It’s about time that somebody finally got off their ass and made a movie about the seminal British rock group The Beatles. It’s genuinely perverse that (with only a handful of exceptions) absolutely nothing like this exists. Lucky for hungry music fans everywhere, Ron Howard has decided to fill that gaping void with the awkwardly titled The Beatles: Eight Days A Week—The Touring Years. This feature-length documentary will follow the music careers of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison—and to a lesser extent Ringo Starr and Pete Best—during the formative years they spent playing before live audiences of surly German boozers and screaming American teenagers. Spanning from 1962 to 1966, Howard’s project will feature never-before-seen concert footage from the first half of the band’s life, including a tantalizing peek at the young ruffians honing their performance skills in The Cavern Club in their hometown of Liverpool.
By the time they’d reached the final stop of their 1966 U.S. tour on August 29 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, the Beatles had had it with playing live to deafening wails. From then on out, aside from one notable rooftop performance three years later, the band members devoted all their energies into pumping out groundbreaking studio albums, doing drugs, and infighting. This film—produced with the cooperation of both living band members and the widows of the other two—will document everything that led up to that decision.
The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years will cause a shrieking, fainting sensation when it arrives in theaters September 15.