Any peek at PBS recently and you’ll catch the airing of its fundraiser showcasing “The Beatles: Eight Days a Week—The Touring Years,” one of prolific director Ron Howard’s latest films. The movie was made with the help of a local man.
Paul Crowder, a Brit musician who turned his talents to editing, is a sought-after filmmaker, having worked on well-known documentaries including “Riding Giants” and “Dogtown and Z-Boys.” Through his filmmaking, Crowder reconnected with someone he knew as a child—Paul McCartney. Crowder’s father worked for the famous Beatle for 30 years as tour manager and ran his production company. When Crowder’s name came up to work on the Beatles film, Howard and the other producers thought he would be ideal.
“McCartney said he knew me personally and knew my work,” Crowder said.
As editor and executive producer of “Eight Days a Week,” Crowder and his team had to find a new angle to the Beatles story.
“When we were commissioned to make this film, it was like, ‘Wait a minute… Hasn’t this story been told a thousand times? Wasn’t ‘Anthology’ recent?’ But the reality was, ‘Anthology’ was 20 years ago—a generation ago,” Crowder explained. “There were a lot of people who would know those stories. We knew we’d have to repeat some footage, but we should also attempt to find more footage that hasn’t been seen and try and tell stories that hadn’t been told before.”
When word got out of a new Beatles documentary, Crowder faced a mountain of footage he equated to “being at the bottom of Mt. Everest looking up.”
“The thing to remember about those guys is during their heyday from ‘63, when they broke in England, to ‘64 in America—through till they went off the road in ‘66—they were in British newspapers. Front page every day—in most of America as well,” the producer said. “It was the most incredible amount of footage to go through.”
After combing through a deluge of newspaper clippings, interviews and footage of the Fab Four during their brief touring years, an important piece of forgotten history was uncovered by Crowder and his team.
“The Beatles themselves had forgotten,” Crowder explained about how the group did its part to oppose segregation in the South. “The most important story that came out was whether the Beatles would play the Alligator Bowl in Jacksonville, Fla., because the risk it might be segregated. They said, ‘We’re not playing to a segregated audience. So you change that rule.’
“When Paul and Ringo watched the film, they both said, ‘I forgot we did that. We were cool. That was a strong stand,’” Crowder recalled. “Even they discovered things about themselves that they didn’t remember. In telling that story, we found Dr. Kitty Oliver who brought that story to life. That was one of the strongest parts of the film, I feel. An important moment.”
Whoopi Goldberg also makes a memorable appearance in the film telling her personal account of seeing the Beatles at Shea Stadium.
“She gave us the most beautiful, personal story,” Crowder said. “These are the things we discovered in our story making that we had no idea were coming. There was also bits and pieces of footage that hadn’t been seen in archives. There was lots to discover. There’s nothing like the Beatles. I was getting calls daily. The pressure on all of us to deliver was huge. People told Ron Howard, ‘You can’t mess this up. They’re my ‘favorite band’.”
The film pulled in an unprecedented $12 million at the box office, even though Hulu started streaming it the day after theatrical release. Despite that, it stayed in U.S. theaters for three months.
“When Dad starting working for McCartney, I got to see them play live,” described Crowder, a Beatles fan since he was a child. “What I didn’t realize at the time is, I’m watching a guy who hasn’t played live since 1966. To be involved in a Beatles project in any form was a huge honor. They’re going to live on like Beethoven.”
Describing one perk of the job, Crowder reminisced, “McCartney called me in the car with an idea. Then he proceeds to sing the guitar solo of ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ all the way into ‘I’ve Got a Feeling.’ He goes full Paul McCartney a capella all the way through. This was not the usual drive to work. It was a fantastic moment.”
