I am holding a ‘Client remittance advice’ from Hope Leresche dated 19 September 1968 which reads:
Fee in payment for story boards and dialogue of THE |
|
YELLOW SUBMARINE |
$1000 = £417 10 9 |
Less Commission |
41 15 1 |
Less Bank charges |
15 6 |
Total |
£375 0 2 |
The making of the Beatles’ animated classic would make an intriguing film in itself and has indeed spawned a number of books, the best of which is Inside the Yellow Submarine by the heroically named Dr Robert R. Hieronimus. The Beatles’ contract with United Artists required them to make three films, two of which, A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, came out in 1964 and 1965, but in the following year, as their music transported them into the stratosphere, they were disinclined to take time off and rejected all the scripts that came their way. Enter Al Brodax, a New Yorker wearing an Hawaiian shirt and smoking a fat cigar. As head of King Features he had produced a highly successful cartoon series, The Beatles, that was broadcast only in America, and he persuaded Brian Epstein to let him make a full-length animated cartoon, which would free the lads to sit at the feet of the maharishi in India while at the same time fulfilling their contract with United Artists.
Suspicious of anything that wasn’t their own idea and having disliked the US cartoon series for reasons that Brodax openly admits to – ‘The Beatles didn’t like the caricatures and they also objected to the fact that I had American voice-overs. Because it was difficult for Americans, in my experience, to understand Englishmen. They tend to have a mouth full of marbles …’ – the Beatles assumed a King Features full-length animation would be another candyfloss rip-off and decided to have as little to do with it as possible. The fact that they were won over eventually, and indeed regretted not having involved themselves more closely, has almost everything to do with a small band of artists at TV Cartoons in London.
TVC producers John Coates and George Dunning had not enjoyed the experience of churning out the weekly half-hour Beatles cartoons, so when Brodax offered them the opportunity to make a full-length feature they put the newly released Sergeant Pepper on the turntable and determined to look for an illustrator who could visualise the music in terms of graphic art. The man they found was a Czechoslovakian-born illustrator, Heinz Edelmann, whose designs helped shape the plot and direction, and who inspired all those who worked around him, myself included.
I was brought in to the project early one morning very late in the day, if that’s chronogrammatically feasible, because all the Brits at TVC felt that the script was far too American. There is an adage that ‘movies are not written – but rewritten’, and by the time I arrived on the scene there had already been numerous writers, rewriters and script consultants hired, fired, dismembered and buried in wet concrete. There was also a sense of panic orchestrated by King Features, who wanted to speed up production for fear that by the time the film was released the Beatles’ glory days would be well and truly over. The late Erich Segal, a former Professor of Classics at Harvard and author of Love Story, had finished what he considered to be the final treatment, and his script was passed on to me with instructions to rewrite the Beatles’ dialogue and inject some Liverpudlian humour. As my job description seemed to imply little more than a few days’ script doctoring, my agent was happy to agree to the $1,000 fee and no screen credit, whereas $1 and a credit would have been the better deal, because the writers’ residuals would have bought me that massive ranch in Montana, the one I’ve always dreamed of.
At first I worked directly from Segal’s script, having no idea of how the characters were evolving in the animation studios. I took the dialogue line by line and whenever the Beatles sounded like the Bowery boys or the Goodfellas I would take them by the scruff of the vowels and drag them back to the Pier Head. George Dunning, a quiet, dignified Canadian, was the film’s director and it was his genius that elevated a simple cartoon film to a production that the Beatles eventually embraced. After reading my revisions and laughing at the jokes, he invited me to the studios in Soho Square to work directly with the animators, particularly Bob Balser and Jack Stokes who were devising scenes like ‘The Sea of Monsters’ that weren’t in any of the original scripts. Occasionally J, P, G and Ringo would whizz into the Dean Street office for a swift viewing on the moviola, say a few whizzy things and whizz out. Although John was to claim later that the vacuum cleaner monster had been his idea, the 200 people who worked on the film denied it.
When it comes to making a cartoon, the recorded voice track is the horse that comes before the cart carrying the animators, and as the Beatles didn’t fancy climbing into any saddles, George Dunning was keen to find actors who could impersonate them. Paul Angelis provided the lugubrious voice of Ringo, Geoff Hughes, another friend from Liverpool who wouldn’t be mistaken for McCartney in a police line-up, played Paul, John Clive got to be John Lennon and Peter Batten came in at number four. Rumour has it that the producers were having a few drinks in the crew’s local, the Dog and Duck, after a hard day auditioning unsuccessfully for somebody to voice George Harrison, when they heard the man himself talking loudly on the other side of the bar. And you’re right, it wasn’t George, it was Peter. To this day, who is to say that Batten’s girlfriend at the time, a woman who was working for TVC on the film, didn’t whisper: ‘Hey Pete, look who’s just come in after a hard day auditioning unsuccessfully for somebody to voice George Harrison. Go on, do your impersonation … Louder! … Oh, good, I think they’re coming over.’
The great twist to the story is that not only was Peter Batten not an actor, but he was a deserter from a British Army barracks in Germany. As he told the Sunday Telegraph in 1999:
It was all very strange. One minute I’m a soldier on the run, the next I’m meeting the Beatles and bumping into actors like Peter O’Toole. All that and I was being paid fifty quid an hour thirty years ago. It was brilliant. There was some whingeing from some people because I wasn’t a member of Equity, the actors’ union, but overall I felt very lucky.
Lucky indeed, although the company weren’t so lucky when he was hauled off by military police in the middle of recording the dialogue track, and Paul Angelis had to step in and complete the remaining lines of George’s character. With an aversion to ‘mouth-marbles’ verging on the paranoid, Brodax worried throughout the recordings about the actors’ voices being indecipherable in upstate Buffalo, but Dunning was insistent on keeping the Mersey sound, although, as Paul Angelis recalls, ‘We spoke very, very slow.’
Needless to say, spending time in the studios, I was to become aware of the various tensions between the ‘Yanks’ and the ‘Brits’, or the producers and the creators, but considering the deadline to which everyone was working, friction was inevitable and I feel honoured to have been involved in the making of a classic, even if my part in the creative process has been kept a closely guarded secret. Until this year, in fact, when Walker Books published Yellow Submarine and on the title page it says:
Story adapted by Charlie Gardner from the screenplay
by Lee Minoff, Al Brodax, Jack Mendelsohn and Erich Segal.
With thanks to Roger McGough.
So in the end it all worked out happily. I mean, what would I do on a massive ranch in Montana?