Grab some images like this from Google and you too can maker a documentary!
THE BEATLES:
THEIR GOLDEN AGE (2012)
Written and Directed by Les Krantz
MVD Visual, 60 mins.
zero stars
Is The Beatles: Their Golden Age” the worst
film ever made about the Fab Four? I wouldn’t go that far. It’s possible there are
lousier efforts out there that I’ve simply not seen. If there are, please alert
me—sitting through Les Krantz’s film is as much pain as I can take. I will give
him credit for one thing: I once thought it impossible to make the lovable
Liverpudlians boring, but I was wrong.
I
knew I was in for trouble from the opening sequence on. The soundtrack
consisted of generic music, some of which was vaguely composed to sort of
resemble Beatles’ tunes. I’ve encountered this before and what it means is that
the director could not secure permission to use Beatles’ tunes and didn’t have
the money to hire other musicians to recreate them and pay copyright fees. This
makes for awkward filmmaking; dozens of Beatles’ songs are mentioned, but none
are heard. What we hear most is crowds screaming and Kranz’s voiceover, sure
signs of no-budget filmmaking. What Kranz did was grab a few pieces of public
domain documentary footage and force fit them into a Wikipedia-like overview of
the Beatles’ career. (And it’s a truncated version at that, with all of
earliest years shoved into a few minutes and no explanation of how Ringo came
to replace Pete Best.) You will see the same pieces of surging, screaming
crowds over and over, as well as a few fair-use interview snippets, and
segments from various films made about the Beatles. In other words, it’s the
sort of film that someone reasonably skilled with iMovies could make in an
afternoon.
The
thesis, such is it is, is that The Beatles quickly became more popular than
Elvis. Is there anyone who doesn’t know this? And is there anyone who thinks
that you can make a decent film about the most popular band in history without using any of its music? Simply a
horrible project. Watching this was my own Hard
Day’s Night.
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