My Idea For a 'Sgt. Pepper' Movie

I've written so much on this blog about how awful the 1978 Sgt. Pepper movie was that you are probably saying, "Okay, Steve, if you think that movie, which is a guilty pleasure for so many, sucked big time, why don't you suggest an idea of your own for making a better Sgt. Pepper movie yourself?"  Well, as a matter if fact, I have, on social media, but I've never posted it here before now.

I have to confess that my idea breaks, or at least bends, some of my own rules on how to make a better Sgt. Pepper movie, which I offered in a post from March 2018.  But I think it would work because it's more plot-driven and the musical numbers would be presented by a band playing a concert, as the original Beatles album envisioned, not be a device for characters to suddenly break out in song like in a traditional musical.    

So here it is: Sgt. Pepper retires from making music and becomes his grandson Billy Shears' music teacher. Billy has a band in high school, and Sgt. Pepper helps them with their music. They name themselves Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band because they don't have girlfriends ("Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"), and they get by because they help each other out. ("With a Little Help From My Friends") The lead guitarist has a crush on a girl in high school, Lucy.  In art class, he paints a fantasy picture of her silhouetted against a field of stars. ("Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds") They start going out. Sgt. Pepper realizes that the band is honing its skills quite well ("Getting Better") even as they hold down cruddy part-time jobs, like the bass player, who works for a home improvement company. ("Fixing a Hole") The drummer finds true love with another girl in school. Lucy wants to be an artist, and she can't communicate with her parents, so she runs away to seek her fame and fortune, leaving her boyfriend bereft. ("She's Leaving Home") Her father, Mr. Kite, is really upset, so Sgt. Pepper's Band plays a show to raise money to help him find Lucy. The show is held with a traveling circus that Mr. Kite used to perform with as a young man, with other acts to bring in the families with little kids. ("Being For the Benefit Of Mr. Kite!")

A lady clown - or maybe a ballerina mime 😉 - catches Billy's attention; she thinks he's cute. She takes him back to her trailer, goes into another room to remove her costume and makeup, and turns out to be a gorgeous woman, a few years older than Billy, when she emerges.  After talking to each other and realizing how much they have in common, they fall in love, and they sleep together. (Don't worry, by now, Billy is 18.) They talk about the meaning of life in afterglow. ("Within You, Without You") The lady clown asks Billy if they will stay together despite the age difference. ("When I'm Sixty-Four") The circus leaves town, but Billy and his new girlfriend vow to keep a long-distance romance going. Eventually, the bass player finds a girlfriend when, just after high school graduation, he sees a parking meter attendant writing up a ticket when he parks the band's van in a NO PARKING zone. ("Lovely Rita") 

Billy's circus girlfriend returns to town - with Lucy, who wants to go home. Everyone is happy when Lucy returns in the A.M. hours. ("Good Morning, Good Morning") Billy's girlfriend has quit the circus to become the band's manager; surprisingly, no one objects.  The band gets a recording contract, Billy is grateful to his grandfather, and the band leaves for the big city with their girlfriends. The end.

The musical sequences are Sgt. Pepper's Band performing in concert the songs their beginnings inspired while their ladies wait backstage, and the movie's plot is told in flashbacks. The last song they play at the end of the movie is the hard-rocking "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" reprise. "A Day In the Life" plays over the closing credits.  A reference to the newspaper stories would be worked into the script somewhere in the third act so it makes sense.  In the flashback scenes, they play covers of the same rock and roll and rhythm and blues songs the Beatles themselves covered.

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Admittedly, this treatment probably wouldn't make a great movie, but it would most likely make a better movie than the one that came out in 1978.  I don't think anyone will actually try to make a movie based on only the songs in Sgt. Pepper and nothing else, or any movie based on Beatles songs, because the surviving Beatles, Yoko Ono, and Olivia Harrison liked 2007's Across the Universe (which I haven't seen) so much, why bother making another Beatles jukebox musical?

'Sgt. Pepper' Movie: YouTube Video Reviews

A participant in a Beatles Facebook group I belong to announced that she had just seen the 1978 Sgt. Pepper movie starring the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton, and that lit a fire in me to indulge myself once again in making comments on blog posts and videos about what Peter Frampton's mother called "that awful movie" all over the Internet.  It seems there are plenty of reviews of the Sgt. Pepper movie - negative, of course - on YouTube which are nasty, acerbic, trenchant, and as funny as hell . . . more so than anything I've ever written about this cinematic monstrosity, and I'm jealous of these folks for offering such wonderfully conceived reviews even as I tip my hat to them.

I post these video reviews with sole purpose of continuing to spread the word of this film's awfulness to prevent younger generations of Beatles fans from seeing it.

 

 

Over the years, the Sgt. Pepper movie has come to be appreciated among many people - even some Beatles fans, like this person I mentioned on this Beatles Facebook page - as pleasurable camp, a movie that's so bad it's good.  To be fair, the movie does have a few interesting scenes, such as the performances from Earth, Wind and Fire ("Got To Get You Into My Life") and Aerosmith ("Come Together"), as well as Steve Martin's manic "wild and crazy guy" shtick.  And to be fairer still, a couple of its stars have no regret for appearing in it.  Although the movie didn't make her a star, singer Dianne Steinberg - who has since married Steve Miller's bassist Kenny Lee Lewis and is now Dianne Steinberg Lewis - enjoyed her work in the movie and calls it the highlight of her career; she's also been active as a performer and as a music teacher in California.  (Some of her interviews are on YouTube.) 

But let's look at the big picture (and I don't mean the film's ugly logo).

The 2020 Bee Gees documentary How Can You Mend a Broken Heart ostensibly covers their musical achievements and also their involvement with theatrically released movies, but one such movie fails to get any mention.  Guess which movie.

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"There is no such thing as the Beatles now. They don't exist as a band and never performed Sgt. Pepper live in any case. When ours comes out, it will be, in effect, as if theirs never existed." - Robin Gibb, 1978

Twenty Rules For Making a Movie Based On 'Sgt. Pepper'

It was forty years ago this coming summer that the career-killing rock musical movie based on the Beatles' classic Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, starring the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton, hit the theaters. I was reminded of it by the news that Alice Cooper, whose mustache played a villain in this movie with its wearer in a supporting role, will be involved in another rock musical - a live production of Jesus Christ Superstar, to be broadcast on NBC this Easter Sunday, April 1, with Alice as King Herod (and John Legend as Jesus).

Regular readers of this blog will know that I saw the Sgt. Pepper movie when it first came out in July 1978, when I was twelve years old and didn't know much about the Beatles beyond their greatest hits, and I actually liked it without having a clue of what the Beatles were all about . . . like the people who made this movie.  Having long since come to realize what an awful movie it is, and knowing how sacrilegious it was for its producer - music mogul Robert Stigwood, then the Bee Gees' manager (and also the producer of the original production of Jesus Christ Superstar) - to trash the Beatles' greatest work not called Revolver, I have made it my life's mission to discourage people from ever seeing this movie, which has since become an inexplicable cult favorite (and - danger, Will Robinson! - was released on Blu-Ray disc a few months ago).

But today, I want to take a kinder, gentler approach to the Sgt. Pepper movie, even if it is what film critic Janet Maslin called "a business deal set to music," and concede that, while the Sgt. Pepper movie was bad, maybe the idea of making a movie based on Sgt. Pepper isn't.  If I may quote the late Roger Ebert . . . "It's not the idea, it's what you do with the idea."  

Back in the early nineties, in their book "The Worst Rock 'n' Roll Records of All Time," Jimmy Guterman and Owen O'Donnell made a list of the fifty worst albums ever and placed the Sgt. Pepper movie soundtrack LP at number 43 (only 43?), explaining how to make such a bad movie in the form of a "recipe for disaster" ("Ask Frampton and the Brothers Gibb to act . . ..  Expect them to act.").  I'm not going to tell you how to make the worst possible movie based on Sgt. Pepper, but I am going to tell you what to do and what not to do if you want to make a movie based on Sgt. Pepper and want to have any chance of making it work - in the form of twenty rules.

My list:

Don't kick off your movie and soundtrack album with a third-tier pop star.  The first singer you hear in the 1978 Sgt. Pepper movie and on the soundtrack record is that of Paul Nicholas.  Who?  Nicholas is a British singer and actor who, as a singer, is one hell of an actor.  He's best known in America for his role as Cousin Kevin in the Robert Stigwood-produced film version of the Who's Tommy and for the lame disco hit "Heaven On the 7th Floor," released on Robert Stigwood's record label. Guess who his manager was.  Uhh, Robert Stigwood?  Come on, if you're already managing the Bee Gees and you have Peter Frampton co-starring with them in your movie, why do you need one of your flunkies to start off your show?  Why do you even need him in the show?

A movie based on the Sgt. Pepper album should only feature the songs from Sgt. Pepper.  Stigwood could have had his production crew concoct a screenplay with a plausible storyline based on just the songs on Sgt. Pepper, with dialogue to drive the plot in between, but as he had the movie rights to even more Beatles songs from other albums, he insisted on using all of them - 28 songs in  total, to be exact - for a rock opera with no dialogue, killing any chance the screenwriter had to come up with a coherent story.  Proof that less is more.

Don't invent characters that already aren't in the Beatles songs from Sgt. Pepper.  Billy Shears did not have a stepbrother named Dougie, a character completely made up for the movie and played by . . . Paul Nicholas.  This was the entertainment version of making up a patronage job at City Hall.

Don't name your characters after places in Beatles songs.  The heroine in the 1978 Sgt. Pepper movie, the wholesome girlfriend of Frampton's Billy Shears, is named Strawberry Fields.  Please - what self-respecting couple would name their daughter after a fruit? This was just an excuse to feature "Strawberry Fields Forever," originally recorded by the Beatles for Sgt. Pepper but released separately, in the movie.  And when Strawberry the character, played by singer-songwriter Sandy Farina, sang the song in the movie, it made no sense - she sang about  . . . visiting herself?  What was next?  A pretty nurse named Penny Lane?  And her Uncle Albert Hall?

If your heroine is white, your anti-heroine vamp should not be a woman of color.  The Sgt. Pepper movie featured a sexy disco singer named Lucy (no prizes for guessing her featured number in the film) who tempts Billy Shears when he signs a record contract and becomes her label mate.  Lucy was played by Dianne Steinberg, whose mother was Martha Jean the Queen, a pioneering black female radio DJ; she was to R&B radio what Allison Steele was to rock radio.  It is blatantly racist to have a woman of color play the slutty, vampish female character when her rival for a man's affections is a lily-white good girl.  This was not fair to Dianne Steinberg, and it was an insult to her mother's legacy as a pop-music trailblazer.

Make up your mind about the vamp.  One thing I could never figure out after seeing this movie - was Lucy supposed to be a villain, like the evil characters trying to take over the world, or was she just a bad girl with a heart of gold who simply liked making lots of money as a singer?  Either she's a villain or not.  Make it clear one way or the other. But then, as long as Dianne Steinberg was in this movie to provide sex appeal, it didn't matter what her character was supposed to be.

Though I have to admit, she did have sex appeal.

The characters in your movie should resemble the characters in the Beatles songs that they're named for.  In the Sgt. Pepper song "Being For the Benefit For Mr. Kite!", the title character was a circus performer.  How, as played by George Burns in the movie, did he become the mayor of a small town in the American Midwest?

Sgt. Pepper is British.  Why was this movie set in America, even though half the cast was British?  If you must make your characters in a Sgt. Pepper movie American, at least get Americans to play them. Or, if you get British actors to play Americans, at least make sure they're trained to do American accents. 

Show, don't tell.  The story in Sgt. Pepper was so convoluted, it being based on two-dozen-odd Beatles songs and all, that George Burns narrated the tale to keep it moving along.  As I said in an article about this movie that was published several years ago in a Beatles-fan magazine, if a movie needs a narrator to tell you what's happening, it usually means that nothing is happening.

Comedians are not rock stars.   

Rock stars are not comedians.

You saw that coming, didn't you?

No robots, and no electronic vocals.  The Sgt. Pepper movie gave Mean Mr. Mustard a pair of female robot assistants who "sang" the song of that name.  The electronic voices, supplied by the Bee Gees (what, you had Peter Frampton and his voice-box guitar and you didn't ask him to do it?), were so distorted you couldn't make out the words.  But then, if you could, you would have wondered why Mr. Mustard's sister Pam wasn't in the movie to take him to see the Queen so he could shout obscenities at Her Majesty. (See how it's impossible to turn 28 Beatles songs into a rock opera?)

Don't get Giles Martin to produce the music.  Beatles producer George Martin produced the soundtrack record for the Sgt. Pepper movie because his wife suggested that another producer would give the Beatles' songs less respect.  Martin's work was respectful, all right, but unless he worked with recording artists who brought some originality to their Beatles covers - mostly, he didn't - it wasn't much else.  Don't bother Martin's son Giles, now the caretaker of his father's work with the Beatles, and ask him to reproduce Beatles music for a new Sgt. Pepper movie.  He just remastered the original Beatles album.

Get an experienced screenplay writer.   The guy who wrote the screenplay for the Sgt. Pepper movie had never written a screenplay before.  So, you think, we've all got to start somewhere?  Not at the top!  

No outrageous props.  In a key scene set in Hollywood, the Sgt. Pepper movie used a six-wheel topless limousine and had brandy snifters the size of potpourri bowls to symbolize the decadence of the music industry circa 1978.  Dudes, you had Donald Pleasence play an unintentional parody of Robert Stigwood while sporting a bad toupee - that wasn't enough?     

No spoken-vocal recitations of Beatles songs in your movie.  Unless it stars William Shatner.

Your leading lady should not be upstaged by the extras.  It's sort of embarrassing when your heroine is less interesting than a pair of overweight clowns acting as her outriders in a circus-parade sequence.

But the sexy ballerina mimes were a nice touch. 

I want you - I want you so badly! :-D

Don't make your storyline about a good-guy rock band saving the world from the forces of evil.  Because that's what Yellow Submarine was all about.  What made Robert Stigwood think he could remake Yellow Submarine as a live-action movie with Peter Frampton, the Bee Gees and George Burns singing the Beatles' songs?  Please come up with something more original.

Don't use a deus ex machina to end your "story."  The Sgt. Pepper movie ends with Sgt. Pepper himself, played by fifth Beatle Billy Preston, setting everything straight with magic powers to allow the movie to have a happy ending.  This was just a way of admitting that no one knew how to bring the movie to a proper end. 

And finally . . . no glass coffins.

Definitely no glass coffins.  If you must have a funeral scene, we don't need a glass coffin to see who's dead.  It not only looks vulgar, it's rather creepy.  Especially if you have someone singing "Golden Slumbers" to the person inside the coffin.

And no pallbearers singing "Carry That Weight."   

Now, if you follow these rules, I can't guarantee that you'll make a good movie.  But if you break these rules, you could end up making a worse Sgt. Pepper movie than this one.  Please don't give into temptation and ignore my advice.  Life is too short to waste it on making another movie like this.  As Paul McCartney found out when he made Give My Regards To Broad Street.

Though if you have a circus-parade scene and use sexy ballerina mimes, I won't complain. ;-)

Especially if they're blonde.

Love is all, love is you, sweetie! ;-) :-D 

The Fake 'Sgt. Pepper' Movie Soundtrack Album

In discussing the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, I inevitably find myself coming back to the execrable 1978 movie based on that album.  You know the story: Pop impresario Robert Stigwood, the manager of the Bee Gees, owned the movie rights to 28 Beatles songs - all but five of them from the Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road albums - tried to weave them into a coherent rock opera, and convinced both the Gibb brothers and Peter Frampton to play Sgt. Pepper's band, resulting in what became the Cleopatra of rock movie musicals.  As bad as the movie was, the soundtrack album - including wrongheaded Beatles covers from Frampton and the Bee Gees but also wrongheaded Beatles covers from George Burns, Alice Cooper and Frankie Howerd (Frankie Howerd?) - was even worse.  Indeed, it's generally regarded as one of the worst albums of all time.  The Beatles themselves were not happy about any of this, and neither were their fans.  When radio stations tried to play some of the selections from the movie soundtrack album, Beatles fans angrily called into these stations, demanding that they revert to playing the original Beatles recordings.  The stations caved to the pressure; just as no one wanted to bother with the movie, no one wanted to bother with the soundtrack record.

Well, what if I told you that someone put out an imitation Sgt. Pepper soundtrack record?

That's right - someone ripped off a ripoff!

Pictured above is an album of anonymous covers of the Beatles songs in the Sgt. Pepper movie, put out by Springboard Records.  Springboard was a Los Angeles-based budget label that, in addition to putting out cut-rate compilations of various recording artists, put out LPs from anonymous studio bands that recorded copycat covers of pop hits and - you guessed it - movie soundtracks.  Before the Sgt. Pepper movie came out, Springboard, guessing that it would be as big as hit as Robert Stigwood's two previous pop musical productions, Saturday Night Fever and Grease, tried to get in on the act by rush-recording and rush-releasing this fake soundtrack record performed by the soundalike group "Abbey Road '78." Abbey Road '78's job was not to copy the original Beatles recordings; their job was to copy the Beatles covers that the cast of the Sgt. Pepper movie recorded to lip-sync to in the film.

That's right, Springboard thought it could swindle record buyers into buying a record that had imitators of Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees (and others) singing Beatles songs.  But then, there was a lot of foolishness in the record business in 1978.  Consider the Kiss solo albums.

When the Sgt. Pepper movie tanked, this fake soundtrack record ended up creating more headaches for Stigwood's RSO record label (which issued the real soundtrack record) than for Springboard.  See, when the legitimate soundtrack album bombed, the unsold copies were sent back to RSO . . . but so were copies of the fake Springboard release.  About a million copies of the Springboard album, by some estimates, were sent to RSO along with copies of the actual RSO album.  The joke went like this - the Sgt. Pepper movie soundtrack album was shipped double platinum and returned triple platinum.  And it was all because record store employees, in sending back to RSO all of the records that said "Sgt. Pepper" and "movie" on the sleeve, couldn't tell the difference between the real movie soundtrack album and the ripoff.  Ironically, that was a mistake that Springboard was counting on record buyers to make!  And not all of the Springboard records went to either RSO or back to Springboard itself.  Some of them remained in record stores, left in discount and cut-out bins, with eight-track versions cropping up in discount department stores and selling for fifty cents as late as the mid-1980s.  

On his blog "Classical Gas Emissions," Ben Century sums up the stupidity of this imitation soundtrack album quite succinctly.  "The only thing worse than a bunch of famous artists doing bad Beatles covers," he wrote in 2008, "is . . . a bunch of nobodies doing bad impressions of famous artists doing bad Beatles covers."

Capitol Records, the Beatles' American label, probably made out the best from all of this.  When the Sgt. Pepper movie soundtrack came out, the label capitalized (no pun intended) on the fact that it had the original Beatles recordings available and promoted the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album as if it were a new release.  It even issued the title song and "With a Little Help From My Friends," backed by "A Day In the Life," as a new single, and there was even a Sgt. Pepper picture disc!

Cool, huh? :-)

I've confessed to having seen the Sgt. Pepper movie, and I also admit to having owned the RSO Sgt. Pepper movie soundtrack album (I was twelve years old, for Pete's sake), but eventually, I happily graduated to the Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road LPs that, er, inspired the movie.  As we learned from the animated movie Yellow Submarine, the Beatles could pass for Sgt. Pepper's original band, because they were the originals.  So why settle for a mere copy?  

And so, why settle for a copy of a copy?   

The Sgt. Pepper movie failed because Robert Stigwood, who died in 2016, essentially asked the biggest names in late-seventies pop to pretend to be the Beatles in a movie based on an album the Beatles made pretending to be other people.  The big joke about the fake Springboard release was that Abbey Road '78 pretended to be other people pretending to be the Beatles. 

Oh yeah, here's Abbey Road '78 pretending to be Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees with their recording of "Getting Better."  And it can't get any worse than this.   

Rare Alice Cooper Photos!

If you came here from Facebook or Twitter, you may be expecting this to be an April Fool's Day joke, like my previous post - perhaps pictures of a little girl named Alice Cooper. Some of you might be expecting legitimate photos of the Alice Cooper, the great seventies shock rocker.  Whatever you expected upon clicking on the social network link you came from, remember - YOU ASKED FOR IT! :-D

These are actual photos of Alice Cooper, from 1978. That's not the joke. The joke is what they show Alice Cooper doing!

In the first picture, a cheesily mustachioed Alice is about to dunk in his face in a cream pie, and with so much force that he appears ready to engage in mortal combat with it.

In the second picture, Alice lifts his head up gingerly after dunking his face, he and his moustache still involved in a death match with the cream pie.  Alice is almost down for the count but not out. Meanwhile, ironically, a boxing match is airing on a television set.

Finally, in the third picture, Alice has plopped his face back into the pie.  The fight is over - the pie wins!!  

There are not Photoshop creations. In fact, they're stills from the disastrous 1978 Beatles-inspired movie Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which starred the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton. In the movie, Alice plays a villainous hypnotist trying to help an evil rock band - which is not played by the Bee Gees! - take over the world.  Most of the characters in this movie were named for characters in Beatles songs, but Alice's character was given the inexplicable awful-pun name of Father Sun.

So how did Alice end up in the pie?  Barry Gibb threw him into it.

Alice's scene would make even less sense if I tried to explain the context of it.  

Happy April Fool's Day. :-D