McCartney Times

In a box overlooking the Royal Albert Hall, The Beatles, dressed in drag, are aiming a sniper rifle at the speaker below.The Fab Four are in an alternate reality version of 1960s Britain where women occupy all the positions of power. The ruling matriarchy also happens to be crudely stereotyped as a bunch of catty, style-obsessed harpies.“We’re having the House of Commons redecorated in Chinese white lacquer and natural oak woodwork!” UK prime minister Lillian Corbett tells the tittering all-female crowd.Then, a shot rings out, Corbett falls dead, and the cross-dressing Beatles drop their smoking rifle and begin to flee.The Beatles in November 1967 FileAnd this wasn’t even the most shocking scene of Up Against It, the Beatles-commissioned 1967 screenplay that was to be the band’s third movie.The Beatles would blow up a Great War cenotaph. They would serve in a brutal English civil war fought between male and female forces. Paul McCartney would spend 10 years in jail.Sexual assault, both committed by and against the Beatles, would be repeatedly played for laughs.“Rowena has consented to meet me in her cabin at noon. I’m going to give her a good raping. You won’t either of you disturb me, will you?” the McCartney character tells the other Beatles at one point.In the final scene, polyandry has been legalized and main character Patricia Drumgoole celebrates by marrying all four Beatles.“Miss Drumgoole squeals with delight and disappears under the coverlet with her husbands,” reads the final line.The script, commissioned for the modern equivalent of about $130,000 CDN, was the work of playwright Joe Orton, a rising British master of blackly comic plays. The version being quoted here is an obscure 1979 publication of the screenplay. The minute the Beatles saw the script, not only did they not make it, but they didn’t even return Orton’s calls.“No explanation why. No criticism of the script … Fuck them,” Orton wrote in his diary.Even in a country renowned for its anti-establishment satire, Orton nurtured a particularly cynical distrust of authority. He was gay, for one, at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in the U.K.Joe Orton Orton Collection at the University of Leicester, MS237/5/38/10 © Orton EstateWhile the Beatles were scoring their first number one hits, Orton had been serving a six-month jail sentence for the surprisingly benign crime of vandalizing library books.The young artist had thought it was funny to, for instance, glue a picture of a monkey head onto the front cover of the Collins Guide to Roses.By the time the Beatles got word of Orton, the prolific playwright was already well into a private mission of “comic revenge against society,” according to Orton biographer John Lahr. His plays featured characters utterly stripped of redeeming qualities, and plots oozing with taboo and sex. Orton’s What the Butler Saw ends with the discovery of Sir Winston Churchill’s severed bronze penis.The Beatles soon before their official 1969 breakup. FileOrton had been contacted by Walter Shenson, the producer of the first two Beatles films, Help! and A Hard Day’s Night. The band had apparently become annoyed at the cartoonish silliness of their films, and wanted a script with more depth. “The only thing I get from the theatre is a sore arse,” McCartney had told Orton during a brief meeting, before adding that his play, Loot, had been the only theatrical performance he had ever not hated. Shenson, meanwhile, “was most concerned to impress to me that ‘the boys’ shouldn’t be made to do anything in the film that would reflect badly on them. You see, the kids will all imitate whatever the boys do,” wrote Orton in his diary. The playwright, it’s safe to say, rejected this advice with enthusiasm. With history’s biggest band suddenly at his disposal, Orton had gotten to work trying to subvert every ounce of non-threatening goodwill the band had accumulated. Throughout, he laboured under one major limitation: The Beatles sucked at acting.“Difficult this as I don’t think any of the Beatles can act in any accepted sense,” wrote Orton at the time.The Beatles were not averse to subversive humour. Their songs are laced with raunchy jokes and George Harrison would go on to become one of the key financial backers of Monty Python.However, the group also knew better than Orton the awesome consequences of controversy.Just the year before, the Beatles had been avalanched with death threats in response to John Lennon’s comment that The Beatles were “more popular than Jesus now.”A 1963 portrait of Beatles manager Brian Epstein, who commissioned Up Against It. Copyright Apple Corps Ltd.Then, they had accidentally snubbed Filipino First Lady Imelda Marcos while on tour in Manila — and were forced to flee the country through streets packed with violent anti-Beatles mobs.Reportedly, though, the Beatles didn’t reject Up Against It because it was too outlandish. Instead, they passed because it was all “a bit gay.”

Source: The absurdly violent and gay Beatles movie that never got made | National Post