Were teenage girls key to the Beatles' success? A new documentary explores how 'these young women discovered something that nobody else knew.'

The subject of Beatles ’64 — the new documentary produced by Martin Scorsese that debuts Nov. 29 on Disney+ — is a familiar one: the Fab Four’s arrival in the United States on Feb. 7, 1964, and the cultural maelstrom that followed.

The villains of the film are familiar, too: the old folks, the establishment types, the squares — all the Americans who just didn’t get it.

“Visually they are a nightmare: tight, dandified, Edwardian-Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair,” Newsweek sneered in a contemporaneous cover story quoted at length onscreen. “Musically they are a near-disaster: guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony, and melody.”

But while most accounts of the Beatles’ U.S. invasion treat the boys themselves as conquering heroes, Beatles '64 does something a little different. It turns a refreshing and revealing lens on the band’s first stateside fans as well — the vast majority of them teenage girls, a group all too easily dismissed at the time.

“These young women discovered something that nobody else knew,” the documentary's director, David Tedeschi (who previously edited Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue and George Harrison: Living in the Material World documentaries), tells Yahoo Entertainment. “And it turned out to be true.”

A policeman holds back fans of the Beatles. (© 2024 Apple Corps, Ltd.)

To capture that bigger, broader picture, Tedeschi raided the archives of the Maysles Brothers, the revolutionary fly-on-the-wall documentarians who followed the Beatles for their entire two-week initial visit, unearthing 17 minutes of never-before-seen footage in the process. All of the Maysles’ material was then restored to crystalline 4K by director Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post studio in New Zealand.

Meanwhile, the Beatles’ iconic Ed Sullivan Show appearances and raucous first U.S. concert at the Washington (D.C.) Coliseum were demixed and remixed using the same AI-assisted innovations as their other recent releases. And a handful of hardcore fans were asked to reflect on their youthful obsession, 60 years after the fact.

The result is a triumph of technology and storytelling — our clearest view yet into what Beatlemania looked like, sounded like and, most importantly, felt like for those who lived it.

To learn more about the making of Beatles ’64, Yahoo Entertainment spoke to Tedeschi and to a producer of the movie, Margaret Bodde.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This is a film — a really intimate film — about the moment America fell in love with the Beatles. But obviously, there is a degree of familiarity here. Every Beatles fan has the iconography of this first American visit in their head: the plane at JFK, the quippy press conferences, the screaming girls swarming the car, the Ed Sullivan Show, the D.C. concert in the boxing ring. And much of the Maysles Brothers footage has been used in documentaries before. Was it difficult to find a way in — an approach that felt fresh? And how would you describe the approach you landed on?

Tedeschi: We recognized it was a challenge at the very beginning, but we had several advantages. A big one was that Park Road, Peter Jackson's company, had restored the footage. And it just looks amazing. It looks better to my eye than 16 mm film looked when I was working in 16 mm. It's so clean, but it still feels cinematic.

As far as our vision, we wanted something that captured the joy of the Beatles’ music and the joy of the fans in that moment. Coming out of the Kennedy assassination, there was this generational shift in America. We wanted to find people who could really say something about their experience, so that in some way we could experience it, too.

Bodde: A lot of unseen Maysles Brothers material is of people on the street — mainly young women — finally getting a chance to talk about their feelings for this band. It's so visceral, so emotional. In the film, you really see them as they were — these young teenagers who have gotten there before everyone else. And they were right. They were right to be focused on this band. They were right to be as enthusiastic as they were.

Once you dove in, what surprised you in the material, in making the film — and what do you hope the audience is surprised by when they watch it?

Tedeschi: The girls on the street surprised me.

Why?

Tedeschi: They had a lot to say, and they had a lot of life. They really do capture how emotional that moment was — what it meant to them even then. Hearing that teenage perspective, it’s clear these young women discovered something that nobody else knew. And it turned out to be true.

There is a technological element here, too, right? The Maysles footage has been beautifully restored, and the live recordings have been demixed and remixed in the same way as the recently reissued albums. How important was this technology in making such an iconic moment feel fresh and new?

Bodde: I think it made all the difference. Just stripping back the layers of time and degradation and being able to reveal this beautiful black-and-white footage, clean — it brings those four young men right to you, with no artifacts of time to kind of get in the way.

Tedeschi: And the music… I don't think anyone has ever really heard the Beatles in that Washington Coliseum concert. The audio restoration is just mind-blowing. On the old tracks that we all heard, the mono tracks, you just hear the screaming of the audience, you know? Finally hearing the band is key to the film working as well as it does. They were just a great rock ‘n’ roll band in early 1964. That cover of “Long Tall Sally”? They're having so much fun. They're so young. They have so much energy. It all translates into the music.

The big question you ask in the film is why — why did this happen? You start with the assassination of JFK, and end with it too. As Paul McCartney puts it on screen, “Maybe America needed something like the Beatles to lift it out of mourning and just say, “Life goes on.” Or as the writer Joe Queenan recalls, “My father never recovered from Kennedy’s assassination — but we did.”

At the same time, you also touch on how the Beatles broke down the barriers of gender, sex, race and so on. After going deep and making this film, where do you land? How do you explain Beatlemania?

Tedeschi: I don't know that there is an explanation. It was a generational shift. I always go back to what John says at the end of the film — that they weren't necessarily leaders, but that they saw what was coming and somehow they were able to capture the energy of it. They became a part of the change.

Paul McCartney in "Beatles '64." (© 2024 Apple Corps, Ltd.)

Bodde: One of the things that struck me is when John talks about the end of military conscription in England, and he says they were the first generation who were “allowed to live.” So all these guys started bands instead. Thank God for England, then, because America didn’t fully appreciate its own music at the time.

Which was really Black music.

Bodde: Right. Soul, rhythm and blues, rock ‘n’ roll. America needed these outsiders to bring our own songs back to us.

Circling back to those teenage girls and what they intuited before everyone else, something that the feminist writer and activist Betty Friedan said in the film really resonated with me. It was this idea that the Beatles represented “a new man who's strong enough to be gentle.”

Bodde: The gender issue was huge. The Beatles were somehow looking at love and romance in a more equal way. It was kind of hard to pin down. But it wasn't like, “I'm going to take you.” It was more like, “We're going to do this together. I'm going to hold your hand.”

Another thing that really stood out in the film is how America experienced the Beatles collectively. But today we're all in our separate algorithmic echo chambers, experiencing our own versions of reality. Do you think we could ever experience something like the Beatles again?

Bodde: Our technology is great. It does a lot for us, but it really does divide and separate us, too. So in that sense, the film does provide some historical context to reflect on — where we were and where we are now. And I do feel like we have lost something by not having more shared experiences. There’s a sadness to that.

Tedeschi: On the other hand, with everything that's been happening over the last 20 years, it's almost as if we're trying to go back to an America that existed before the Beatles. I was born in ’62. So I grew up in the ’60s and early ’70s. And at one point I mentioned to Scorsese that all of that stuff — that period — seemed normal to me: the Beatles, New Wave cinema. It was normal because it’s what I knew.

And he laughed. He goes, “No, that was not normal. That's something that happened because of us.”

Beatles '64 starts streaming Nov. 29 on Disney+.