Question - Hard Days Night missing footage

[Gredel21]

Question - Hard Days Night missing footage

Knowing Dir Richard Lester tried to get the missing footage and discovered it had been destroyed in 1969/70

Dont you think " United Artist " Would have contacted him earlier about destroying the footage
As well as someone would have kept a " safe " copy of all the footage.
on the Beatles Bible there is some information about the unused footage. only still photo;s remain ( unfortunately)

only outtakes I know of are from " the Ed Sullivan Show interview
interesting information
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058182/trivia/

Here is a great Documentary

[Lord Reith]

I don't think there was any awareness of the importance of such material in 1970. If it had no commercial value it was destroyed, and that applied to not only film elements from movies but also TV and radio programmes, many many session tapes from Abbey Road and even things like the original animation cells from the Warner Bros cartoons. Nobody then envisaged home video or even that anyone would even show interest in such stuff. An epic fail of imagination that has probably resulted in countless millions of dollars in lost revenue.

[zappaf78]

One thing that seems to exist, is the overdubbing of audio on certain sections of the movie. the Revolver TV Youtube page uploaded an audio sample. It's quite terrible that the footage was destroyed in 69/70. One of a few reason I love Apple Records, they seem to keep every footage from 1967-1970. Same thing with John and Paul keeping copies of their TV appearances. I do wish that someone secretly saved such United Artist footage.

[Bublifuck]

Hello !

I don't know who was responsible for the archive back then, but the idea that someone threw out the unused negative and unused film and removed it to make room on the shelf is unimaginable! It might be worth looking into how the films were released, whether they threw them away with the boxes or scrapped them, I don't know. Always in 1964, the Beatles were at the peak of popularity, surely someone would buy those reels unofficially, right? I know it's just speculation, but what if...

[Choking Smoker]

I don't think there was any awareness of the importance of such material in 1970. If it had no commercial value it was destroyed, and that applied to not only film elements from movies but also TV and radio programmes, many many session tapes from Abbey Road and even things like the original animation cells from the Warner Bros cartoons. Nobody then envisaged home video or even that anyone would even show interest in such stuff. An epic fail of imagination that has probably resulted in countless millions of dollars in lost revenue.

Indeed, we also have the Cavern Club to add to the list of unimaginative, destructive and short-sighted decisions made in that era.

[Lord Reith]

The thing is, nobody actually ever thinks about this stuff at the time. I was reading about how little of the "old" internet pre-facebook remains now outside of Internet Archive's random trawls. For example, millions of photos and audio files were obliterated when MySpace migrated to a new server. I used to have webpages on Geocities like countless other people that were all nuked. It is almost impossible to find anything pre-2000 unless someone archived it. Now you may not think any of this stuff is important, but that's exactly how people thought in the 60s and 70s. BBC producer Bernie Andrews told how he once applied for a retention order on one of his sessions he felt was especially historic. The department head's response was hostile and dismissive. Their attitude was "this stuff isn't important, it's ephemeral, it's disposable".

It would be great if all the footage from AHDN and HELP existed like that for MMT and LIB. I would love to see the missing sketch with Frankie Howerd and Wendy Richards, or the infamous "quarry" sequence where the four Beatles smashed up some sportcars (although there is a tiny fraction of that in a trailer somewhere).

[billychildish]

Previously unknown footage turns up in film archives all the time. They are notoriously underfunded and some have reels and reels of film which are just sitting there waiting to be gone through. Unless someone shows documentation that these reels were destroyed, they are just waiting to be rediscovered.