Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion (21 page)

Aside from the one overnight setup when Paul took too many pep pills and turned neon green, the first week of the shoot was a breeze. Word went around the set that George had had some sort of dust-up with a zombie townie, but I chose not to get involved. Georgie’s business was Georgie’s business.

It all went to shit eight days in. We had about half of the film in the can, and the entire cast and crew felt great about the whole thing, just great … until we all sat down to watch the first batch of dailies.

To this day, nobody knows exactly how it happened. There was no precedent for it. But then again, nobody had shot a feature film that gave zombies any significant screen time, so how
could
there be?

BRIAN EPSTEIN:
Ringo looked marvelous. Wilfred Brambell, the actor playing Paul’s grandfather, was genius. Lester’s visual style was original and arresting, full of quirky angles and madcap energy. There was one teeny, tiny little problem:

No zombies.

RICHARD LESTER:
The studio was putting a lot of pressure on me to finish on time and under budget, so when neither John, nor Paul, nor George showed up on the screen, my first thought was,
We pissed away half of our budget: 250K, right out the window.
And then I got curious:
Is a zombie not showing up on film the same principle as a vampire not showing up in a mirror? How come you could see them perfectly well when filmed with television cameras, but not with movie ones? How come their clothes also became invisible?
Then I went into problem-solving mode:
How can I make this work? How do I get these boys to be seen on the screen?

And then the answer dawned on me. Two words: Claude Rains.

JOHN LENNON:
Dick took Paul and me aside and said, “Do you guys want to make this movie work?”

I said, “Fook, yeah. If Elvis can get people in the theaters, we have to at least
try
.”

He said, “This is a major problem. Are you willing to do anything to make it work?”

Paul said, “Absolutely.”

Dick said,
“Anything?”

I said, “Yes,
anything.
What’re you thinking?”

And then he showed us a roll of duct tape.

RICHARD LESTER:
In the 1933 version of
The Invisible Man,
when Claude Rains wanted to be seen, he wrapped himself in gauze. There wasn’t any gauze on the set of
A Hard Day’s Night
—and based on what we’d learned to that point, soft material became invisible on camera when it was resting on an undead body, which I eventually learned was due to the noxious gasses that emanated from the Fab Four’s rotting, pus-covered, nausea-inducing skin.

The good news was, we had plenty of duct tape.

I told the guys, “Get into your trailers, get naked, and get Ringo to cover your entire body with this stuff.”

They stared at the tape for a bit, then Paul said, “Dick, that’ll look ridiculous.”

I said, “It’s better than nothing, Paulie. And if you don’t do that, that’s exactly what this damn movie will be:
nothing.
”

RINGO STARR:
Maybe it was because I was the last one to join the group, or maybe it was because I wasn’t a zombie, but I sometimes felt like the band’s whipping boy. Think about it: If I’m not picking up their fallen testicles, I’m wrapping duct tape around their naked bodies. And how many songs do they let me sing per album? One, that’s how many.

On the plus side, that was the last time I ever had to handle Lennon’s and McCartney’s boy parts.

GEORGE HARRISON:
Ringo was very thorough. He didn’t miss a spot. I’m not necessarily convinced he needed to stick any tape on that little area between our bollocks and our arseholes, but he claimed he was following Dick Lester’s orders.

PAUL M
C
CARTNEY:
Me, I liked having tape up in that particular vicinity. Still stick some on there once in a while, y’know.

RICHARD LESTER:
I never, ever, ever told Ringo Starr to put duct tape on the area between John Lennon’s, Paul McCartney’s, and George Harrison’s respective zombie scrotums and anuses. Even if I wanted or needed tape there, I wouldn’t have broached the subject; yes, I was from the States, but I’d worked in the UK long enough to know that that little spot of body isn’t the kind of thing you bring up in conversation.

But considering how nicely
A Hard Day’s Night
came out, it was worth it.

GEORGE HARRISON:
I refuse to discuss the removal of the duct tape. I’m not going to tell you who did it. I’m not going to tell you how it was done. I’m not going to tell you the aftermath. There are some things better left unsaid, and some memories better left unremembered.

I
rvine Paris had just turned twenty when he landed a job as the arts critic for the Liverpool Herald in 1960. A staunch Beatles fanatic, he wrote lovingly about the band for his entire fifteen-year tenure with the newspaper. Every record write-up or concert report or hard news story was glowing. Never an ill word was written.

Except for two teeny-tiny negative write-ups. And the first was a critique that almost ended in a Liverpool-style fatwa.

John’s first book of verse,
In His Own Write,
was published on March 23, and Paris’s review, which ran the following day, wasn’t exactly what you would call glowing.

JOHN LENNON IN HIS OWN WRONG

Farcical Poetry or Poetical Farce?

By Irvine Paris

March 24, 1964

For the last thirteen months, Beatles cofounder John Lennon has been Liverpool’s darling. He can do no wrong. His group’s music is scintillating. His public demeanor has been exemplary. He is a credit to our city, to rock ’n’ roll musicians, and to the undead. However, you cannot expect perfection. John Lennon is going to have a long career, and there will be missteps along the way. Beatle John’s first misstep was a big one.

Considering its amateurishness, one wonders if
In His Own Write,
Lennon’s collection of simplistic poems and pointless stories, is a joke on fans of the Beatles. This gentleman who, along with his partner Paul McCartney, cocomposed some of the most memorable pop ditties in recent music history, has presented a pile of dung that could be enjoyed only by a six-year-old zombie of dubious intelligence.

Consider, if you will, the opening two verses of the piece entitled “I Eat Salami”:

I eat salami mixed with brains

Sitting in the winter rain

Song on my lips, chunks in my teeth

My favorite Scottish town is Leith

Googly moogly bombity bombie

I’m a gray and rancid zombie

Bombity bombie your blood is red

You are alive, I am undead

Upon a cursory read, one would assume that the sole message Lennon attempted to get across in “I Eat Salami” is that he’s lonely. One would also assume that since Lennon is Lennon, such is merely a surface message and a deeper meaning is hidden beneath. After four or five reads, one realizes that this is not the case. The remainder of the poem consists of nonsense words similar to “googly moogly” and off-putting imagery similar to that in line three. That sort of imagery—descriptions of death, dismemberment, and oozing innards—grows tiresome.

So please, please, Beatle John, please, please go back to the guitar. We love you, yeah, yeah, yeah … but only when you are singing, strumming, or talking. Leave the verse to the experts.

JOHN LENNON:
If you like my book, you like my book. If you don’t, you don’t, sod you, it’s your loss. Irvine Paris? The little git didn’t bother me a bit.

NEIL ASPINALL:
Irvine Paris bothered John quite a bit.

We all knew what happened when John
really
lost his temper—lunchtime killing sprees, ripping off his own left leg and tossing it out a hotel window, eating all the live pigeons he could get his hands on, that sort of thing—but he always managed to regain control of himself within a few hours. However, when he saw Paris’s review, he crossed over to what George began calling “Johnny’s dark place.”

BRIAN EPSTEIN:
John walked through the door of my flat—literally walked through it; he broke the thing to smithereens—holding the newspaper an arm’s length away from his body, between his thumb and index finger, as if it were a fish that had been dead for a week. He yelled, “Oi, Eppy, did you see this?”

I hadn’t. It was unquestionably a grim review, and I can understand why he was so upset: up until then, nobody had ever written an ill word about him or the band, and as anybody in the arts field knows, that first bad review is tough to swallow.

I sat him down, gave him some tea, and said, “Listen, John, people will say what they’ll say. Sometimes they’ll like you, but sometimes they’ll want to tear you down. What someone says about you shouldn’t change you or your vision or your dreams. Keep writing your poetry. Keep writing your songs. Be the best John Lennon you can be.”

He calmly said, “Right, then. I understand, Brian, I understand. Not every word written about us can be a good word. Writers have their opinions, and they’re allowed to write them. I believe in artistic freedom. I believe in individuality. I believe in the right of every man to look at the rest of world from his own perspective and to share that perspective with the rest of world. And now I’m going to the
Herald
offices to Midpoint Irvine Paris’s arse.” Then he stood up, smiled, gave me a little pat on the shoulder, and went on his merry way.

Still not sure why he crashed through my picture window rather than walking through the hole in the door he’d created five minutes before. But that was John Lennon for you.

Fortunately for Irvine Paris, John was so upset that he got lost on the way to the
Herald
offices. He somehow ended up in Everton, and his car ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere, and he didn’t have any money with him. Paulie found him three days later, in the
Everton Cemetery over on Long Lane, curled up under the threshold of a small mausoleum. John claimed it was the only comfortable place he could find to sleep, but I think he settled there so that when he was found, it would look more dramatic. I think he was pretending.

JOHN LENNON:
Of course I was pretending.

BRIAN EPSTEIN:
Irvine Paris wisely went underground for a while. John did too, but in his case, underground meant two weeks in the Liverpool sewers. We had a tour coming up, but neither Paul nor George would go down there to get him out, so it was up to me, and as much as the thought of it repulsed me, I did it because that’s what managers do.

Seeing how those zombies lived, all I can say is, no wonder they’re so grouchy.