Re -Train Your Brain To Happiness: The Beatles: Eight Days A Week

LOS ANGELES, CA June 20, 2016 – Academy Award®-winner Ron Howard’s authorized and highly anticipated documentary feature film about The Beatles’ phenomenal early career The Beatles: Eight Days A Week - The Touring Years has set its US theatrical release date for September 16th, 2016 and debuts the first trailer from the film and the official poster to launch the campaign, it was announced today by Imagine Entertainment, White Horse Pictures and Apple Corps Ltd.

Hulu will be the presenting partner for the theatrical release of the film in the US where the film will become available to stream exclusively to Hulu subscribers on September 17th.

Featuring rare and exclusive footage, the film is produced with the full cooperation of Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono Lennon and Olivia Harrison. White Horse Pictures’ Grammy Award-winning Nigel Sinclair, Scott Pascucci and Academy Award®-winner and Emmy® Award-winner Brian Grazer of Imagine Entertainment are producing with Howard. Apple Corps Ltd.’s Jeff Jones and Jonathan Clyde are serving as executive producers, along with Imagine’s Michael Rosenberg and White Horse’s Guy East and Nicholas Ferrall.

Studiocanal is an anchor partner on the film having acquired UK, France, Germany and Australia and New Zealand rights.

The Beatles: Eight Days A Week - The Touring Years is based on the first part of The Beatles’ career (1962-1966) – the period in which they toured and captured the world’s acclaim. Ron Howard’s film will explore how John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr came together to become this extraordinary phenomenon, “The Beatles.” It will explore their inner workings – how they made decisions, created their music and built their collective career together – all the while, exploring The Beatles’ extraordinary and unique musical gifts and their remarkable, complementary personalities. The film will focus on the time period from the early Beatles’ journey in the days of The Cavern Club in Liverpool to their last concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco in 1966.

Richard Abramowitz’s Abramorama will handle the US theatrical release of the film that is set to be an event driven experience with a few special surprises planned for cinemagoers.

Hulu will have the exclusive US streaming video on-demand rights to the film on SVOD beginning September 17th – marking the first feature film to debut on Hulu following its theatrical premiere. The Beatles: Eight Days A Week - The Touring Years is the first film acquired by Hulu’s Documentary Films arm which will serve as a new home for premium original and exclusive documentary film titles coming to Hulu.

Following an all-star world premiere in London on September 15th, the film will roll out theatrically worldwide with release dates set in Japan (September 22nd), Australia and New Zealand (September 16th) and UK, France and Germany (September 15th).

Award-winning Editor Paul Crowder is the editor. Crowder’s long-time collaborator, Mark Monroe, is serving as writer. Marc Ambrose is the supervising producer.

www.thebeatleseightdaysaweek.com

With many thanks to You Tube

Above: 'Eight Days A Week' - Shea Stadium
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These pictures from The Australian:

Film Review by David Stratton from The Australian:

‘In the beginning, things were really simple,” says Paul McCartney in a new interview filmed by director Ron Howard for his documentary feature Eight Days a Week — The Touring Years.

And if you thought you knew all there was to know about Beatlemania, this is the film to fill in any gaps you may have missed. At the same time it’s a reminder of the importance of the contribution the four young men from Liverpool made towards the world of music — one of Howard’s interviewees compares them favourably to Chopin and Mozart.

Howard sets out to tell the story of the Beatles from their faltering beginnings until their last live performance on the rooftop of the Apple building in London during the Let It Be sessions.

He employs rare footage of concerts, interviews, press conferences, behind-the-scenes horseplay and contextual current events (the assassination of John F. Kennedy, nuclear testing, racism in the American south).

In addition to McCartney, Ringo Starr provides a new interview, while John Lennon and George Harrison are seen in interviews filmed many years ago. Other commentators include Elvis Costello, Eddie Izzard, Richard Curtis (who claims to have spent his career trying to replicate the group’s sense of humour), Whoopi Goldberg (“They were a revelation: the whole world lit up”), Sigourney Weaver (“I loved John”) and Richard Lester, who directed the two Beatles feature films, A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965).

The concert footage begins with a performance at a cinema in Manchester early in 1963 and climaxes with the event at New York’s vast Shea Stadium in August 1965. The songs are all-time classics now, but the film reminds us that these four gifted musicians hailed from modest backgrounds (Harrison notes that his home didn’t have a bathroom).

Tribute is paid to manager Brian Epstein (“He was class,” says McCartney) and record producer George Martin. But this is in in some ways an “official” film (one of the production companies credited is Apple Corps), so no mention is made of Epstein’s death in 1967 from a drug overdose. Nor do Pete Best, Stu Sutcliffe or the women in the group’s lives get a mention, though we see the odd fleeting photograph of some of them and Yoko Ono is present at the Let It Be sessions.

There are insights into how the songs were composed in the first place, with both McCartney and Lennon agreeing that they worked closely together, almost taking it in turns to come up with ideas and themes. Some of the songs were clearly very personal: Help! was, it seems, a cry from the heart. The gradual transition from catchy pop music to something more complex and experimental, abetted by Harrison’s fascination with Indian music and culture, is also explored.

Lester talks about the fun everyone had making A Hard Day’s Night and how, just a year later, the production of Help! was far less happy. He also explains that the curious sequence set in the Bahamas in the latter film was included because the Beatles were looking for ways to reduce their income tax.

And then there’s Lennon’s throwaway line about the Beatles being more popular than Jesus, and the impact that had on their subsequent American tour. There are scary images of former fans burning Beatles records that look like something filmed in Nazi Germany.

“By the end it became quite complicated,” says McCartney in a masterpiece of understatement, but Howard doesn’t dwell on all the friction and dissension that ended the careers of the Fab Four.

Where the film is really interesting is its exploration of the contribution the Beatles made to the outside world, especially the US. There’s an interview with African-American historian Kitty Oliver who relates that, as a girl living in a strictly segregated environment, her attendance at the concert the Beatles gave in Jacksonville, Florida, was the first time she had mixed with white people; this became possible because the musicians refused to submit to local regulations that would have banned non-whites from their concert, and Oliver calls it an important milestone in the troubled history of race relations in the U.S.

Beatles fans will relish this musically rich trip down memory lane, while even the uninitiated will surely be impressed by the talent, humour and, yes, class on display.