The 2008 Ron Howard movie Ringo Starr couldn’t stand: “He just kind of decimated it”
Like almost everyone else of his generation, Ron Howard was hooked on The Beatles from the moment he watched their seminal appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, when he was nine years old.
However, unlike almost everyone else of his generation, the actor-turned-filmmaker would go on to become one of the most successful directors in Hollywood, not to mention someone who could call Paul McCartney a friend and a person he could turn to for advice and some sage words of wisdom.
That lifelong fandom of Fab Four came full circle in 2016 with the release of The Beatles: Eight Days a Week, the documentary helmed by the two-time Academy Award winner that gave him more than he bargained for when Ringo Starr told Howard to his face that he couldn’t stand one of his movies.
“I won’t say which one, but it was one of my movies that sort of wasn’t an award winner and didn’t make the top ten in the box office,” he elaborated. “It was still a solid movie, but had a few problems with it, and he said, ‘Oh, I saw such and such a movie’, and I said, ‘Oh, OK, great’. He said, ‘It wasn’t very good, was it?'”
While Howard refused to name and shame the picture that Ringo slated in his presence, let’s put on our investigative hats and do some digging, shall we? It was released before 2016, it didn’t win any major awards, it wasn’t a top ten box office hit, and Starr also informed him that “your problem was casting, because you had this bloke.”
Interestingly, the only feature he’s ever directed that didn’t spend a single week inside the top ten at the box office in the United States was Frost/Nixon, and while it’s true that it didn’t win any notable awards, it was still widely acclaimed and nominated for five Oscars and five Golden Globes, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’.
Michael Sheen and Frank Langella both reprised their roles from the stage production of the same name, and although the latter was Oscar and Globe-nominated, Sheen was shut out of the awards season conversation, so maybe he was the miscast actor that ruffled Ringo’s feathers so much.
On the other hand, Howard has always seemed very proud of his work on Frost/Nixon, which doesn’t jive with the director admitting there were problems. Either way, “He just kind of decimated it,” he recalled, with Starr refusing to beat around the bush. “It wasn’t mean, it was just kind of conversational.”
Macca was there, too, and he also chimed in. “Well, we certainly know the absolute truth about that movie now, because Ringo just told us,” Howard recalled. “He sort of tried to cover for him, but Ringo would always cut to the chase.”
It hasn’t been confirmed or denied, if it was Frost/Nixon or any of the other dozens of movies he’s directed, but it’s the only one that fits the criteria Howard laid out without naming names, so it’s as good a guess as you’re likely to find.
