The Beatles, June 22 or 23, 1961
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/NOV/AintSheSweet.mp3]The Beach Boys, September 15, 1961
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/NOV/Surfin.mp3]Category: Beatles
A Hair Day’s Night
In this video, hair dresser Betty Glasow talks about working on “A Hard Day’s Night.” Note: it starts with a clip that includes Jimmy Nichol, the temporary touring drummer who filled in for Ringo, while he was having his tonsils taken out.
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These pictures show Betty setting the hair of beauteous Prue Bury. (Prue’s name is pronounced like “blueberry.”)
The next picture is a truly delightful one of Prudence, taken before filming started of the scene with her and Pattie Boyd. Click to see a 1024×768 scan.
© Astrid Kirschherr
See how Prue still has the clips in her hair? The newspaper next to Prue says “the Beatles” and if you look at the paper John Lennon is holding it says, “she’s with it! she’s got it!” That is so perfect. Prue is still very with it and she’s definitely still got it. I’m fairly sure that Ringo was sitting across from John.
And this is Betty Glasow getting Prue’s hair camera-ready for that day’s filming.
The finished product.
By the way, Prue’s regular hair stylist was Vidal Sassoon. Not one of his people, but Sassoon himself.
Lucy’s in the sky, with diamonds
Lucy (O’Donnell) Vodden, 1963-2009
Beatles Widget
If you haven’t played with the Beatles Widget yet, give it a try. They could have called it the Ono Sideboard.
‘A Hard Day’s Night’ on CD-ROM
Way back in January 1994, I ordered my first “serious” desktop computer. It was MS-DOS 5 with Windows 3.1, on a 40 MHz AMD processor with 4 MB of memory, a 160 MB drive, generic Tseng ET4000 video card, and a 14″ SVGA CRT. I installed a Soundblaster 16 card with a proprietary SCSI interface for a Panasonic CD-ROM drive that used caddies.
One of the first CD-ROM’s I had (which, come to think of it, might have been a gift from Denro), was “The Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night, the complete uncut movie”. It was put out by the Voyager Company, known for its high quality Criterion label of LaserDisc videos. My LD copies of “A Hard Day’s Night” and “HELP!” are both from Criterion.
I was thrilled with this new technology! I could actually watch the movie on my computer, albeit in extremely compromised quality, with the script automatically following along. Here are some sample screens.
Enlarged, the screen caps show the actual video image size. I’ve scaled up one of the MOV files from the CD to 320×240. It runs at a measly 16 fps, but this was hot stuff in 1993, with online streaming video still a long way off. Note that even here, in this limited presentation, “I Should Have Known Better” sounds better than on the Miramax DVD!
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A Hard Disc’s Night
There is supposed to be yet another video release coming of the Beatles movie, A Hard Day’s Night. That’s good, because the DVD is excessively cropped for widescreen format, it pushes the contrast too hard and, for the songs, the sound is terrible compared to the 1987 release on the defunct LaserDisc format. Here’s the comparison.
Prue Bury with Pattie Boyd on the AHDN LD…
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…and on the Miramax AHDN DVD.
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Here’s something you may not know. The scene in the baggage car wasn’t filmed on the train. Prue Bury told me…
All the singing on the train was shot in the studio,with someone shaking a carriage about!!
According to Mark Lewisohn in “The Complete Beatles Chronicles”…
Wednesday, March 11, 1964:
On this day, working from 8:00 am to 10:00 pm, the group filmed on a set resembling a train guard’s van, where they played cards and also mimed to ‘I Should Have Known Better’, later edited into the film’s train sequences.
Here is “I Should Have Known Better” as presented on LD…
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… and on DVD.
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Addendum: It seems the “new” AHDN DVD is only on Blu-Ray, and only in Canada, and it’s the same questionable video transfer from the Miramax DVD. But the sound is supposedly greatly improved.
I suppose the best all-around video version of “A Hard Day’s Night” is the original DVD release, which explains why it’s going for a premium on Amazon Marketplace.