The sci-fi movie Linda and Paul McCartney wrote for Wings: “Smoking something particularly potent”
It would be safe to assume that Paul McCartney can do anything he puts his mind to. The songwriter is so supremely gifted at the art of making music and is also a talented painter that one might assume that his movie career should have been written in the stars. He wouldn’t have been the first musician to try his hand at becoming a movie star, and he wouldn’t be the last.
The Beatles enjoyed a flourishing movie career, but it is hard to see those films as anything but serviceable flickers of comic strip stories with the added benefit of Fab Four music. They were for fans, not for critics. Of course, McCartney had a good and public stab at doing so with his 1984 movie Give My Regards to Broad Street, which left everybody in no doubt that he was far better at songwriting.
In a 1984 interview conducted around the time of the movie’s release, it appeared as though McCartney yearned for the days of The Beatles’ films and attempted to orchestrate his own: “I wanted to be involved in the making of a movie. I remembered from the time of A Hard Day’s Night and Help! what a pleasant experience it is. And there’s a funny thing. It’s a real luxury, having ten people looking after you,” he said.
“It’s silly, I know,” continued Macca, “But I come from a big working-class family in Liverpool, and we had to look after ourselves, and if someone wants to come and brush my hair, I must admit I like it. And being fussed over for makeup and costumes, I like that, too. Also, I like creating an illusion. I think I could have been very happy as part of the Muppets team.” But the picture failed miserably, leaving McCartney’s ideas of becoming a matinee idol in ruins.
The bizarre sci-fi film Paul McCartney tried to make with Isaac Asimov
It wasn’t the first time he had a go at becoming a filmmaker, though. In documents discovered in 1974, McCartney and his wife Linda, with the latter’s help of science fiction legend Isaac Asimov, would write a treatment for a sci-fi movie that his new band Wings could have taken on. It revolved around the idea of aliens landing on Earth and shapeshifting into the figures of him and his bandmates.
The movie had the working title of Five and Five and One and even had a treatment written by McCartney and his wife. It begins: “A ‘flying saucer’ lands. Out of it get five creatures. They transmute before your very eyes into ‘us’ [Wings]. They are here to take over Earth by taking America by storm, and they proceed to do this supergroup style. Meanwhile – back in the sticks of Britain – lives the original group, whose personalities are being used by the aliens…”
It was clear McCartney needed a professional, though, and called on Asimov to help, who penned his own thoughts on the treatment: “The picture opens with the arrival on Earth of six extra-terrestrial characters. They are from a dying planet and are looking for a new home. They are wraith-like energy-beings who are parasitic on matter-beings. The spaceship is hidden in a handy cave by the occupied lizard creatures who, however, are clearly dying. We know what the energy-beings are saying because they are communicating by thought-waves and we can overhear them.”
The papers are certainly wrought with some schlocky ideas, including the aliens being overwhelmed by human music and deciding that they must use the musical key to unlock human emotion.”
“They’ve just been sitting there,” Adrian Sinclair told The Guardian when he found the documents in Asimov’s archives. “Paul’s treatment reads like something Paul and Linda cooked up while they were smoking something particularly potent.”
Thankfully, this treatment was never made into a movie, and we are spared there being another huge black mark on McCartney’s CV like Give My Regards to Broad Street. He may be able to do a lot of things, much like the best footballers in the world being great at golf, but like plopping McCartney in a Hollywood writer’s room, drop those footballers in the NBA and watch them get dunked on every day.
