Help!

Part 1 - Background and Production

After the success of A Hard Day's Night, the Beatles went back to the recording studio to work on their next album, Beatles for Sale (1964). Although retrospectively condemned as somewhat lacklustre by the majority of critics,1 the album also sold very respectably, replacing A Hard Day’s Night at the top of the British album charts and enjoying an intermittent run of eleven weeks in that position. By the Beatles' standards, 1965 began fairly uneventfully and, after completing their run of Christmas shows at the Hammersmith Odeon, the group took a well-earned break before returning to Abbey Road to begin work on the soundtrack of the second film for United Artists, provisionally titled Beatles 2. This title was later to change to Eight Arms to Hold You (another ‘Ringoism’), and would eventually become Help!

Unlike their first film, the colour-shot Help! was a lavish affair, the success of A Hard Day’s Night no doubt convincing the producers and financiers that an inflated budget and a less intense shooting schedule could be justified in the light of the Beatles' ever-increasing popularity. According to Alexander Walker's figures, the film was budgeted at £400,000,2 twice the cost of their previous production, and the shooting schedule, which spanned eleven weeks (between 23 February and 11 May), was almost one third longer than that of A Hard Day's Night. Again the same successful combination of Lester and Shenson were employed as director and producer, although the screenplay was written by Marc Behm and Charles Wood rather than Alun Owen, whose script had been integral to the success of A Hard Day’s Night. It is possible that the Beatles were at least partly responsible for this decision, as records show that the relationship between them and Owen was characterized by a mutual, although mild, dislike. In a 1993 interview, Owen stated that he ‘didn't really get on with John Lennon’,3 and as Tony Barrow revealed some years earlier, the Beatles ‘tolerated rather than enjoyed their relationship with Alun Owen’.4 Lennon was particularly uncharitable about Owen's personality, and some years after the film was made described him as ‘a bit phoney, like a professional Liverpool man - you know, like a professional American’.

Despite the fact that Help! was essentially the construction of the same team, the narrative premises of the two films differ enormously. Unlike the realist-oriented aesthetic of A Hard Day’s Night, Help! was conceived as pure fiction fantasy, and while it retains the notion of the Beatles ‘as themselves’, the writers had no intention of attempting to construct an illusion of actuality. Instead, they created a totally fictitious extravaganza in which the Beatles are pursued across various exotic locations by an assortment of mad scientists, Eastern mystics and bumbling policemen who want to get hold of the highly prized diamond ring, Kaili, which has inexplicably become stuck to Ringo’s finger.

The final synopsis of the filmed screenplay has a fascinating and complex history, made all the more difficult to fathom by the conflicting memories of those concerned. However, it would appear that the origins of the underlying ‘chase’ premise of the final script evolved from an original treatment, which had to be jettisoned for external reasons. The original treatment was written, to greater or lesser degrees, by Dick Lester and Joe McGrath, who by 1965 had also been involved with the Beatles in a number of ways, having produced and directed such television shows as A Degree of Frost and Not Only But Also (in which members of the group had appeared), as well as contributing some script ideas to A Hard Day’s Night. Because of the conflicting recollections of McGrath and Lester, there are some minor differences over both the extent of authorship and the plot of the original synopsis. Lester maintains that the outline was an ‘idea of mine’6 which he talked through with McGrath, and McGrath maintains that he was ‘paid a lot of money’’ by Shenson to produce the treatment. However, since the stories they recount are essentially very similar, and both directors were, in Lester’s terms, ‘very good friends’ and would ‘always talk up ideas’,8 it is not unreasonable to suppose that they collaborated on the original rejected treatment.

As Joe McGrath remembers it, the original synopsis of the Beatles' second film was ‘based on a very old film idea’:9 Ringo is told by a doctor that he is terminally ill and becomes so depressed that he immediately pays a contract killer £500 to dispose of him. Unable to face immediate termination, he asks the killer to destroy him when he least expects it. This should be easy, since the killer is also a master of disguise. However, the following day the doctor phones and confesses that he has made a terrible mistake, telling Ringo that the X-rays used to diagnose the drummer’s illness belonged to somebody else and that he is not terminally ill at all. Unfortunately Ringo, unable to trace the master of disguise, panics and tells the other Beatles of his predicament. With this premise established, there follows a series of comic chases and mishaps in which the Beatles attempt to trace the killer before he can carry out his task. However, Lester remembers things slightly differently. As he recalls it, Ringo's motivation for hiring the hit man was that he is tired of the constraints of his fame, and in a drunken stupor meets a man in a pub who then hires the killer. The following morning a sober Ringo regrets his actions and, as with the other recollection, there then ensues a series of comic chases and scrapes in which the Beatles attempt to track down the master of disguise before he can terminate their drummer's life.

According to Lester, the idea, which he had already talked through with Paul McCartney, had to be jettisoned because a similar screenplay was, by ‘pure accident’10 already being shot in Hong Kong as Chinese Adventures in China by Philippe de Broca (aka Up to His Ears). However, he liked the premise and approached American writer Marc Behm with a view to producing a similar story. ‘Out of that,’ recalls Lester, ‘came the fact that Ringo, for one reason or another, was being attacked by people and didn't understand why...’11 Once this synopsis was written by Behm, Lester then drafted in Charles Wood (who had written The Knack) to give the story the English context which, as an American living in Paris, was beyond Behm's experience. As Lester remembers, Behm's story had ‘no English context at all, so Charles came in and we rewrote it to suit them [the Beatles] and the Englishness of it all.’12

Like the original treatment, the film's title also faced considerable technical problems. From the outset, Lester had wanted to use the title Help, Help but was initially unable to use it because it had already been registered in America. As a result, the shooting title went through a number of changes until well into filming, when it was decided that the then current title, Eight Arms to Hold You was both disliked and unsuitable as the basis for the as yet unwritten title song. Lester then went to United Artists’ lawyers and asked, ‘What is the law? Can you copyright the word "Help"? ... OK, somebody else has registered it but it's like saying that somebody's registered the word "and" ... Shakespeare used the word "and", so we can't use it?’13 After he had decided to go ahead and use the title anyway, one of the lawyers told Lester that the registered title did not have an exclamation point, so one was added as ‘a legal wheeze’14 to avoid potential problems.

Continued... HELP!: Part two

© Bob Neaverson 1997 - 2008