Beatle Tunes in Film? Got It Covered

By PATRICK GOLDSTEIN

Nov. 6, 2001 12 AM PT

Before Jessie Nelson began work on “I Am Sam,” a wrenching drama due at Christmas that stars Sean Penn as a mentally handicapped father battling to keep custody of his 7-year-old daughter, the writer-director spent several months at the L.A. Goal center for people with disabilities in Culver City. It didn’t take long for Nelson to notice something the center’s residents had in common: Nearly everybody was a huge Beatles fan.

“They were always talking about the Beatles songs they loved,” Nelson recalls. “They looked to Beatles songs as touchstones for their own lives. When a woman had problems with her roommate, she’d say, ‘Well, John and Paul had problems too.’ The whole public nature of the Beatles’ journey through life had become very important to them.”

Nelson and her writing partner, Kristine Johnson, were so struck by the way the Goal residents connected to the Beatles that they made this fascination with the band a leitmotif in their film. Nelson read a stack of Beatles biographies and listened to the band while writing the script. During filming, Nelson played Beatles music on the set to keep it in her actors’ heads. “I’d say, ‘Today we’ll do ‘The White Album.’ Tomorrow we’ll do ‘Rubber Soul.”’

“I Am Sam” has a multitude of references to the Beatles, most notably in a dramatic courtroom speech in which Penn compares his relationship with his daughter to the way John Lennon and Paul McCartney needed each other as songwriters. “Whenever Sean’s character was at a turning point in his life, he would think of the Beatles,” Nelson says. “When we were writing a scene where he held his baby daughter in his arms, we thought, what character from a Beatles song would be appropriate for her name? Should it be Julia? Prudence? Lucy? As a writer, it’s pretty inspiring to spend a lot of time with the Beatles, because they’re such brilliant writers.”

What Nelson never realized, though, was what a herculean task it would be to get permission to use the songs in her movie. “I was so naive writing the script that I thought, ‘Oh, this is wonderful, I’ll get 12 Beatles songs and we’ll just have them run through the movie.”’

That’s not how it works in the brave new world of movie soundtracks. Over the past decade the soundtrack business has become a profit center where musical artistry is often overshadowed by corporate marketing and branding. There are still filmmakers who genuinely collaborate with musicians, as Paul Thomas Anderson did with Aimee Mann on “Magnolia” and Cameron Crowe did with his favorite Seattle bands on “Singles.”

But all too often soundtracks are treated like an extension of the film’s advertising campaign--just listen to the soundtracks of recent hits like “American Pie 2” and “Rush Hour 2” that feature second-rate leftovers from rock and hip-hop artists whose youth appeal is exploited to help the films attract all-important teen moviegoers.

Trading on pop’s cool comes at a price. Metallica got $1 million for providing a new song for the “Mission Impossible 2” soundtrack. U2 could retire on the money it’s made simply from licensing songs to movie trailers and TV spots; MGM recently paid U2 $500,000 to use “It’s a Beautiful Day” in the trailers and TV spots for its current film “Bandits,” and Universal paid $400,000 to use the band’s “One” in trailer and TV spots for “Family Man” last year.

Once Nelson got a crash course in the complexities of the soundtrack racket, she knew it was a longshot to get the Beatles’ original music. To use the songs, she needed the Beatles’ approval. Both Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono, who represents Lennon’s interests, saw the movie and liked it. Before approaching Ringo Starr, Nelson tried to reach George Harrison, who’s been ill. She could never make contact with him and knowing the New Line film had to be ready for Christmas, Nelson opted to recruit younger artists to cover the Beatles songs.

Using cover songs meant she didn’t need permission from the Beatles, simply from Sony Music, the company that administers their music publishing. While New Line secured the rights, Nelson approached several record companies about doing a soundtrack album, eventually going with V2 Records, a New York-based label whose roster includes Moby and the Black Crowes. Beatles music has turned up in movies before, but the “I Am Sam” soundtrack represents perhaps the most ambitious collection of Beatles interpretations by modern-day artists.

V2 President Andy Gershon had little interest in doing soundtracks. But at the urging of his West Coast A&R; chief, Jon Sidel, he took a video home about a week after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. “I figured I could stop the tape after 20 minutes and be done with it,” he recalls. “Of course after 20 minutes I was crying and going to the bathroom for more tissues. The movie really touches a lot of raw emotional nerves and in the light of everything that’s happened in the world, it’s the kind of film you want to believe in.”

V2 executives and the filmmakers began a series of daily conference calls, essentially “casting the songs like you’d cast a movie,” as Nelson put it.

One of the first artists to sign on was Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, a surfing buddy of Penn’s, who volunteered to do “Hey, You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” telling Nelson that he’d sung the song around the campfire as a kid. The Wallflowers recorded their track, “I’m Looking Through You,” at a studio owned by Jackson Browne, who sang harmony on the track. (See accompanying box for a list of artists.) To cover a Beatles song is a daunting challenge in itself. But because Nelson had already finished shooting the film, most of the artists ended up recording to what’s known as a “click track,” so their tempo would match the tempo of the original songs that had been in the movie.

Nelson ended up using eight Beatles covers in the movie. Normally it would cost several million dollars to obtain the publishing rights to that many Beatles songs, but Nelson says Sony Music generously let her have the songs for significantly less money--well under $1 million, she says. There are 16 songs on the soundtrack album that V2 will release in early January.

V2 also arranged an agreement ensuring that the cover artists would earn considerably less than their normal soundtrack fees. (Neither V2 nor New Line would say how much it cost to secure the Beatles publishing rights, though.) V2 also agreed to donate a portion of soundtrack proceeds to L.A. Goal.

In the hands of the right filmmaker, music can be a terrific storytelling tool--go back and watch almost any movie by Martin Scorsese, who has an unerring ability to use music to heighten his characters’ turbulent emotions. Wes Anderson, director of the upcoming film “The Royal Tenenbaums,” says he always has a collection of songs in his head that form the central focus of the movie he’s working on. Before screening “Tenenbaums” at the recent New York Film Festival, Anderson warned moviegoers that some key music in the film hadn’t been cleared yet. He said this past week that he’s cleared everything but two Beatles originals--”Hey Jude,” which opens the film, and “I’m Looking Through You,” which plays over the final scene.

“I wrote both scenes with those songs in mind and I don’t know what I’d do without them,” he says with a nervous laugh. “I don’t really have a backup plan.”

“Tenenbaums” also has a Nico version of Jackson Browne’s “These Days,” the Velvet Underground’s “Stephanie Says” and two obscure Bob Dylan instrumentals (one a soundtrack song itself, from “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid”). The most striking use of music comes in a scene with Gwyneth Paltrow and Luke Wilson, in which one of them holds up a copy of the Rolling Stones’ “Between the Buttons” album and cues up the record on a turntable, which remains on camera as the scene unfolds, playing two Stones songs in a row. Like the Beatles, the Stones are notoriously protective of movie use of their songs.

“I have some kind of thing about the Stones,” says Anderson, who says he obtained the rights to the songs before filming the scene. “I always wanted to see the needle on the record, but I only had a CD of the song, so we had to go out and buy a vinyl version of it. For me, it’s a breath of fresh air whenever you can skip the dialogue and let the music take over. It’s hard to get that kind of emotion in your movie without it coming from the music.”

For his upcoming film “Baby’s in Black,” director Brad Silberling stashed away $2 million--roughly 10% of the film’s overall budget--to pay for licensing early 1970s-era songs by such artists as the Stones, Van Morrison and Led Zeppelin, all of whom rarely make their music available. He sent a copy of his script to Morrison before filming began and burned CDs for his actors so they could hear the songs as they developed their characters.

“Some people have great olfactory senses,” he says. “For me, it’s music that ties me to important emotional moments in my life.” “Baby’s in Black” has a scene set in a tavern in which a bartender, rather than confront a nosy stranger, simply plays Dave Edmunds’ “I Hear You Knocking” on the tavern jukebox. “In a film, music can be a great storytelling tool,” Silberling explains. “Instead of having a lot of dialogue, you can let the jukebox do the talking.”

“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, comments or ideas, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.

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Here’s a first look at the lineup of Beatles cover songs on the upcoming “I Am Sam” soundtrack:

“Blackbird” Sarah McLachlan

“Two of Us” Aimee Mann and Michael Penn

“I’m Looking Through You” The Wallflowers

“Across the Universe” Rufus Wainwright

“Strawberry Fields Forever” Ben Harper

“You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” Eddie Vedder

“Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” The Black Crowes

“Golden Slumbers” Ben Folds

“Nowhere Man” Paul Westerberg