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.
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
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