How “Beatles '64” Reveals the Fab Four's Success in America Was Linked to John F. Kennedy's Death (Exclusive)

Over Thanksgiving weekend in 2021, Beatles fans settled in for Get Back, Peter Jackson’s eight-hour epic that transported viewers back to the weeks leading up to the band’s famous rooftop concert in January 1969. Though more lighthearted than the troubled reputation of the period would indicate, the docuseries was colored by the irrefutable fact that it concludes with the last live performance the Beatles would ever give. Even the happy moments were made bittersweet with the knowledge that, despite appearances, it was nearing the end.

This Thanksgiving, fans received the perfect cinematic companion piece. Beatles ‘64, now streaming on Disney+, bookending the group’s story by providing the ultimate insider's look at the birth of Beatlemania in the United States. Executive produced by Martin Scorsese, the film is directed by his longtime editor David Tedeschi, a crucial collaborator on his string of essential latter-day rock docs examining the work of Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and George Harrison. “I think one of the reasons they chose us to make this is because we're from New York,” Tedeschi tells PEOPLE. “And it's a very New York story.”

That was, of course, where the Fab Four first made landfall on Feb. 7, 1964. The hero's welcome they received at Kennedy International Airport would echo throughout the city, country and ultimately the world. It’s only fitting that the Nov. 24 premiere of Beatles ‘64 was held in the heart of the Big Apple. A-listers like Emma Stone, Chris Rock, James Taylor, and Elvis Costello were on hand at Manhattan’s recently completed Hudson Square Theater to celebrate alongside Olivia Harrison, Sean Ono Lennon, and an ebullient Paul McCartney. Ethan Hawke moderated a post-screening Q&A with the director and Scorsese, who recalled how hearing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” for the first time on his morning walk to NYU’s Washington Square College left him so mesmerized that he was late to class.

Like Get Back, Tesceschi’s film draws from newly unearthed footage to focus on a brief yet pivotal juncture in the Beatles’ career. In this case, it’s their maiden voyage to America, the two week sojourn when they managed to cram in their generation-defining debut on The Ed Sullivan Show (plus two more appearances!), their first U.S. concert in Washington, a gig at New York’s prestigious Carnegie Hall, and a jaunt to Miami to swim, sail and have a quick meet-and-greet with Muhammad Ali.

The trip was captured for posterity by filmmakers Albert and David Maysles. While the brothers would go on to achieve legendary status with cinéma-vérité documentaries like Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens, they got the Beatle gig back in 1964 simply because they were the first guys to say "yes."(D.A. Pennebaker reportedly passed.) "I got a call from Granada Television in England saying, 'The Beatles are arriving in two hours. Would you like to make a film of them?'” Albert told me in a 2014 interview for VH1. “So I put my hand over the phone and I said to my brother David, 'Who are the Beatles?'" Thankfully David was an early Beatles convert, and soon they were in a cab to JFK. "We rushed over to the airport just in time to see the plane coming down. I was swallowed up by all the shouting and screaming and love that the young women were expressing. I think there were 5,000 or 10,000 youngsters all excited about the Beatles."

Related: Beatles Documentary Produced by Martin Scorsese Coming to Disney+ — Featuring Never-Before-Seen Footage

For the next two weeks, the Maysles were embedded with the band, hustling through besieged limos, sweaty nightclub dance floors, cramped train cars, backstage dressing rooms, and even the Beatles' suite at Manhattan’s stately Plaza Hotel. The level of access is unthinkable in today's PR-savvy world, and the brothers took full advantage, unobtrusively documenting the chaos and the quiet in their trademark fly-on-the-wall “direct cinema” style. Highlights from the 11 hours of 16mm they shot ended up in the seldom-seen 1964 TV special What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA (later re-edited for a home video release, which has gone out of print). The rest remained in the vault — until now.

“Albert sent us all the footage in the 1980s,” says Jonathan Clyde, an executive at the Beatles’ Apple Corps organization and one of the producers of Beatles ‘64. “It was just hundreds and hundreds of cans of film. There were work prints and outtakes. It was like a giant jigsaw puzzle and we had never really addressed what to do with it.” When the production of Get Back was in its final stages, Peter Jackson volunteered to use the same state-of-the-art film restoration technology he’d employed on that project to give the Maysles material a 4K polish. “They spent three years working on it,” Clyde adds. “At that point there was no intent to do anything with the footage. Then the internal discussion started. It was Olivia Harrison, who'd worked with Marty and David before [on 2011’s George Harrison: Living in the Material World], who suggested we speak to them. Paul, Sean and Ringo completely agreed, and that’s how it started.”

While the film features new interviews with the surviving Beatles, as well as fans, artists and other notables, the heart of Beatles ‘64 is the Maysles footage. The material is unique for presenting the moments immediately before and after the iconic scenes enshrined in history books. We’ve seen the Beatles making their Ed Sullivan debut an endless number of times, but few have witnessed the raucous afterparty where the band dance and flirt with club-goers at Times Square’s hotspot du jour, The Peppermint Lounge. Their first American press conference at JFK's arrivals hall is unforgettable for their witty one-liners. (Reporter: “Can you please sing something?” John: “No, we need money first!” Reporter: “Why does your music please people?” John: “If we knew we’d form another group and be managers.”) But the sight of the band watching themselves on television later that night and laughing at their own jokes is just as charming as the banter.

“What’s your ambition?" one reporter yells at the press conference. George Harrison’s reply is telling: “To go to America.” This is as big as they ever dreamed, and the looks on their faces can only be described as giddy. “They just cannot believe what is happening to them,” Clyde observes. It’s striking just how new they are to being the most famous people on the planet, and their awe is touching. Transistor radios are practically glued to their ears, as if they can’t get over the fact that their music is being played on American networks. They are the first British musicians to make a mark in the birthplace of rock. As one of their songs pours out of McCartney’s radio speaker for what was likely the 50th time that day, he stares right into the camera and lets out a gleeful “I love this!” Ringo IDs himself on one radio interview as “Ringo from the Beatles” — surely the last time he’d ever feel the need to offer that qualifying suffix.

Lennon becomes almost childlike upon hearing his voice through headphones. The mere act of seeing and hearing themselves was still novel. The endlessly prodding lenses and microphones are nearly never treated like the intrusion that they clearly are. Only once does Paul make a run for it — albeit comically, and just to the end of the hallway. After all, there’s nowhere for him to go.

Much of the footage is confined to four walls, but the limitations of their fame have yet to become a claustrophobic prison that would force them to permanently retire from touring less than three years later. In fact, there’s hardly a shot where they aren’t beaming authentic un-media-trained smiles. The suites become a stage to amuse the Maysles and themselves by pulling faces and adopting Goon-ish voices. Train cars are an arena to verbally spar with hard-nosed reporters who are thoroughly won over by the mouths of these boys. Limos provide a front-row seat to the hysteria as hoards of humanity heave themselves at the windows, mouths agape in shock or screams. The Beatles themselves can only offer bemused waves and baffled chuckles. “Hi girls,” McCartney says in a tone that suggests their car doesn’t have a greater-than-zero possibility of being crushed by the accumulation of teens permanently stationed outside the Plaza Hotel.

The scene is a rare look at what John Lennon later referred to as “the eye of the hurricane” — the calm focal point around which the mayhem revolves. “The craziness was going on in the world,” says Harrison in an archival clip. “In the band, we were kind of normal and the rest of the world was crazy.” The Beatles were arguably the most documented people in the world for a handful of years in the mid ‘60s, but seldom were the cameras pointed outward. The Maysles — and McCartney, whose Pentax snaps were recently published and exhibited in New York this year — capture the madness unfolding before their eyes.

The fans are truly the co-stars of Beatles ‘64, getting equal screen time in both Techschi’s documentary and the Maysles’ original footage. They match the Fabs for charisma and magnetism — no easy feat. They are hilarious. (“Elvis Presley stinks. He’s so old anyway,” one member of the Plaza vigil says of the 29-year-old King of Rock, before adding that all American singers can “rot.”) They are brilliant. (Of note: the Juilliard student clutching her classical musical scores — ”Italian arias,” she says with an eye roll — as she patrols the hotel entrance in search of the moptops.) They are enterprising. (Particularly the young lady who slipped the Plaza cleaner a few bucks for a piece of the Beatles’ used linens.) They are fearless. (Huge props to the pair who somehow managed to breach multiple layers of security and make it onto the Beatles’ floor. They kept their cool even after getting collared by a guard who ungallantly threatened to toss them down the stairwell.) Moreover, they take absolutely no s---. (“Who're you?” one girl snaps at a cameraman who dared to ask her the same question.)

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The fact that the Maysles spent so much film stock on these young women sets them apart from most other adults, who were all too happy to dismiss the whole thing as hormonal hysteria, no different than the silliness surrounding Elvis or Sinatra in prior decades. But the Maysles recognized that this raw display of emotion was worthy of respect and even reverence. Tedeschi tracked down a handful of these pioneering Beatlemaniacs, many of whom struggled to articulate the emotions behind these screams even after 60 years of processing. “It was like a crazy love,” Vickie Brenna-Costa, the linen purchaser, reflects in the film. “I can’t really understand it now. But then it was natural.”

For decades, it was almost mandatory for Beatle documentaries to feature interviews with an assortment of rock royalty, who tell fundamentally identical tales of catching their first glimpse of the group on TV and then starting a garage band the next day. Techeshi bucked tradition by interviewing figures who were impacted by the group in less obvious ways. The first talking head in the film is writer and critic Joe Queenan, who speaks simply but movingly of how the Beatles’ music helped dull the pain of an adolescence marred by paternal abuse.

“It was like a light coming on amid total darkness,” he says tearfully when recalling the first time he heard "She Loves You" as a 13-year-old. By depicting how the band impacted fans on a non-musical level, Beatles '64 both accentuates their power as a cultural force that transcends songs and also makes the message resonate even more deeply for those of us who didn’t follow their path to rockstar glory. The connection with the Beatles isn't just musician-to-musician, or boy-to-girl. They're for everyone, forever and always.

The mania reached critical mass on Feb. 9 when the Beatles made their hyperbole-proof debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. Their appearance drew upwards of 73 million viewers, making it the most-watched television event to date. “It's very hard to imagine today what it was like in terms of media in 1964,” Tedeschi explains. “I think New York probably had five television channels, and that was more than anywhere else in the country.” The Maysles’ cameras were barred from entering CBS studios, but they ultimately captured something far more precious: some of the only known footage of a family witnessing this oft-recalled cultural turning point in real-time.

It was a moment of inspiration born of desperation. "We just walked out onto the streets and into the first apartment building we found,” Albert Maysles explained in the VH1 interview. “As we were walking along the corridor, we could hear the Beatles’ music coming from one of the apartments. So we knocked.” They were welcomed by the Gonzalez family, who were enacting a scene being played out in millions of living rooms across the country. Their two daughters huddled around the mammoth TV set, necks craned to get as close to the screen as possible. Their faces are glazed in ecstasy. Their father’s face is notably different, however. Keeping his distance on the plastic-covered couch, he wears an unmistakable look of apprehension, as if realizing that his home — if not his world — was about to change. “He’s rigid,” laughs Clyde. “It’s like he’s saying, ‘Oh my, here’s my future. What is happening here?!’”

A few blocks away, composer Leonard Bernstein’s daughter Jamie convinces her parents to drag their black and white TV from the library to the dining room of their Midtown apartment so she could watch the Beatles during Sunday supper. Six decades later, she describes to Techschi the sense of “primitive eroticism” stirring inside her. The phrase comes near enough to verbalizing those overwhelming feelings that manifested mostly as screams. By embracing the Beatles in this way, young women of the era begin to embrace their own agency and sexuality. The documentary includes a mid-’60s CBC interview with the feminist writer Betty Friedan, not long after publishing her groundbreaking book, The Feminine Mystique. She characterizes the Beatles as the fresh definition of masculinity for modern times. “Those boys are wearing their hair long and saying no to the masculine mystique. No to that brutal, sadistic, tight-lipped, crew-cut, Prussian, big-muscle Ernest Hemingway masculinity,” she says. “The man who is strong enough to be gentle — that is a new man.”

Needless to say, this radical shift left the old men feeling threatened. Beatles ‘64 reminds viewers just how much skepticism and outright bile the band faced upon their American arrival, chiefly from males of a certain age. Revered CBS broadcaster Eric Sevareid likened the outsized public response to an outbreak of German measles during his newscast, while the pages of Newsweek carried a vicious takedown of their Carnegie Hall concert, which Lennon can be heard reading in the film. “Visually, they are a nightmare. Musically, they are a near disaster. Their lyrics, punctuated by nutty shouts of ‘yeah yeah yeah’ are a catastrophe.” In one unsettling scene, a buzzcut-sporting onlooker outside the Plaza engages with the young women, condescendingly declaring their passion “a little bit frightening and quite sick,” before suggesting that Beatles fans are “all lower-middle class, highly illiterate, unintelligent.” The way he throws the full weight of his adulthood into the attack of girls less than half his age is truly disturbing.

Teschedi’s film also underscores the role that race played in the Beatles’ disruption of the early ‘60s status quo. To parents, the band represented an insidious infiltration of Black culture into the mainstream (read: White) society through the songs they covered and full-throated endorsement of Southern R&B acts, urban girl groups, and the nascent Motown label. The Maysles footage shows all four calling into radio stations to request not their own songs, but music by Marvin Gaye, the Ronettes and the Miracles. “They were the first White group I ever heard in my life saying, ‘Yeah, we grew up listening to Black music,’” Smokey Robinson says in one powerful segment. He recalls getting shot at while navigating segregated bathrooms on tours of the South. Now these White kids from half a world away not only praised his song “You've Really Got a Hold on Me,” but recorded it. The recognition left Robinson “elated.” Tedeschi includes a clip of Robinson and the Miracles performing a show-stopping rendition of McCartney’s “Yesterday “ on Ed Sullivan in 1968, completing the circle of musical cross-pollination.

The Beatles were aware of their inadvertent (and uneasy) role as de facto ambassadors of Black music to White America. Lennon referenced it when recalling the initial U.S. resistance. “People have always been trying to stamp out rock ‘n’ roll since it started,” he says in a 1975 interview clip included in the doc. “I always thought that it’s because it came from Black music and the words had a lot of double entendre in the early days. It was all this ‘our nice White kids are gonna go crazy moving their bodies.’ The music got to your body. The Beatles just carried it a bit further [and] made it a bit more White, even more than Elvis did because we were English.”

This point is dramatically illustrated in vivid footage of the Beatles' first full concert on American soil, held at Washington DC’s Coliseum on Feb. 12, 1964. With visuals restored by Peter Jackson’s wizards at WingNut Studios (and sound remixed by the Beatles’ sonic steward Giles Martin), it’s arguably the closest most of us will ever get to seeing the Fabs in their apprentice period as a bar band in Hamburg’s red light district. Several clips of the performance are sprinkled throughout the film, but it was McCartney’s larynx-shredding version of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” that yielded the only spontaneous ovation at the documentary’s New York premiere. Both onscreen and in the theater, bodies certainly moved.

Related: Why Paul McCartney He Didn't Keep the Beatles Going with George Harrison and Ringo Starr: 'You're Hurting Too Much'

Ultimately Beatles ‘64 is less a biographical portrait of a band conquering a willing America with joy and more an exploration of how the country was drastically altered by their arrival. But the question at its core is the same that many self-aware Beatle fanatics have likely asked themselves at one time or another: Why do they mean so much? How did four musicians — barely out of their teens, from a city few had ever even heard of — cause such a damn fuss?

Tedeschi attempts to answer the question, at least partially, by linking their fates with John F. Kennedy. The film opens with a highlight reel of JFK’s thousand days in office, which abruptly terminates with a rifle blast. The newly-renamed Kennedy airport becomes a geographic inflection point, as clips of solemn attendees at the rechristening ceremony dovetail with hysterical teens welcoming the Beatles’ Pan Am flight just over two months later.  “When we came, America had been in mourning,” McCartney says in a contemporary interview. “Maybe America needed something like the Beatles to lift them out of mourning and say life goes on.”

It’s a rationale favored by countless historians. It’s as good an excuse as any. Then again, so is the emotional explanation provided by filmmaker David Lynch, who was in the crowd at the Beatles’ Coliseum show. “Music is one of the most fantastic things. Almost like fire and water and air,” he says. “It does so much. It does a thing for the intellect, it does a thing for the emotions... Music can swell the heart [until it] almost bursts. Tears of happiness flow out of your eyes. You can't believe the beauty that comes, and it comes from these notes.”

As the man (Billy Joel, actually) once said, perhaps it's best not to dissect something that’s still alive. And, inexplicably, the Beatles phenomenon continues to endure. “One of the big surprises of the film for me was how much fans from 1964 continue to love the music,” says Tedeschi. “Jamie Bernstein says that whenever Beatles songs come on, she has to stop what she’s doing because it goes straight into her heart and transports her back to that place inside of herself where the Beatles live.”

The "why" is a magical mystery. Intellectualizing aside, the explanation that will probably feel the most accurate to fans is a brief one buried midway through the movie. A reporter asks one of the girls outside the Plaza, “What do you like about the Beatles?” Her answer, delivered in a feral caterwaul that distorts the tape, is simple: “EVERYTHING!”

That's the second greatest interview in Beatles ‘64. The best occurs during a quiet moment on the train ride from New York to their Washington gig. A reporter asks McCartney what he thinks the Beatles’ impact will be on Western culture. It’s possible that his tongue is firmly in cheek, and McCartney seems to take it as such. “Culture?!” he chuckles incredulously. “It’s not culture. It’s a good laugh!” After witnessing the 82-year-old McCartney watch the towering image of his younger self uttering those words at the documentary premiere, it’s tempting to wonder if he’s changed his mind.

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