THE MAKING OF THE BEATLES’ LET IT BE AND PETER JACKSON’S GET BACK:

The project began in Fall 1968, when The Beatles announced to fans that they would play three concerts at London’s Roundhouse, a 1700 capacity venue, in October or November, even before the November 22 release of The Beatles. In late October, Paul McCartney reached out to American-born director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, to ask his help in turning that event into a television special of some kind. Lindsay-Hogg had spent several years directing Associated-Rediffusion TV’s Ready Steady Go! weekly pop music program. The Beatles had hired him in 1966 to film promotional films for their single, “Paperback Writer”/”Rain,” and again, in early September ’68, promo videos for their first Apple single, “Hey Jude”/”Revolution,” at Twickenham Film Studios, in front of an invited audience of 150-200.

Not long after filming the latter, the director moved into The Rolling Stones’ offices on Maddox Street. “I’d already been talking to Mick Jagger about a television special The Stones wanted to do,” he says. Meanwhile, Paul invited him to meet with the four Fabs at Apple, at 3 Saville Row – a four minute walk from The Stones’ office. “When we were doing the promo for ‘Hey Jude,’ between each take, there was about a 10 to 12 minute gap, and, without knowing what else to do, they just started to play some of the go-to songs of the time, old Tamla Motown, etc. And Paul noted at the meeting, ‘You know, we had a good time playing to the audience that day. So we’ve been thinking we could do a television special. Do you want to direct it for us?’ I wasn’t gonna say no to that one.” At further meetings, McCartney suggested shooting documentary footage of them rehearsing for the concert, for, perhaps a half hour teaser TV special to air a week before the show. “No one had ever seen The Beatles rehearsing.”

This is the most detailed article yet I’ve come across on how the intertwined Let It and Get Back projects were produced. There’s a look back at the 16mm film and eight-track recording techniques of 1969. And then how Peter Jackson’s team employed the digital video restoration the had previously used on They Shall Not Grow Old. Plus the cutting edge Machine Audio Learning (abbreviated to MAL, a name inspired by the Beatles’ faithful roadie) was developed to restore and remix the audio, much of which was originally in mono.