© Apple Corps Ltd.If you’re not among the lucky ones getting to see the new Beatles documentary in a cinema, you can see it online.
Ron Howard‘s The Beatles: Eight Days a Week — The Touring Years had its world premiere Thursday in London, and if you’re missing out on the limited American showings, which started Friday, fear not — Hulu begins streaming it on Saturday.
The film chronicles the band’s live career from early Beatlemania in 1962 to the last notes August 29, 1966, at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park. It was an extremely heady time for the four young musicians, who somehow kept their wits about them as they were mobbed by screaming fans.
“I began to see in it, as I looked at those touring years, a kind of an adventure survival story, an ensemble story of this journey,” Howard said, “’cause they definitely grew, evolved and changed as they were tested, as individuals and as a group.”
Paul McCartney described those years as “like a staircase — we’d seen it little, we’d seen it medium — so by the time it was big, we kind of knew what we were dealing with.”
What got the band through the craziness, Ringo Starr said, was the camaraderie among him, McCartney, John Lennon and George Harrison: “We had each other all the time. You have a bad day, he’ll bring me out of it. Someone’s going down, someone’s going up, or we’ll have just a great laugh. We supported each other night and day, and that’s what the band was about.”
The limited U.S. engagement, in 178 cities in the U.S. and Guam, began Friday and runs through October. The screenings are being followed by the restored, remastered 1965 concert at New York’s Shea Stadium.
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