gregorygalloway:When Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s planned television documentary on the Beatles reco

When Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s planned television documentary on the Beatles recording of what would become Let it Be was scrapped, the 16mm footage was enlarged to 35mm and shown in theaters, premiering in New York on 13 May 1970 (less than a week after the album’s release) and released in the UK on 20 May.
None of the band members appeared at the US or UK premieres as they had split a month earlier. The film shows some of the friction within the group (between Harrison and McCartney, and Lennon and McCartney), but much of the bickering was edited out.
While the band had all approved a longer version of the film (at least an hour longer than the released 80-minute version), a second (and final) version of the film was edited without John Lennon’s approval. Lindsay-Hogg stated that “the other three (George Harrison, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr) wanted to make it a ‘nicer’ movie. They didn’t want to have a lot of the dirty laundry, so a lot of it was cut down.” That meant a lot of John Lennon and Yoko Ono were cut out of the film. “The people that cut it, cut it as ‘Paul is God,'” Lennon said.
The film closed in US theaters after about a week.
The soundtrack received an Academy Award for Best Original Score. Quincy Jones accepted on behalf of the absent Beatles.