PETER JACKSON’S DOCUMENTARY ‘THE BEATLES: GET BACK’ STREAMS ON DISNEY+ THIS WEEK

The Beatles have for so long been the most famous rock band in history, and not by a small margin, that it might seem unlikely, 51 years after the group broke up, that there could be anything new to reveal about the foursome.

Peter Jackson disagrees.

And over the Thanksgiving weekend, the esteemed director of both feature films — Tolkien’s “Fellowship of the Ring” trilogy — and documentaries — 2018’s “They Shall Not Grow Old” — will prove the fallibility of that claim by giving fans of The Beatles, myself included, an early Christmas gift.

Jackson’s three-part, six-hour documentary, “Get Back,” will debut on the Disney+ streaming service. The first two-hour segment will be available on Thanksgiving, with the second part coming out Friday, Nov. 26, and the final episode the following day.

Jackson’s documentary truly marks a milestone in the legacy of The Beatles, whose story dates to 1950s Liverpool, England, and, in the U.S., to their epochal 1964 performances on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Longtime fans are certainly familiar with the subject, and the period, that Jackson explores in “Get Back.”

In January 1969 the group gathered in London to work on songs for an album they intended to name “Get Back.” That’s also the title of a Paul McCartney song on the record. The idea was they would “get back” to their earlier days of making records basically by recording the band members playing live in the studio. Since 1966, when the band abandoned concert tours, The Beatles had used a dramatically different approach, assembling their albums by layering on multiple individual instruments and voice parts — a process known as “overdubbing” — in EMI Studios in London (now known, in homage to The Beatles’ last recorded album, as Abbey Road).

The recording sessions for the “Get Back” project, which ended after about a month with rancor — lead guitarist George Harrison quit the band briefly in the interim — were filmed almost in their entirety.

This resulted in a documentary, “Let It Be,” also the title of another McCartney tune and of the album that wasn’t released until the spring of 1970. But “Let It Be,” directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, was never as widely known, or available, as The Beatles’ two earlier feature films, “A Hard Day’s Night” from 1964 and “Help!” released the next year.

And so, for most of the ensuing half century, fans have wondered whether another, more detailed documentary, was forthcoming. And now, finally, it is.

The chance to watch The Beatles play, chat about and create some of the music that remains so beloved today was, until now, the province of hope rather than reality.

It’s little wonder, then, that no production involving The Beatles, including the TV documentary series “The Beatles Anthology,” which aired over three nights in November 1995, has generated so much excitement as Peter Jackson’s “Get Back.”

— Jayson Jacoby, editor, Baker City Herald