Six Lessons from A Hard Day’s Night

What a 59-year-old movie can still teach us…

In the opening scene of A Hard Day’s Night three of the Beatles are being chased down the street by a mob of screaming girls when George trips, does a face plant on the sidewalk, then Ringo falls over George and when John looks back and realizes what’s happened, he bursts out laughing.

Here’s the video (with the wrong music) but you still get to see George trip:

Turns out this was a great introduction to what audiences were about to see: a movie made cheap and fast because the Hollywood Geniuses who financed it didn’t think the Beatles were going to last very long so they had to get the movie made and into theaters as quickly as possible.

But that cheap and fast movie turned out to be a classic and A Hard Day’s Night got nominated for two Academy Awards and 40 years after it was released Time magazine named it one of the best 100 films of all time and in 1999 the British Film Institute ranked it as the 88^th greatest British film of the 20^th century and A Hard Day’s Night was also added to the Criterion Collection of Important and Classic Films which is pretty good for a movie made as quickly and inexpensively as possible and was supposed to be forgotten almost immediately.

So how did a cheap exploitation film become a great one and what lessons can a 59-year-old movie still teach us?  

Glad you asked.  

1. Money Isn’t Everything

The studio didn’t want to spend much time or money on A Hard Day’s Night so director Richard Lester got maybe two takes per scene so when George tripped and crash-landed, Lester was smart enough to leave it in the movie. A less flexible and much dumber director might have said:

“Oh, crap, George fell down so we have to do it again.”

They were using crowds that had shown up to see the Beatles in person and maybe get in the movie as extras and if you pay attention during the chase scenes you’ll see a number of young girls trip and get run over. But leaving those unscripted accidents in the movie added to the feeling of energy and hysteria that surrounded the Beatles and all that energy and hysteria wound up on the screen.

(Plus it saved money because they didn’t have to stage those scenes again.)

A skimpy budget can be a good thing when you have creative people involved, precisely because the lack of money forces those creative people to be creative.

For instance (we’re using a different Beatles movie, but I found the right video so we’re using it anyway and you need to stop being pedantic or I’ll turn this car around right now) during the filming of Help! they shot a scene of the Beatles skiing and when they looked at what they shot, they had missed some wires running across the top of the screen and instead of freaking out and saying “we can’t use it” or “we need to shoot it again” or “let’s wait for CGI to be invented” Richard Lester added musical notes to the telephone wires so it looked planned and inventive.

Here’s that video:

If uncreative hacks are involved it doesn’t make any difference how much money they have because they’ll still be uncreative hacks.

If creative people don’t have the money to blow up buildings or jump cars between skyscrapers or have two digitally-created Transformers fight each other on the surface of the moon, they have to make do with what’s available and if you want a great example of just how well that can work, watch the first Die Hard which cost $28 million.

(When it comes to making movies, apparently that’s chump change and about half what you need if you ask the Pentagon to design an ashtray.)

In the first Die Hard one of the screen writers – Jeb Stuart – had to get inventive and walked around the unfinished building they were using as a set (and it was pretty much their only set) to look for creative things for Bruce Willis to do in a limited space.

But once that first Die Hard made – depending on which unreliable internet source you believe – about $140 million, the Hollywood Vampires (which would be a great name for a band, and yeah, I stole that joke from Dave Barry) showed up to get a piece of the action, so they changed directors and screenwriters and Die Hard 2 is an over-bloated mess, based on the very weak premise that all the Once-In-A-Lifetime stuff that happened to Bruce Willis in the original Die Hard happens all over again.

The budget on Die Hard 2 was $70 million – two-and-a-half times what they spent on the first one – and they still couldn’t make a movie half as good. (But it made $240 million so I’m betting the Hollywood Vampires were OK with that.)

A Hard Day’s Night was made in about seven weeks (from the first day of filming to the premier was just a little over four months) cost $529,000 and made $11 million.

I’m also betting if you asked a Hollywood Vampire if he’d rather make $11 million on a classic or $240 million on a piece of crap he’d ask what kind of moronic question is that and then rip your throat out.

2: Don’t Fall In Love with Plan A

Throughout history Insecure People in Charge of Things want to control everything and not let the people that work for them make any decisions because those Insecure People are afraid they’ll get blamed if their employees’ decisions don’t work out and won’t get credit if they do.

So Insecure People draw up Plan A and insist everybody stick to the plan even though conditions change and Plan A is no longer feasible. Secure People aren’t afraid to change plans when changing plans makes sense.

For instance:

Here’s the scene where the Beatles are rehearsing If I Fell and keep your eye on George and what happens when he tries to act cool and lean on an amplifier:

Once again Dick Lester could have said we have to reshoot it because George knocked over an amplifier and looked like a goof, but instead Lester used the mistake and added a clunking noise to the soundtrack which makes it seem as if it was all deliberate: yeah, we meant for George to do that.

Also…

When they were shooting the Can’t Buy Me Love scene a British European Airways helicopter landed nearby, so seeing an opportunity, they ran over and asked if the helicopter crew would take a camera man up to get some aerial shots and the helicopter crew said yes; after all it was for the Beatles.

Now that lawyers have a stranglehold on everything we do and we’re totally obsessed with possible legal problems, if you tried that same thing today, imagine the paperwork: releases and insurance policies would have to be signed and bosses would have to be notified and a series of negotiations over fees and screen credits would have to take place between British European Airways and United Artists before they’d let someone borrow a helicopter.

BTW: The letters “BEA” were already on the British European Airways helicopter, but they added the “TLES” to make it look like a “BEATLES” helicopter which is another example of how these guys were improvising on the fly and willing to throw Plan A out the window if a convenient Plan B helicopter was suddenly available.

3: Let People Do Their Jobs

One of the many problems we currently suffer is having people at the top of (go ahead and name the industry of your choice) assume they must know more than everybody or else or they wouldn’t be at the top, an assumption which means those people at the top are unfamiliar with The Peter Principle which states that you’ll get promoted until you reach a level where you’re incompetent.

People who actually know what they’re doing are willing to admit they don’t know everything and hire people who know the stuff they don’t and then let those people do their jobs.

For instance:

They were trying to figure out a title for the movie and decided it should be named after one of the Beatle’s songs, but none of the existing song titles sounded right. Then John Lennon told the movie producer – Walter Shenson – about something funny Ringo had said. The Beatles were overscheduled because everyone wanted a piece of their time and after one exhausting day Ringo said:

“That was a hard day’s (and then realized it was already dark outside) night.”

Shenson loved it and said OK that’s the title of the movie; now write a song to go with it. (I’ve also read two other versions of how this happened so believe it or don’t, but this is the version included on the Criterion Collection DVD.)

John said that’s a horrible song title and what kind of lyrics could you possibly write to go with a title like A Hard Day’s Night and Shenson said, hey, you’re the song writer; figure it out. Walter Shenson had the two best songwriters in the world working for him and was smart enough to get out of their way.

Smart movie producers (and editors) don’t try to get you to do what they would do if they only had talent; they figure out what you’re trying to do and help you do it. Dumb movie producers (and editors) try to force their lame ideas on you.

In any case…

The next morning Shenson comes in and John and Paul are sitting there with a birthday card they’d written the lyrics on and they told Shenson, OK, we’ve got your song, which is pretty amazing because they took a difficult assignment and overnight wrote a Number One Hit.

The opening chord of A Hard Day’s Night has been called the most famous chord in the History of Rock and Roll and just in case you need a self-improvement project, here’s a video on how to play it. (Word of warning: you’re gonna need at least three friends to help out, which is actually ten words of warning so I think we can all agree you’re getting your money’s worth.)

According to this video, John played a D chord with a G note on the top E string, Paul played a D note on the bass, George played the chord of F with a G note on the top E string and G note on the bottom E string and Ringo played hooky:

But according to this next video, that’s all wrong and there was also a piano (which would probably include George Martin) and Ringo played a snare and a high hat:

And according to this video George also added a C note next to his G note:

But this next one claims Ringo was actually playing a snare, plus a kick drum and crashed a cymbal, and while Luddites might believe Paul was playing his D note on the 12^th fret, Paul actually played it on the A string at the 5^th fret and there’s also some reverb on it everybody else has missed and John was actually playing an acoustic guitar and played a fadd9 with his thumb on F bass so it wasn’t a D chord and some dude named Norm Smith played bongos and there was also a second gunman on the grassy knoll:

Turns out, people are still arguing about it and the fact that we have more widely accepted explanations for Stonehenge lets you know the Beatles were so far ahead of their time we’re still trying to catch up.   

A Hard Day’s Night – song, movie or album, take your pick – is the kind of thing that can happen when the money people remember they’re money people and not creative people and let the creative people do the job they were hired to do.  

4. Be A Good Listener

Bad Writers regurgitate a bunch of clichés and write dialogue that nobody ever says in Real Life and Good Writers (and right here I’m thinking of my literary hero, Elmore Leonard) listen to people and write the way they actually talk.

As I’ve written previously in this sixth part of what’s starting to look like a 95-part series, once they decided that A Hard Day’s Night should focus on a day in the life of the Beatles, they sent screenwriter Alun Owen to Dublin where the Beatles were appearing and told Owen to hang out a few days and come back and tell them what it was like.

They didn’t try to imagine what it was like to be a Beatle; they asked the people who knew for sure.

If you want to know about baseball, talk to ballplayers. If you want to know about prison, talk to prisoners. And if you want to know what it’s like to be a Beatle, talk to John, Paul, George and Ringo.

Alun Owen was smart enough to listen and use scenes and lines from Real Life like the press conference with “daft” questions (some of the Beatles’ responses were lifted from actual press conferences) and in the scene where a fashion trendspotter asks George his opinion of some shirts George calls them “grotty.”

At an event celebrating the movie, Princess Margaret asked, “Where does that marvelous word ‘grotty’ come from?” and Alun Owen had to admit he didn’t invent it; it was Liverpool slang for “grotesque” and somebody from Liverpool said it to him and he used it.

Good storytellers become good storytellers by first being good listeners.

5: Just Because It Hasn’t Been Done Before, That Doesn’t Mean It’s Wrong

One of the many problems with people who aren’t talented and don’t have imagination is that they can’t conceive of anything different or original being successful, so they copy whatever has already been successful and reject anything that doesn’t follow somebody else’s formula.

Nevertheless…

You can be talentless and unimaginative, but still be smart enough to hire people who are and then get the hell out of their way and let them produce whatever weird shit they come up with and that formula eventually produced A Hard Day’s Night and Seinfeld and The Far Side and as soon as I post this article I’m going to send Gary Larson a bill for mentioning him in the same sentence with the Beatles and Seinfeld.

Anyway…

Director Dick Lester couldn’t afford a crane so he took a child’s swing and used it to produce a 360-degree shot of Paul singing And I Love Her. But showing the light you’re using to illuminate a scene just wasn’t done back then and Lester wondered if anyone back in Hollywood would object.

And they did.

Now here’s the scene that caused all the problems:

When producer Walter Shenson was asked about the scene and showing the light, instead of being defensive and apologizing, Walter went on offense and said, “Yeah, it took us half a day to get that right.”

Which brings us to…

6. Break Some Rules

There are rules you should probably obey like Thou Shalt Not Kill Unless They Really Deserve It And You Think You Can get Away With It, but there also those Someone Has A Stick Up Their Ass rules that are totally arbitrary and are based on nothing more than some control freak’s personal preference.

Where does it say you can’t show the light used to illuminate a scene and what’s the punishment if you show one anyway?

As Hall of Fame Rulebreaker Jason Kendall once said: “If they’re not hitting you or taking your money, why should you care? What are you gonna do — yell at me?”

I once went to lunch with an editor and while discussing whatever thing I’d done that had pissed people off lately (and there was quite a list to choose from) I said: “I’ve been in trouble all my life and it’s never seemed that bad.”

If I drew a controversial cartoon I didn’t go to jail or get strung up by a mob or exiled on Elba. In reality, being “in trouble” meant people I wouldn’t like if I ever met them didn’t like me. So that’s it? I’m going to be unpopular with the kind of people who throw a tantrum and write misspelled letters to the editor when someone doesn’t agree with their view of the world?

I decided I could live with that.  

But that attitude comes at a cost: you have to accept that some people won’t approve of you or what you did.

Think about that for a minute and the alternative is living a life ruled by what others think and trying to keep everybody happy and people don’t all want the same thing so to keep from pissing anybody off you’ll do some bland, middle-of-the-road bullshit that’s immediately forgotten because you didn’t have the balls (and/or ovaries) to do something extraordinary and risk being unpopular with Overly-Opinionated Assholes.

In Conclusion

The People in Charge considered A Hard Day’s Night an unimportant project so they didn’t pay attention and their inattention allowed some talented people do their jobs.

Creative people were allowed to be creative.

And since that formula produced a great movie for not much money and is now considered a classic you’d think the People in Charge would learn a lesson, but if you believe that you haven’t spent much time around People in Charge.

OK, I hope you enjoyed this sixth installment of a three-part series and now you should go watch A Hard Day’s Night and I can pretty much guarantee you it will be the most enjoyable 87 minutes of your day.  And if at some point, you trip and fall, make sure you get some video.

You never know, it might come in handy.