McCartney Times

With Peter Jackson’s re-cut of The Beatles: Get Back coming at the end of November, we are reminded the Beatles were cinematic stars as well as musical artists. Beyond the group’s films, John Lennon played Private Gripweed in Richard Lester’s How I Won the War, and Ringo Starr acted in quite a few films. His choices were far more in keeping with the underground and independent air of the time. Starr starred with Peter Sellars in the anti-capitalist satire The Magic Christian, as the villain in the Spaghetti Western Blindman, and the voyeuristic Mexican gardener Emmanuel in the sex farce Candy. But his most counterculture and independent nod was as Frank Zappa in the film 200 Motels (1971). A special edition of its soundtrack, Frank Zappa 200 Motels 50th Anniversary Edition, is coming out on Nov.19.

Written by Zappa, who co-directed with Tony Palmer, 200 Motels is a musical film which sought to project the surrealistic reality of being a pop musician on the road in 1971. The film stands in history as the first full-length feature where the action was shot directly onto videotape and transferred onto 35mm film for cinema release. To do this, they used the old 3-strip Technicolor method of negative and print to isolate the three color signals – red, blue and green – and transfer them to 3-strip 35mm film. Shot in just 10 days at London’s Pinewood Studios, with a budget of around $650,000 from distributor United Artists, Zappa showed what the new medium could do with spectacular state-of-the-art visual effects.

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Source: That Time Ringo Starr Played Frank Zappa in 200 Motels – Den of Geek