MovieChat Forums > A Hard Day's Night (1964) Discussion > Why did they cut out so much?

Why did they cut out so much?


Having looked up the original script and novelization, I realized that there's a lot more material that didn't make it to the final film!
For example, after finding Grandfather with the woman he's "engaged" to, there was supposed to be a fight that broke out in that room, which ended with Ringo ending up with the woman's purse in his hands-- this would explain why they blame him in the next scene (Paul: "Anyway, it's your fault." Ringo: "Why me? George: "Why not you?").

Another thing I noticed was how the pacing seemed very off: In the movie, Norm and Shake leave the dining room, and two of the Beatles sit at table in the background; next shot shows Pattie & Prudence walking in, and the Beatles are all together again when they eye them. After Grandfather scares them off, we only see Paul facepalm. Then we cut back to Norm and Shake wondering what's taking Grandfather so long -- didn't they just leave the dining cart a few seconds ago? How does that equate to being "gone a long time"? Then when they ask the band about his whereabouts, I realized, weren't they literally just with him in the dining cart, when he scared away those schoolgirls? Why didn't we have a shot of Grandfather sneaking away while the Beatles had coffee or something?

Overall, while I still love this movie dearly - it's one of my all-time favorites! - I have to wonder why they left so much out of the script, too.

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I don't know, but a few thoughts:

At 92 minutes, the movie's a tad short - though a sort of rule-of-thumb is that a comedy is supposed to be around 100 minutes long, so it's pretty close. When it was released, presumably the thinking was that (a) the primary (or perhaps only) audience would be teens and sub-teens and (b) it would be extremely hot right on initial release, but might not last more than a week, and certainly not more than a couple of months. As a commercial matter, the latter argues heavily for a film that can be shown as many times as possible. Of course, there were no multiplexes at the time. Given all that, it's actually a little surprising it's as long as it is.

So the question is really: why was so much more script written than would fit? Possible factors:

- Alun Owen had only written one prior movie. He had written for both stage and TV, but the pacing and length are different. He didn't really know how much material was the right amount, and just ran long.

- The songs took up more space than Owun (and possibly Lester) accounted for when they started work on the project. In particular, the concert sequence at the end may have wound up considerably longer than anticipated. The Beatles music was enormously popular, and clearly the decision to include quite a bit of it was giving the audience what they wanted. Commercial considerations come into play here too, as United Artists' principal interest in the project arose from the opportunity to release a soundtrack album.

- Dick Lester didn't entirely know what he was doing, and had a small budget. He had done a fair amount of TV before, but that was pretty bush league at the time. It resulted in a film that was fresh and different, but the oddity that made it stand out positively also had some weird elements to it, like the those you mention. If it had been backed by a studio interested in a "quality" movie rather than the soundtrack, and made in LA with a big budget by an experienced director, it would've been in color, it would've revolved around a love story punctuated by a string-heavy sappy score written by an old-hand composer, and it would've ended with the love-story star (Paul, presumably) learning an important lesson about life and love. Perhaps it would've been set in the old West, or the Alaska Gold Rush.

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