Company Town : Lucrative Love Affair With the Beatles : Films: ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ was a hit 30 years ago. Now producer Shenson plans a documentary on its making.

People always complain that the path to success in Hollywood is unknowable, but veteran producer Walter Shenson says he has the answer. “Just make sure your first film is a hit,” he explained with a laugh over breakfast recently at the Regent Beverly Wilshire hotel.

Shenson knows of what he speaks. His first several films were successes, which is an especially good career move. And this year Shenson is making plans to celebrate the biggest of them all.

It was 30 years ago that Walter Shenson asked a band called the Beatles to play themselves in a movie. The result was “A Hard Day’s Night,” which many still consider the best rock ‘n’ roll film of all time.

Shenson hopes to rekindle a bit of Beatlemania with “The Making of a Hard Day’s Night,” a television documentary timed to coincide with the film’s 30th anniversary this fall. The project will include unseen footage and interviews with behind-the-scenes participants.

The idea for the documentary came to the producer about a year ago. The surviving Beatles were already at work on a comprehensive documentary on the band, but Shenson says they said OK to his project after witnessing the excitement generated earlier this year by the 30th anniversary of their first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

“They were nervous about a conflict at first,” Shenson said. “And I’ve never wanted to do anything in conflict with them. We’ve always worked together. But after (the Sullivan anniversary) they said, ‘Go ahead.’ So I had their blessing.”

The fact that Shenson still refers to the Beatles as “the boys” when the surviving members are well into middle age is a sign of how long they’ve been in business together. Shenson was a producer living in London, best known for having made the 1959 Peter Sellers breakthrough movie, “The Mouse That Roared,” when a call came that changed his fate.

“I was approached by United Artists to make a movie with the Beatles, and I said, ‘You mean those kids with the long hair and guitars?’ ” said Shenson, who was in his early 40s at the time.

Shenson says UA was more interested in the soundtrack that would result from the movie than the movie itself, since there was no reason to think audiences were interested in a pop band comedy.

A meeting with the group and their manager, Brian Epstein, soon followed at Abbey Road studios. After the deal was made, Shenson casually instructed the band to come back to him with six new songs. The Beatles started filming the movie soon after their Ed Sullivan appearance, and the $500,000, Richard Lester-directed film premiered in August, 1964.

So popular was the movie, which was shot in black-and-white documentary style, that Shenson claims UA got its money back in one day. But it was Shenson who had the last laugh. Under the contract with UA, the rights to both “A Hard Day’s Night” and its follow-up, “Help!,” reverted to him and the Beatles after 15 years--just in time to exploit the video and cable TV revolutions.

“I’ve gotta tell you, the money does come in,” Shenson said of the profits from the two movies, which he and the group split equally. “You ought to see the size of the checks I send them.”

“The Making of a Hard Day’s Night” may prove another bonanza for Shenson, since he plans to syndicate it worldwide. The documentary is narrated by Phil Collins, who was a 12-year-old extra in the original movie. Shenson’s biggest gem is concert footage of “You Can’t Do That,” a song that appeared on the soundtrack but was cut from the movie because of time considerations.

The producer remains active in the business, with two projects in development and well-received recent movies such as “Reuben, Reuben” and “Echo Park” to his credit. But it’s clear from all the 1960s memorabilia that clutters his office that much of what he was and came to be is still tied to those halcyon days with the Beatles.

“I really felt like I was in the middle of a Marx Brothers movie,” Shenson said.

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Image make-over: With Europeans examining why their entertainment industry is so troubled, Hollywood’s United International Pictures is trying to avoid being cast as the scapegoat.

The company, which distributes films overseas for Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, has put out a detailed rebuttal to charges that it is monopolizing European theaters. The report, titled “UIP: The Real Picture,” is being widely distributed in Europe and the United States. It makes the case that the distributor has actually lost market share since 1989, that it encourages competition, and that it poses no threat to European culture.

The public relations campaign comes as UIP fights an uphill battle to renew its special operating agreements with European governments. In an open letter that accompanies the report, UIP President Michael Williams-Jones says much of the criticism of the company is “ill-informed.”