From a non-professional skiffle group that evolved into a quartet playing at every club in Liverpool and Hamburg to becoming a band that revolutionised music like no other, The Beatles’ history has been chronicled extensively in mainstream outlets.
But the story of the catalyst that brought the band’s principal musicians – John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr – out from obscurity, triggering Beatlemania worldwide, is one that is told less often.
Brian Epstein, the behind-the-scenes business mastermind who toiled relentlessly to get The Beatles their break, was given his due in the Tony award-winning producer Vivek J Tiwary's graphic novel The Fifth Beatle last year.
The novel encapsulates, in vivid colours and art by Andrew C Robinson and Kyle Baker, the tumultuous personal life of the band’s first manager and his contribution towards The Beatles’ meteoric rise to fame from 1961 until his death in 1967.
The book, which made it to the top of The New York Times best-seller list in December, will be turned into a feature film that hits the production floor early next year. Tiwary and the Academy award-winning producer Bruce Cohen are producing the film, with the American director Peyton Reed on board as well. The release date hasn't been announced yet.
Anticipation runs high: it will be the first movie to have a score of original Beatles songs that doesn’t star the band. Tiwary says three years and several rejection letters later, the team managed to get the blessings of McCartney, Starr, Yoko Ono (Lennon’s widow) and Olivia Harrison (Harrison’s widow).
"I would not take no for an answer," says the producer of the 2004 revival of the Broadway hit A Raisin in the Sun, who began working on the movie script while simultaneously developing the book.
“I approached several people at Apple Corps for the rights and my persistence paid off. I got an email from the chief executive Jeff Jones, saying they’ve approved my project and will let Sony ATV, which owns the music publishing rights, know.”
Tiwary says he can only speculate as to why the surviving band members have backed his efforts, giving his team unprecedented access to the Lennon and McCartney music catalogue.
“I suspect they recognised the importance of championing the legacy of Brian Epstein,” says Tiwary. “Brian was someone who never got the credit he deserved. The Beatles did not appreciate what he did for them and not in a disgraceful kind of way, but maybe they did not understand.
“It was only in the later years that they understood how much he actually did for them because, after his death, they all had to handle their careers on their own and faced some degree of failure. During his time it was almost as if The Beatles could do no wrong.”
Tiwary says the screenplay requires specific songs and his initial list contains earlier material such as You've Got to Hide Your Love Away, All You Need Is Love, I Want to Hold Your Hand, juxtaposed with their more fanciful work, including Strawberry Fields Forever.
His fascination with Epstein began as a student looking for a case study on notable music ventures. “It was 21 years ago when I was in business school and was dreaming about working in entertainment. So I began studying the life of Brian,” says the 41-year-old author.
The author says there wasn’t a lot of information on Epstein back then, so he resorted to interviewing people who knew him. “I had read every respected book on the band, but they had maybe 10 good pages on Epstein. I began compiling a list of people who knew him best and began with cold calls. Over the years they began opening up to me and gave me more than the business stuff.”
The concealed struggles of a Jewish man who discovered the musicians and took them to the pinnacle of success struck a chord with the writer.
“He was a Jew in the music industry at a time when not many worked in that field. There was pervasive anti-Semitism in the UK in the 1960s and he struggled. Also, Liverpool, before The Beatles, did not have any cultural influence and he worked towards changing that. That wasn’t the story I was after, but that’s what I found the most interesting.
“The story starts off in 1961 Liverpool, which is dark, grey, drab and industrial. It ends in 1967 London, with the birth of the psychedelic era, the summer of love. We show that in bright colours in the novel.”
Even with the continuing debate on who deserves the title of the fifth member of the Fab Four (contenders among fans include the bassist Stuart Sutcliffe and the producer George Martin), Tiwary had no doubt.
“The Fifth Beatle is a colloquial term. But for me Brian is the Fifth Beatle because he handled the business which took the band to great heights. He was there when no one knew who they were.
“In 1997 Paul [McCartney] famously said: ‘If anyone was the Fifth Beatle, it was Brian.’ And if anyone has the right to say that, it is Paul.”
• For more information about the novel and film, visit www.thefifthbeatle.com
aahmed@thenational.ae