Sgt. Pepper Taught the Band to Play
Inevitably, Billy’s band is discovered by B.D. Brockhurst (played by Donald Pleasance), president of Big Deal Records, the world’s biggest record company. He brings the boys to L.A., where they are seduced and promoted. “L.A. must appear,” says the script, “as the exact opposite of Heartland. It’s a place of smoggy air, superficial values, mindlessness, greed and corruption.”
While the boys are becoming superstars, Mr. Mustard is taking over Heartland, and, in cahoots with Dr. Maxwell Edison (Steve Martin), Father Sun (Alice Cooper) and a gang of Future Villains (Aerosmith), is scheming to take over the world with an army of brainwashed teenage fascists. The band foils the plot, but in the process Strawberry Fields, Billy’s girlfriend, is killed. A disconsolate Billy is in the act of committing suicide when the Sgt. Pepper weather vane atop Heartland City Hall comes miraculously to life (in the person of Billy Preston), saves Billy Shears, literally resurrects Strawberry, and transforms the redeemed Heartlanders into the world’s largest rock & roll band, whose members include Tina Turner, Carol Channing, Wolfman Jack, Donovan, the Doobie Brothers, Helen Reddy and dozens of other musical personalities in cameo appearances. The promise of 1967 to remake the world is fulfilled, in fable, in 1978.
“It is hokum,” says Edwards, “but if it’s done with style, people will love it.”
The man charged with tailoring that style is director Michael Schultz, a veteran of New York’s Negro Ensemble Company who directed his first film (Cooley High) in 1975 and went on to direct Car Wash and Which Way Is Up?, among others. Quiet and bearded, Schultz spoke carefully and at length about his plans for the movie during a break from the “Mr. Kite” parade.
“It’s my belief that what carries a musical,” he said, “is not the music. It can be the greatest music in the world, and the greatest dancing, but if there’s no story the audience is far less interested. So my concentration went into fleshing out the story….and to try to make it as coherent and clear and as much fun as possible for the audience.”
Developing a coherent story was no easy task, considering that the film has almost no dialogue and the songs were not written with the film in mind. How many story points, after all, can be made with the lines, “He got walrus gumboot, he got o-no sideboard”?
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And that’s not the project’s only unlikely element. “The studios don’t understand this picture,” said writer Edwards. “Do you realize what Stigwood’s doing? He’s got a writer who never wrote a movie before. The director never directed a musical or a white movie before. And the stars never acted before. Can you imagine what the people who produced Earthquake think about this?”
But Schultz was not fazed.
“When I first started telling people about the project,” he said, “like people in New York, they said, ‘Bee Gees singing Sgt. Pepper? Peter Frampton? Oh God, you’ve got to be kidding.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, you just have to hear it. When you hear it and when you see it, then it’ll be something else….’ If we were trying to do a film that illustrated the album then I think the film would be open to that kind of criticism. But it’s trying to place the music in another context, illustrate a whole other emotion, story, feeling that the music did not originally intend….
“If you look at it from a very practical, pragmatic standpoint,” he said calmly, “it is impossible. But I am an optimist and a dreamer, and so is Stigwood. He’s very positive, a person who believes in making magic, in making something happen out of nothing. He’s very shrewd and very tuned in to young people….He has a kind of sixth sense, an intuition about what is hot, or what will be hot. He’s very clever that way.”
Indeed, if there are any equations to be made between the characters in the film and real people, the closest link is probably between B.D. Brockhurst, the world’s most successful record mogul, and Robert Stigwood, the nattily dressed, Australia-born producer who speaks softly and grosses $100 million a year. Currently riding the success of Saturday Night Fever, his Robert Stigwood Organization also produced Tommy and Jesus Christ Superstar and has Grease in the works. In addition, it manages rock groups (Bee Gees, Cream) and produces stage plays (Oh! Calcutta!), a television series (Beacon Hill) and records (Bee Gees, Eric Clapton). Stigwood also produced “Disco Duck.” It cost him $3500 and sold 4 million copies.
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