The Beatle Movies That Never Happened
Talks a lot about the Joe Orton script Up Against It.
Eventually, according to Philip Norman in Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation (New York: Fireside, 1981), “a script was commissioned from Joe Orton, the young, working-class dramatist whose macabre comedies, Loot and Entertaining Mr. Sloane, had each been huge West End successes” (278). Orton fashioned Shades of a Personality into Up Against It by taking the original premise and combining it with his earlier (The Silver Bucket) and current projects (The Vision of Gombold Proval). The script, as described by Orton himself in The Beatles at the Movies, contained “political assassination, guerrilla warfare, and tranvestism” and called for the Beatles to “have been caught in-flagrant, become involved in dubious political activity, dressed as women, committed murder, been put in prison, and committed adultery” (133). Orton completed his script at the end of February 1967. It was returned in early April without explanation.
It is easy to understand why Orton’s script was rejected. The Beatles’ public image was still under the dogged control of Brian Epstein and Up Against It would definitely have hurt that image. Paul McCartney, according to Carr, was more candid with the reason the Beatles rejected the script: “The reason why we didn’t do Up Against It wasn’t because it was too far out or anything like that. We didn’t do it because it was gay. We weren’t gay and really that was all there was to it. It was quite simple, really. Brian was gay, and so he and the gay crowd could appreciate it. Now, it wasn’t that we were anti-gay—just that we, The Beatles, weren’t gay” (135). However, if the Beatles were indeed interested in completely shedding their mop-top image, then perhaps a project such as this would have been perfect.
It is more likely that they merely had had enough of making movies and wanted to focus on their personal lives as well as their music. It was during this time that the Yellow Submarine animated project found momentum. This was a project the Beatles had initially agreed to believing it would fulfill their contractual obligation to United Artists. When it turned out that it would not, the Beatles lost interest in the film. But the negative reaction to the self-made Magical Mystery Tour and the positive press Yellow Submarine was garnering quickly won them over (it would seem that the Beatles were as image conscious as their manager was). Ultimately, the third film owed to United Artists would have to wait another two years. The story of Up Against It ended tragically when it was discovered that Kenneth Halliwell, Orton’s lover, had savagely murdered the young playwright and then killed himself. In a bizarre twist of fate, Brian Epstein died nine days later and the search for a third Beatles’ film project effectively ended.
