#Magical mystery tour movie script series

#Magical mystery tour movie script series

Watching it, you get the feeling that he let the boys have their way with the movie (tellingly, McCartney does the director’s commentary in the recent reissue), as the action jumps from one silly scene to the next, making it more like a series of comic scenes without punch lines and any kind of plot line being tossed out the bus window. Instead of Richard Lester (who helmed their first two films), the band worked with director Bernard Knowles, who had a distinguished history working as a cinematographer for Hitchcock during his UK years and had a brief career directory afterwards, with Magical Mystery Tour being his last film, passing away eight years later. At roughly 50 minutes, Magical Mystery Tour was too long for a featured short and too short for a full-length film.

Instead of going around Cornwall and Kent (England’s southwest tip), it would have been much more interesting to turn the cameras on in the middle of the swinging capital for a snapshot of that time and place, the way that the cult classic of that same year Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London did so effectively.Īfter the literal and figurative high of Pepper, the band got taken down a notch only months later with the Magical Mystery Tour movie, with the UK public justifiably wondering what the hell was going on with this confusing mess. But like Allen with A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, the Fabs found that once they left the city and roved around the country looking for inspiration, they floundered. Though an auteur like Woody Allen would have his actors improvise their lines, he would still have an overall structure to everything he did. Part of the problem was that the band that didn’t have a track record as film-makers, yet they somehow thought that they could pull off another bold move - a movie with no script. Granted, Magical Mystery Tour was a much riskier proposition than Pepper, including a grander visual element in the form of an entire movie behind it. Buoyed by that incredible success, the group’s new de facto leader (the future Sir Paul) hatched another cute idea for their next project: “Let’s pile into a bus with our friends, go out into the country and film whatever happens!” This time though, things didn’t work out as well. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a pop-art milestone on the level of Warhol. About one year before the movie, Macca had a wonderfully child-like idea, straight out of a Mickey Rooney movie: “Let’s pretend that we’re another band and put on a big show!” Despite their studio hibernation and zero touring promo, the boys scored commercially and artistically with the epochal and era-defining Sgt. Regardless, Magical Mystery Tour now gets lumped it in the dubious category of crappy movies with great soundtracks like Less Than Zero, Judgment Night, One from the Heart and Singles. It’s telling that in this video age, it’s only now that Magical Mystery Tour gets a re-release and a PR push, which their label and management has been brilliant at over the last decade as they resell their catalog again and again. Most of us still love the Fabs, but try to sit through their 1967 movie and you’ll regret losing about an hour of your life.