Running Time: 81 minutes

Release Date: May 13, 1970

Producer: Mal Evans

Director: Michael Lindsay-Hogg

Starring: The Beatles, Yoko Ono, Billy Preston, Mal Evans

Availability: Currently Unavailable (Out of Print)

1970 brought a close to the Beatles saga, and one final film Let It Be. Let It Be was intended to be a documentary of the "rebirth" of the Beatles, but turned out to document the band's "slow demise." The original idea for the movie was to film the Beatles rehearsing, and then performing a concert in front of an audience. What was committed to film were countless hours of seemingly aimless jam sessions, arguments, and a hurried concert on the roof of the Apple building in London. The film ends with the London police shutting the rooftop performance down, thus bringing to close the Beatles collective film careers.

The British soundrack recording for Let It Be was issued on May 8, 1970 on the Parlophone label. The U.S. version of the Let It Be soundtrack album was released on May 18, 1970 by Capitol Records. The track listing for both albums is as follows:

Side 1: Two Of Us, Dig A Pony, Across The Universe, I Me Mine, Dig It, Let It Be, Maggie Mae

Side 2: I've Got A Feeling, The One After 909, The Long And Winding Road, For You Blue, Get Back

Paul: "The original idea was, you'd see the Beatles rehearsing, jamming, making stuff up, gettin' their act together and then finally we'd perform somewhere as the big end of show concert kind of thing. And Michael Lindsay-Hogg was gonna direct it..."

George: "I thought, 'Ok, you know, well, it's a new year, we've got a new approach,' but it soon became apparent that it wasn't anything new, it was just going to be painful again..."

Ringo: "I mean, you know, the days were long and it could get boring, you know, and Twickenham just wasn't really conducive to any great atmosphere...you were just in a big barn..."

George: "I'd just spent like the last six months producing an album of this fellow, Jackie Lomax, and hanging out with Bob Dylan and The Band at Woodstock and having a great time. And for me to come back into the winter of discontent with the Beatles in Twickenham was very unhealthy and unhappy..."

John: "It was just dreadful, dreadful feeling. And being filmed all the time, you know, like that. I just wanted them to go away. And we'd be there at 8 in the morning. You couldn't make music at 8 in the morning or 10 or whatever it was, in a strange place with people filming you, and colored lights...."

George: "As everybody knows, we never had much privacy, and, you know, this thing that was happening was they were filming us rehearsing. There was a bit of a row going on between Paul and I. You can see it, where he's saying, 'Well don't play this,' or something and I'm saying, 'Well you know I'll play what you want or I won't play if you don't want it, you know, just make up your mind.'" That kind of stuff was going on. And they were filming us, recording us having a row, you know, it was like, terrible really...I thought, 'I'm quite capable of being relatively happy on my own, and I'm not able to be happy in this situation, you know, I'm gettin' out of here...'"

John: "The whole pressure of it finally got to us. So, instead of, like people do when they're together, they start picking on each other. You know, it was like, 'It's because of you, you got the tambourine wrong that my whole life is a misery.' You know, it became petty. But the manifestations were on each other 'cause we were the only ones we had..."

Paul: "..it was like, 'No, no, no. Wait a minute, wait a minute. George has left and you know, we can't have this, this isn't good enough!' So I'm not sure what happened, I think maybe Neil or one of the ones who looked after us probably rung George up and said, 'They're real sorry...' or whatever, '....it was a real big mistake...'"

George: "I remember being called to a meeting that was out in Surrey in Ringo's house that he'd bought from Peter Sellers. And it was decided that it would be better if we just got back together and finished the record. Also, you see, Twickenham studio was very cold and not a very nice atmosphere, so we decided to abandon that and go to Saville Row into the recording studio..."

Ringo: "I think everyone was gettin' a little tired of us by then, because we were taking a long time and there were many discussions goin' on by then, many heated discussions..."

George: "It's interesting to see how people behave nicely when you bring a guest in, because they don't really want everybody to know they're so bitchy...suddenly everybody's on their best behavior. So I put out a message to find if Billy (Preston) was in town, and told him to come in to Saville Row, which he did. Straight away it just became 100% improvement in the vibe in the room and everybody was happier, also, to have somebody else playing in the band...."

Ringo: "We were working on a good track, and that always excited us. And his part was also a part of it, you know. Suddenly, when you were working on something good, the bull shit went out the window, and we got back down to doin' what we did really, really well..."

George: "The idea being that , we were gonna originally rehearse all these new songs then make an album in a live show never really happened because the album became us in the studio. As we rehearsed the songs, they were recorded..."

Paul: "...'cause that was looking for an end to the film, really. It was one of those, 'Well, how are we going to finish this?' because there wasn't going to be a big concert. 'Cause by then, it was really looking like, 'Well, can we do this, can we finish this in two weeks time?' So then it was suggested that we go up on the roof and do a concert there, and then we could move on....and in the end, it started to filter up from our roadie, Mal (Evans), come creep in tryin' to keep out the camera and say, 'The police are complaining, you've got to stop!' We said, 'We're not stopping!,' keeping goin', and he come up and said, 'The police are going to arrest you!' 'Good end to the film, let 'em do it!,' great, you know. And we thought, 'Well, that's an end...'Beatles Busted on Rooftop Gig!'"

Ringo: "The thing on the roof that I always feel let down by are the police. 'Cause someone in the neighborhood had called the police and the police came up and I was playin' away and I thought, 'Oh great!,' you know, 'I hope they drag me off!' You know, I wanted the cops to drag me off..'Get off those drums!,' 'cause we were being filmed and it would've been really great, but they didn't, of course. The just came bumbling in, 'You've gotta turn that sound down!' It could've been fabulous..."

John: "By the time we got to Let It Be, we couldn't play the game anymore, we couldn't do it anymore. It came to the point where it was no longer creating magic, and the camera, being in the room with us, sort of made us aware of that, that it was a phony situation...."

Paul: "In fact, what happened, when we got in there, we showed how a break-up of a group works. We didn't realize that we were sort of breaking up as it was happening...."