Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg on the Definitive New Beatles Video Set
Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s five-decade career as television, film, and theater director has spanned everything from Ready, Steady, Go! to Waiting for Godot. There was also a period, in the mid-1960s, when he made something called promos for a band called the Beatles.
“Promo” was the term for what, in the fullness of time, would become known as the music video. And it’s impossible to imagine a better crash course on the early days of the form than the three new editions of the Beatles’ hits package, 1, coming out this weekend, in time (per long-standing Fab Four tradition) for holiday wish lists. The set includes the deluxe 1+, a whopping package of 50 gorgeously restored videos, with new stereo and 5.1 remixes by Giles (son of George) Martin. Forget the bootleg, third-generation, Betamax versions on YouTube. Frame by frame, new aural and visual wonders are revealed here, from the bristling guitars on “Paperback Writer” to the graffitied “STONES” that can now be clearly seen on a Penny Lane street sign.
Lindsay-Hogg, who shot the Beatles at critical career junctures (including Let It Be, the film that unsuspectingly captured their breakup), remembers what it was like to turn a camera on “the four most famous people in the world.”
Vanity Fair: It’s an obvious question, but it’s unavoidable: Did you have any idea we’d be watching these videos almost 50 years on?
Michael Lindsay-Hogg: No, no, of course not. I mean, they were little mom-and-pop videos because there weren’t really videos before. There was a French system called Scopitone. . . . But then the Beatles—as you see on the DVD set—did some very quick promos after they shot Help!, I think. And so they were the first. And then, when appearing live got to be too much of a headache for them, they were the first band to think about making their own promos and distributing them all across the world—they didn’t have to go there, the promos went there.
By: Mark Rozzo
Source: Vanity Fair
