#dick lester

[nemperor]

Brian Epstein and the Beatles with Dick Lester and Walter Shenson, 1964

[muzaktomyears]

...Down on the beach at Paradise Island, Dave Hull had one recorder and mike, I had another. He had given me his mike: ‘This will put more oomph (oomph, for Chrissake?) in your voice,’ he said, showing me. ‘Moooore Bas-aaaaasssss sound, like, deeeeeep.’ O.K. Dave, I can dig it. The mike was faulty and I popped p’s in the breeze. We split up between the Beatles. I took John first; caustic John who was really nothing of the sort. He pulled a couple of desultory put-downs and then gave me as good a tape as you’ll get if you are asking questions like: ‘Whereja buy your boots?’ and ‘Do you enjoy filming?’ and ‘How old are you?’ of someone you know at least as well as your brother, and maybe better. George told me about going to a family wedding in Liverpool. Paul decided not to be mean any longer - guessing, correctly, that life was bad enough without rubbing my nose in it - and talked about song-writing (‘We can carve Paul’s up into twenty pieces,’ said Dave. ‘Let’s see, twenty by 100 dollars, that's 2,000 bucks.’) and Ringo said it was great to be married, a quote you can read even today. It comes up as fresh as ever... A few days later, Bob Eubanks and his team of mailers, tape-editors and salemen were ready to market the tapes, segmented, trailered, packaged. Beatlemania would do the rest. An ad was placed in Billboard. Disaster... No one wanted the tapes, at all. But these we said, were conversations between friends, we said. No deal, said the thundering silence. And Brian Epstein, through his lawyers in New York threatened vengeance in the worst way. ‘I back down,’ I told Bob. ‘You stay where you are,’ said Bob. ‘We won’t have hands to count the money.’ Forget it. I backed down and out of the Beatle tapes. Also, I never had the lust for gold again. Money doesn’t talk, it swears* and Hollywood is a town of many temptations. (*Bob Dylan) In the longer distance since I wrote that, I have come to see the Bahamas visit as just the turning of a page in The Great Novel. As a practised journalist, of course I would respond to the request to go. On newspapers one spent one’s life awaiting deployment; if one were told to ask the Queen why she kicked the corgi, one did it, as nicely as possible. I had worked for The Beatles for only eight months but I had been a journalist for 15 years, and such odds weighed heavily on the subconscious. As a result, there were gaffes all through the Bahamas visit; at dinner one evening with The Boys, Eleanor Bron, Bob Freeman, Neil, Mal, Dick Lester and Roy Kinnear, I relaxed into the tropical night with its scents and wines and felt sufficiently integrated into the ambience to ask Lester if we could meet for a chat on tape sometime, ‘nothing too complicated’. In less sensitive company, this would have been a perfectly normal request. As it was, The Beatles drew the wagons around Lester, and I could scarcely have been more of a pariah had I stood, priapic, on the table and mooned.

Fifty Years Adrift, Derek Taylor (1984)

[chaptertwo-thepacnw]

the running jumping & standing still film |1959|

[jozefsquare]

Movie poster designed for Dick Lester’s The Sound of Jazz by Czech sculptor and fine artist Zdeněk Palcr.

Join our £3 Poster Auctions at https://www.jozefsquare.com/poster-auctions/ or subscribe to our daily or weekly newsletter: http://eepurl.com/RvXo9 (25% OFF for Students).

[hellyeahlennon]

John Lennon holding a plastic football figure at a press conference for the film How I Won The War. 1966. 

[beatlequotes]

I was going home in the car and Dick Lester suggested the title, 'Hard Day's Night' from something Ringo had said. I had used it in 'In His Own Write', but it was an off-the-cuff remark by Ringo. You know, one of those malapropisms. A Ringo-ism, where he said it not to be funny... just said it. So Dick Lester said, 'We are going to use that title.'

John Lennon, Playboy Interviews, 1980

[blixtbaby]

(how i won the war 1966)

[sgt-peppers-blog]