Cannes Market Dailies

White Horse Pictures and Studiocanal will launch international sales on Academy Award winner Ron Howard’s authorized documentary about The Beatles’ phenomenal early career - the touring years, it was announced today by producer and White Horse CEO Nigel Sinclair and Studiocanal’s EVP of International Production and Acquisitions Ron Halpern and Head of Sales Anna Marsh.  The film is produced with the full cooperation of Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono Lennon and Olivia Harrison.  White Horse’s Grammy Award-winning Nigel Sinclair, Scott Pascucci and Academy Award-winner and multiple nominee Brian Grazer of Imagine Entertainment are producing with Howard.  Apple Corps Ltd’s Jeff Jones and Jonathan Clyde are serving as executive producers, along with Imagine’s Michael Rosenberg and White Horse’s Guy East.  

With filming and post production well advanced, White Horse and Studiocanal will present the film to buyers at the upcoming Cannes market where they will show new material from the film, including fresh footage from The Beatles’ early performances.   The sound from the concerts will be restored by Grammy Award-winning music producer and long-time Beatles collaborator Giles Martin. 

White Horse Pictures and Scott Pascucci are repping US rights in consultation with Apple Corps Ltd and Imagine Entertainment.

“Ron is providing an all-access backstage VIP pass to The Beatles, giving fans fascinating insights on the band, and the ability to experience what it was like on the inside,” said Sinclair. 

Ron Halpern said, “Studiocanal is excited to work with Apple, White Horse and Imagine on this world-class project. There are so many extraordinary things people are going to be seeing for the first time. We’re really proud to distribute it directly in all our 5 Studiocanal territories.”

Anna Marsh said, “Studiocanal is delighted to be bringing to the market a film from such a phenomenal director about such a phenomenal band.”

Ron Howard’s film will explore The Beatles’ inner world - how they made decisions, how they related to each other, the way in which they built their careers - all the while showing off their extraordinary and unique musical gifts and their remarkable complementary personalities. The film focuses on The Beatles’ journey from the early days of the Cavern Club in Liverpool and engagements in Hamburg to their last public concert in Candlestick Park, San Francisco, in 1966.

This project was originally brought to Apple Corps by One Voice One World, which has conducted extensive research around the globe, including inviting Beatles fans to send in clips of home movies and photos that they acquired during this extraordinary period. OVOW’s Matthew White, Stuart Samuels, and Bruce Higham are co-producing the film.

Acclaimed and award-winning editor Paul Crowder is serving as editor. Crowder’s long-time collaborator, Mark Monroe, is serving as writer. Marc Ambrose (Bhutto) is serving as supervising producer.

Nicholas Ferrall is the executive in charge of production for White Horse Pictures, assisted by executives Jeanne Elfant Festa and Cassidy Hartmann. The Beatles documentary is one of the first projects under Nigel Sinclair’s new White Horse Pictures banner, which he founded in 2014 with long-time business partner Guy East.  Their recent documentary, David Gelb’s A Faster Horse, had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival where it received rave reviews.

The Beatles began touring Europe in late 1963, after an extraordinary arrival on the British scene in 1961 and ‘62.  However, it was their much-heralded Ed Sullivan appearance on February 9, 1964 that caused The Beatles’ popularity to explode. By June, the band had commenced their first world tour, and continued on a relentless schedule for two subsequent years.  By the time the band stopped touring in August of 1966, they had performed 166 concerts in 15 countries and 90 cities around the world. The cultural phenomenon their touring helped create, known as “Beatlemania,” was something the world had never seen before and laid the foundation for the globalization of culture.

Beatlemania was not just a phenomenon. It was the catalyst for a cultural shift that would alter the way people around the world viewed and consumed popular culture.  This film explains what it was about that particular moment in time that allowed this cultural pivot point to occur, examining the social and political context of the time, and revealing the unique conditions that caused technology and mass communication to collide. The film also explores the incomparable electricity between performer and audience that turned the music into a movement – a common experience into something sublime.

Additional information about the film is available at www.thebeatlesliveproject.com

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ABOUT APPLE CORPS LIMITED

Apple Corps Ltd. was founded by The Beatles in 1968 to oversee the band's own creative and business interests. As part of its management of The Beatles’ entire intellectual property canon, the London-based company has administered the legendary band’s recorded catalogue, with more than 800 million physical and digital albums sold to date.  

Apple Corps has also piloted innovative Beatles projects which have become benchmarks for pioneering accomplishment, including the record-breaking, 30 million-selling album The Beatles 1, the universally acclaimed The Beatles Anthology series, and the, GRAMMY®-winning CD, vinyl and iTunes release of The Beatles’ 13 remastered studio albums.

In Apple Corps’ first major theatrical partnership, The Beatles LOVE by Cirque du Soleil® has played to more than six million audience members since its June 2006 opening at the Mirage in Las Vegas.  The Beatles’ LOVE also resulted in a double GRAMMY®-winning album and a GRAMMY®-winning feature film, All Together Now, that details the fascinating story behind the unique partnership between The Beatles and Cirque du Soleil that resulted in the creation and launch of LOVE.

And continuing the commitment to preserving the archives and legacy of The Beatles catalogue, The Beatles Help!, Yellow Submarine, and Magical Mystery Tour feature films have been digitally restored with great care for DVD, Blu-ray™ and iTunes release. 

Additional information about The Beatles is available at www.thebeatles.com.

ABOUT IMAGINE ENTERTAINMENT

Imagine Entertainment was founded in 1986 by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer to create independently produced feature films, television programs and other original programming. Imagine Entertainment has been honored with more that 60 prestigious awards including 10 Academy Awards and 36 Emmy® awards. Past productions include the Academy Award Best Picture winner A Beautiful Mind, 8 Mile, Apollo 13, American Gangster, The Da Vinci Code, Liar, Liar, Backdraft, and Parenthood to name a few. Upcoming films include Get on Up and In The Heart of the Sea. Television productions include NBC’s Parenthood, NBC’s Friday Night Lights, Fox’s 24 and 24: Live Another Day, Fox’s and Netflix’s Arrested Development, as well as HBO's From the Earth to the Moon, for which Howard and Grazer won the Emmy® for Outstanding Mini-Series.  Upcoming television productions include Fox’s Gang Related and Empire. Ron Howard and Brian Grazer began their collaboration in 1985 with the hit comedies Night Shift and Splash, and continue to run Imagine Entertainment as chairmen.

ABOUT WHITE HORSE PICTURES

White Horse Pictures is a production company focused on high quality, commercial content creation across various different media – Film, TV, Documentaries and Digital. Based in Los Angeles, the company is built on the foundation of Nigel Sinclair and Guy East’s vast experience of producing independent movies and takes a Millennial approach to storytelling and distribution.  Sinclair and East’s previous partnerships at Intermedia and Exclusive Media resulted in dozens of successful films with top talent – The Woman in Black with Daniel Radcliffe, Snitch with Dwayne Johnson, End of Watch with Jake Gyllenhaal, Rush with Ron Howard and Chris Hemsworth, The Ides of March with George Clooney, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Sliding Doors, The Wedding Planner, K-Pax and The Life of David Gale.  White Horse digital is a partner in online video specialists www.billiondollarboy.com .

www.whitehorsepics.com

ABOUT STUDIOCANAL

STUDIOCANAL is a subsidiary of CANAL+ Group. It is one of Europe’s leading companies in the market for co-production, acquisition, distribution of international feature films and TV series. STUDIOCANAL is behind box office hits like Paddington, Shaun the Sheep and Non-Stop. STUDIOCANAL is the only studio operating simultaneously in the three main European territories - France, the United Kingdom and Germany - as well as in Australia and New Zealand. Additionally, STUDIOCANAL owns one of the most important libraries in the world, with more than 5,000 international titles.