The Man Who Framed the Beatles: A Biography of Richard Lester - Hardcover

Yule, Andrew

3.53

19 ratings by Goodreads

9781556113901: The Man Who Framed the Beatles: A Biography of Richard Lester

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1556113900 ISBN 13: 9781556113901

Publisher: Dutton Adult, 1994

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A biography of the director of the Beatles' twin smash hits, Help! and A Hard Day's Night, presents Lester's memories of directing the Fab Four and offers insights into his directing style.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

Yule has written better-than-average lives of Al Pacino, Sean Connery, and David Puttnam, among other works; here, Richard Lester only seems a lesser figure until you weigh his full plate of achievements. Lester (b. 1932) broke into entertainment in Philadelphia in 1951 at WCAU-TV, where he mounted five shows daily, including a personal failure featuring himself whose reviews begged for the show's death. Philadelphia offering little future, then, he took off for England, fell in with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, fresh from radio's The Goon Show, and directed them in a new TV show, Idiot Weekly, whose surreal comedy lifted English reviewers into ecstasies. This was followed by A Show Named Fred, then by Son of Fred--which failed because Milligan had gone overboard with minimalist sets and lost the audience. But Lester showed he could deliver amazingly funny film with the 11-minute classic The Running, Jumping, Standing Still Film and the full-length musical It's Trad, Dad!--two films that induced the Beatles into accepting him as director of their first film, It's a Hard Day's Night, and then of Help! Yule has much fun showing Lester improvising on the script and the Beatles inventing much of their material--George Harrison actually wrote, ``What do you call that haircut?'' and John Lennon's reply, ``Arthur.'' Later, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum let Lester work with Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, and Buster Keaton, and was followed by the hilarious How I Won the War (featuring John Lennon), the San Francisco farce Petulia, and The Three Musketeers and its sequel. We watch him film Robin and Marian, Superman II, Superman III and still another Musketeers sequel. Also included is the script for a scene written for Paul McCartney but then deleted from the final cut of A Hard Day's Night. A running, jumping biography that never stands still except for a final interview with Lester, now much more cautious about his projects. -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Booklist:

The Beatles have a lot more fans than does Richard Lester. Yule's biography of the film director plays to that discrepancy, first with the introduction by Paul McCartney and then throughout the book's structure, which starts with a detailed account of the filming of A Hard Day's Night. Of course, Beatlemaniacs are the book's biggest potential audience, but the rest of Lester's career warrants attention, too. Unfortunately, Yule's casually written effort, based extensively on interviews with the director, doesn't do all of Lester justice; it makes one wish the director had saved his anecdotes for an autobiography. Lester managed better than any other movie director to capture the 1960s zeitgeist, but like many of the decade's hottest filmmakers, he's had difficulties launching projects recently, and most of what he's produced has been mediocre or worse. Yet every few years he's plunked down another major work, such as The Three Musketeers or Superman II, and there's no reason to think he won't again, even if his most recent effort, a documentary of a McCartney tour (there's that Beatles connection again), was, in Lester's own words, an "old-age-pension film directing job." Gordon Flagg

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