'They weren't breaking up': Here's why Peter Jackson's 'Get Back' defies Beatles history

What if everything you thought you knew about The Beatles’ breakup was wrong?

That’s the promising premise behind director Peter Jackson’s new six-hour documentary “The Beatles: Get Back” (streaming Thursday, Friday and Saturday on Disney+), which revises the narrative around “Let It Be,” a gloomy behind-the-scenes film about the album of the same name that arrived in theaters after the band revealed its split.

“It’s forever tainted by the fact The Beatles were breaking up when it came out,” Jackson says of the original 1970 movie. Fans who’ve seen the fly-on-the-wall footage of the band writing and recording live takes of 14 songs in 22 days – which includes a painful exchange in which Paul McCartney and George Harrison bicker about Harrison’s guitar playing – “naturally assume” they’re viewing the band’s demise. “ ‘Let It Be’ had the aura of this sort of miserable time.”

But what “Get Back” teases is a deeper dive into long-vaulted outtakes shot in January 1969, in which the four friends gamely make the best of bad acoustics, growing divisions and a tight timeline.

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In segments screened for USA TODAY, John Lennon and Harrison snicker like schoolboys when engineers pause the recording to announce McCartney’s bass is out of tune. Lennon cracks a lewd joke about “I’ve Got a Feeling” as The Beatles fumble and bumble through unfamiliar material, and no one can remember the title of “The Long and Winding Road.” Ringo Starr chummily shares a piece of gum with Yoko Ono, who does needlework at John’s side. Arms are thrown around shoulders and lunch plans are made. The beloved rooftop concert at their Apple Corps. headquarters plays out in full, running 42 minutes. The grainy look of the first movie has disappeared, replaced by crisp footage with lifelike clarity.

After plowing through nearly 60 hours of film and 150 hours of audio, Jackson’s sense of relief at what he’s found is palpable. He knew the original Michael Lindsay-Hogg film from a VHS bootleg (“a horrible, fourth-generation thing”) he’d rabidly watched as a lifelong Beatles fan. He dug into the source material fervently hoping for more.

“If it was truly miserable, I would have said to Apple (Corps.), ‘Look, thanks very much for the offer, but this is not a film I want to make,’ " says the “Lord of the Rings” director, who volunteered for the project and decided to expand it into a docuseries. “But I just laughed. It’s very, very funny.”

No one could have been more surprised than McCartney, now 79, who nervously met up with Jackson before a 2017 concert in New Zealand. “I said to him, ‘Well, I’ve seen all the footage,’ and I can still see the tension in Paul’s face because he was expecting me to say, ‘and it’s really awful,’ “ Jackson recalls. “And he said, ‘So what do you think?’ “

Jackson’s take was reassuring. “ ‘It’s absolutely fine, Paul. It’s really happy. It’s not what you think,’ ” the director says. “Every negative spin you could ever imagine has been put on this by different (biographers) over the years, and to be truthful, by The Beatles themselves. That’s not what I saw, I saw something completely different.”

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What struck Giles Martin, who remixed the music heard in the film and on a new deluxe edition of the album, was the effort The Beatles still devoted to developing each other’s ideas.

When Lennon shows McCartney something he’s written, “it’s like, ‘Should we work on this song?’ ” says Martin, son of Beatles producer George Martin. “It’s not like, ‘This is my song. What are you doing with it?’ You don’t get that, ever.”

Jackson has his theories about why The Beatles’ memories of the project are faulty.

“They weren’t breaking up when it was shot,” he reminds. The band went on to write and record one final classic album, “Abbey Road.” “But they do remember seeing ‘Let It Be’ when they were breaking up, at a very stressful time of their lives. So their memories of the ‘Get Back’ sessions are their memories of the movie rather than what happened (when they were filming).”

Starr, 81, remembers the tensions – the new film shows Harrison briefly quitting the band – but is pleased with the balanced retelling. “We had lots of those moments, but we had a lot of loving too,” he told USA TODAY in March. “There's laughter and there's joy, and (footage) of the band being the band: digging each other, fooling around. That's how the sessions were. So I love Peter and I love what he's doing. Everyone will be amazed.”

When the surviving Beatles and their families saw the documentary, “I was thoroughly expecting notes from them because I didn’t hold back, I put some pretty raw, honest stuff in there,” Jackson says. “I was expecting to hear, ‘Could you chop that out? Do we have to show that?’

“I didn’t get a single note, not one. They said it was difficult for them to watch, they found it a bit stressful, but they wanted a definitive record of this time to exist in the world.”

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What’s less clear is whether the Beatles faithful will accept this celebratory version of the truth.

“A lot of fans are probably expecting it to be something of a whitewash,” Jackson acknowledges. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic last Christmas, Disney and Jackson released a perky preview reel. “It was just us thinking, ‘God, we should cheer people up,’ so we cut together a deliberately funny two- or three-minute reel, which everybody has taken to mean, ‘Well, this is going to be a happy whitewash of the whole thing.’ “

Hours of audio Jackson pored through reveal a different perspective.

“You’re eavesdropping on them talking all day long, day after day,” Jackson says. “You get a pretty strong sense of what’s actually accurate and what’s not. They’re not a band that intends to break up. If it’s supposed to be a film of a band breaking up, it ain’t that for sure.”

When Giles Martin played recordings from the sessions for McCartney and Starr, “they just go, ‘You know, we were really good, weren’t we, as a band?’ ” he says. “We love normal people doing exceptional things. And that’s what this is. They’re The Beatles, but talking about what they’re going to have for lunch, and then they’ll play ‘Let It Be,‘ and it’ll sound great.

“It’s the closest you’ll know what it’s like to be in the room with The Beatles.”

Contributing: Patrick Ryan

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'The Beatles: Get Back' on Disney+: Peter Jackson rethinks the breakup