as we do now, that it was the last time, and we look at it with a full understanding of who they were, and still are, and they are still a little sad. I was amazed by that Peter was able to do it with ‘Bat Back,’ using all the footage I had taken over the past 50 years.”

Lindsay-Hogg explained the new revival in an interview with the New York Times published on Tuesday. “When Peter started showing me the restored footage from the film, one was of the two Beatles from behind, and their original hair looked really good,” he said. director. Then he said, “Now let me show you what we have been working on.” It was the same shot, but you could see individual strands of hair. The new genre is the genre of the 20th century film. It’s definitely brighter and more alive than what ended up on videotape. Now it looks like it was meant to look like 1969 or 1970, although at my request, Peter gave the look of the film more like ‘Return,’ which had a modern look and digital.

It was not only some viewers of the 1970 film but some of the Beatles themselves who seemed to have a dim view of introducing some difficult collaborations during the making of what ended up being “Let It Be”. It will be interesting to see if Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr can now offer a closer examination of Jackson’s latter-day praise.

It is reported that some efforts to revive this film began in the 1990s and again in the 2000s, with an eye on DVD viewing or theatrical release. Although the rejection of the previous revival was due to the lack of interest of the remaining Beatles, Paul McCartney said in a 2016 interview that he was not the one holding it, and that he encouraged the effort to make the document available again.