“Harvey Weinstein, ‘Nowhere’ man”
Awesome story from Patrick Goldstein today at the The Big Picture about a new film project called “Nowhere Boy”:
For all of us Beatles fans, the news last week that the Weinstein Co. had acquired “Nowhere Boy,” a coming-of-age tale about John Lennon’s tumultuous teenage years in Liverpool, was cause for high hopes. The script, written by Matt Greenhalgh based on a memoir by Lennon’s half-sister, Julia Baird, offers a bracingly unsentimental portrait of the fabled artist as a young scamp — sensitive but bitingly sarcastic, smart but achingly soulful, wildly ambitious but without a ruthless bone in his body.
The script, which I’ve read, has a host of the most vivid moments from early Beatles mythology but always plays them in the right key, capturing Lennon’s artistic drive and caustic wit.
When Lennon and Paul McCartney first meet, at a Quarrymen rehearsal at St. Peter’s Church Hall, a friend has brought Paul along, who’s come armed with a guitar. The friend says, “Paul plays too.” Lennon immediately responds: “With himself?” After he gets a round of giggles, John takes the edge off it, adding “I do. All the time. Good for the wrist muscles.”
There’s an additional bit of history that makes the involvement of Harvey Weinstein with the project quite poignant:
But for Harvey Weinstein, the acquisition of the film — now shooting in and around Liverpool — was more personal. For the veteran film impresario, being involved with a Beatles project was the equivalent of coming full circle. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Weinstein was a skinny, long-haired, bell-bottomed teenager, he worked at Apple Records’ New York office. The highlight of his job involved running errands for McCartney and picking up Lennon at the airport. For a 16-year-old Beatles fan, full of Hollywood dreams, it was nirvana.
“My mom knew somebody at the Villanova restaurant on 47th Street, whose owners knew people in show business, so they helped me get a job at Apple,” Weinstein told me. “I did everything that needed to be done — carrying boxes around, mailing out records, working backstage at ‘The Concert for Bangladesh.’ I remember picking up Lennon at the airport one night, who flew in with Eric Clapton, and I had them both in the back of my car.”
It’s a great read and a great story. I’ve often thought about if one of these victims had not been killed — John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, or John Lennon — who would have had a bigger influence on human history. My answer is Lennon. He had a massive public pulpit due to his fame, a powerful world view as a peace activist, along with his obvious talent as a singer-songwriter. Plus he had battled most of his personal demons and seemingly won. By 1980 when he was assassinated, he was by all accounts quite happy — husband, father, New Yorker — and just then entering his fifth decade of life. Who knows what he could have accomplished, but my guess it would have had an enormous influence culturally and politically.
Here is a Guardian article about the movie “Nowhere Boy”. And here is a montage of John Lennon’s scene in the movie How I Won the War (1967):