A Hard Day's Night as a Musical Biopic of the Post-Studio Era

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Notes

1. Denisoff and Romanowski, Risky Business: Rock in Film, p. 138.

2. Ibid., p. 130.

3. Ibid., p. 138.

4. Ibid.

5. Miller, “Of Tunes and Toons: The Movie Musical in the 1990s,” in Film Genre 2000, p. 45.

6. Altman, The American Film Musical, p. 170.

7. George Custen, one of the few film scholars to devote significant attention to the biopic, defines the genre as follows: “a biographical film is one that depicts the life of a historical person, past or present…whose real name is used” (Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History, pp. 5–6).

8. Grossberg, “Same as it Ever Was? Rock Culture. Same as it Ever Was! Rock Theory,” in Stars Don't Stand Still in the Sky: Music and Myth, p. 112.

9. Tibbetts, Composers in the Movies: Studies in Musical Biography.

10. Ibid., p. 92.

11. Anderson, “Biographical Film.” In Handbook of American Film Genres, p. 334.

12. Denisoff and Romanowski, Risky Business, p. 130, quoting Watts from 1964 (“The Beatles’ ‘Hard Days Night,’” in New York Times).

13. While it is quite common for musical biopics to employ orchestrated, non-diegetic motifs of the star subject's music—Coal Miner's Daughter, for example, repeatedly uses a version of its title-track with classical instrumentation—in this case, the use of an entire, original track, with loudly and clearly mixed vocals stands out as an unusual choice.

14. Michael Atkinson writes that A Hard Day's Night “may be the best biopic any rock star will ever get, in so far as it captures its protagonists at the height of their powers, gives them all the best lines and cancels any questions of likeness or musical impersonation” (“Long Black Limousine: Pop Biopics,” in Celluloid Jukebox Popular Music and Movies Since the 1950s, p. 31).

15. Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, pp. 330—385.

16. Clover, “Based on Actual Events,” in Film Quarterly, p. 9.

17. Smith Jr., “Love as Redemption: The American Dream Myth and the Celebrity Biopic,” in Journal of Communication Inquiry p. 231.

18. Clover, Based on, p. 9.

19. Corrigan and White, The Film Experience; Bordwell et al., Classical Hollywood.

20. Clover, Based on, p. 9.

21. Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock, pp. 74–75.

22. Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture.

23. Ibid., p. 64.

24. Ibid., p. 54.

25. Feuer, The Hollywood Musical, p. 3.

26. Grossberg, “The Media Economy of Rock Culture: Cinema, Postmodernity and Authenticity,” in Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader, p. 206.

27. Custen, p. 74.

28. Collins, “The Musical,” in Handbook of American Film Genres, p. 278.

29. Ibid., p. 278.

30. Box Office Mojo, “Biopic—Music Movies at the Box Office,” at <http://www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=musicbio.htm>

31. Babington and Evans, Blue Skies and Silver Linings: Aspects of the Hollywood Musical, p. 55.