Mark Waters, a Hollywood director of tolerable if, broadly speaking, unimaginative romantic and teen comedies
has been announced as the director of a movie set to ponder one of the ultimate what if? questions of popular culture. The question being, what if John Lennon had not gone out with Yoko Ono? The films premise is simple, if not a little silly: two Beatles fans travel back in time to prevent John Lennon from meeting Yoko so that she would not- as conventional wisdom dictates- have broken up the greatest band in the history of popular music. Of course, for anyone that cares to spend two minutes researching the complexities that have since emerged, the presence of Ono around Lennon much of the time was relatively incidental to various arguments concerning business and recording at the time, unhelped by drug fuelled paranoia. Nevertheless, Yoko Ono has become a byword for the influence of a disruptive girlfriend of wife of any band member. It will be interesting to see how Waters manages to traverse these tricky personal (and legally) paths in order to extract the obvious potential for humour. Not least among these problems will be that of finding actors of sufficient skill to properly grasp the unique wit and charisma of the Fab Four at their artistic and commercial peak. The screenplay- provisionally titled,
Get Back - written by Chris McCoy, has already received acclaim, and producer, Sidney Kimmel, must be reasonably confident of resolving potential legal issues to have announced pre-production to the press. Smartly of course, Get Back is the final Beatles song on their last album together Let It Be; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6G7MkBMVxE Although no actors names have been attributed to the project thus far, it is likely that we will see the film in some form, sooner rather than later. (image courtesy of
/film)