John Lennon Film 'Nowhere Boy' - Rel. 12-26-09 UK

[yerblues1968]

John Lennon signs an autograph in 1965.


CONTROL WRITER TO MAKE JOHN LENNON BIOPIC


'Nowhere Boy' will be based upon a book by the Beatle's sister.


NME News
July 18, 2008


A film based on the life of John Lennon has been awarded funding by the UK Film Council.


Entitled 'Nowhere Boy', the film will be written by Michael Greenhalgh, who adapted the late Joy Division singer Ian Curtis' wife Debbie Curtis' autobiography, 'Touching From A Distance', for last year's film 'Control'.

The Lennon film will cover the story of late Beatle's childhood in Liverpool, where he was brought up by his aunt Mimi after his mother Julia died in an accident involving a police car, reports the Guardian.

It will be based upon a controversial book, 'Imagine This: Growing Up With My Brother John Lennon', by Lennon's sister, also called Julia, in which she describes how Mimi was intensely jealous of her younger sister.



Greenhalgh, who received an award for special achievement by the director of a debut feature for his work on 'Control', told the Guardian he could not resist the lure of a film about Lennon, despite intending to avoid making another music movie so soon after 'Control'.

He said: "When looking for my next project I was wary of musical protagonists - but when John Lennon was floated, that vanished.

"He is beyond music; above it even. And his early life as told in Julia's book took me into a world that illuminated so much about this legendary genius. I could see the drama and film immediately. The women in his life, the men who weren't, the birth of rock n roll; all imposing on a brilliantly complicated adolescent mind.

"The nagging questions, the icy secrets, the need for love. John's angst and anger pouring out into his music, his thankful salvation. Without this story we would never have heard The Beatles - can you imagine that?"



John Lennon's half-sister Julia Baird, is pictured next to
John Lennon's statue outside The Cavern Club on Matthew
Street on Beatles Day, July 10, 2008. Photo by Dan Kay.


Imagine This: Growing Up With My Brother John Lennon (import) paperback book may be purchased here:
www.amazon.com/Imagine-This-Growing-Brother-Lennon/dp/0340839392/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1216502523&sr=1-1

Customer Review

An unusual perspective, March 30, 2007

By A reader (Seattle)

This review is from: Imagine This (Hardcover)

I found Julia Baird's book on her half-brother, John Lennon, well-written and very enjoyable. I've read dozens of books on John and the Beatles, and hers provided a unique perspective which definitely humanized this "icon" in a way few others have. These days it is hard to find anything but the highly-sanitized, Yoko-centric version of John, but this look into his childhood, adolescence and later years has a ring of truth to it. He lived more than half of his life before Yoko, and this book reminds us of that.

www.nme.com/news/john-lennon/38256

[yerblues1968]

Kate Winslet


KATE TO PLAY LENNON'S MOTHER?

metro.co.uk

Friday, August 29, 2008


Kate Winslet is apparently in the pipeline to play John Lennon's mother.

The Titanic star is on a list of actresses director Sam Taylor-Wood is looking to approach for the part, according to The Daily Mail.

The film, called Nowhere Boy, will tell the story of the Beatle's childhood, growing up with his mother and his aunt. The screenplay has been written by Matt Greenhalgh - who won a BAFTA for Control, his biopic about Joy Division's Ian Curtis - and is based on the book Imagine This: Growing Up With My Brother John Lennon by John's sister Julia Baird.


John Lennon and Aunt Mimi

John was raised by his Aunt Mimi and apparently grew up not knowing that his real mother, Julia, lived just round the corner. It seems Aunt Mimi disapproved of her younger sister for "living in sin", and Baird's book claims this was driven by jealousy, dating back to childhood sibling rivalry.



John Lennon's home with Aunt Mimi.


The story sees John and his mother re-united and she introduces him to the world of rock 'n' roll. A painful struggle erupts between the two women, and tragedy strikes, propelling John into The Beatles, full of love, longing and pain.

Sam reportedly hopes to approach Angela's Ashes star Emily Watson to play Aunt Mimi.

Auditions will begin in Liverpool next month to search for suitable teenagers to play Beatles' legends John and Paul McCartney. Filming is due to start in March.




John Lennon's Aunt Mimi 1981 UK interview. (8:55 minutes)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRqU2teFtw8


www.metro.co.uk/fame/article.html?Kate_to_play_Lennon%27s_mother?&in_article_id=286270&in_page_id=7

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John Lennon


NEW FILM EXPLODES LENNON MYTHS



sundayherald.com
By Brian Pendreigh


Saturday, September 20, 2008



Beatle's 'missing' mother actually lived round the corner ... and taught him George Formby songs on the Ukelele.



A young George Formby (Jr.) in 1922, a later photograph, in the film "Let George Do It" in 1940 with Marcel Varnel and his grave site in Warrington Cemetery, Manchester Road.


JOHN LENNON owed his interest in music not to early American rock and rollers, as popularly believed, but to British music-hall entertainer George Formby and to his mum, according to a new feature film that will shoot next spring.

The wayward Beatle is the latest in a series of British national icons to come under the microscope of Douglas Rae, the Scottish producer whose screen career began in the 1970s presenting the children's programme Magpie.

He had a big hit with Mrs. Brown (1997), which looked at the relationship between Queen Victoria and Highland ghillie John Brown. He tackled Jane Austen's love life in Becoming Jane (2007) and he has even had the audacity to remake Brideshead Revisited as a two-hour film, opening in British cinemas next month.

"The John Lennon story has never been told before on film and it's going to be quite a controversial movie," said Rae, whose company Ecosse Films, also made the long-running TV series Monarch Of The Glen.

It is widely known that Lennon was brought up by his Aunt Mimi. It is generally believed he was abandoned by his mother and that her absence throughout his childhood and her early death traumatized him and inspired the Beatles ballad Julia and the later solo recording, Mother.

But in Rae's film, entitled Nowhere Boy - after one of the Beatles' most famous songs, Nowhere Man - Lennon discovers on his 15th birthday that his mother is living round the corner. He visits her in secret and she teaches him how to play the ukulele and then guitar.

They practice with songs from the repertoire of George Formby, the Wigan-born singer, musician and comedian, who enjoyed a successful career in music hall and films in the 1930s and 1940s.



George Formby (Jr) in 1950 switching on the illuminations of a train and in "Zip Goes A Million."
George Formby, OBE, was born on May 26, 1904 and died on March 6, 1961 of a heart attack.
He was 56 years old.



George Formby singing, "When I'm Cleaning Windows." (1:34 minutes)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfmAeijj5cM



Lonnie Donegan, MBE, was born on April 29, 1931 and died on
November 3, 2002. Lonnie was 71 years old, after suffering a
heart attack in Peterborough mid-way through a UK tour and
shortly before he was due to perform at a memorial concert for
George Harrison.



Lonnie Donegan singing "Grand Coulee Dam" in 1957. (2:30 minutes)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Jc2efqj5Js


Formby popularised the song When I'm Cleaning Windows, but his simple-minded songs, squeaky singing voice and juvenile sense of humour have few followers today. Glasgow skiffle star Lonnie Donegan was another favourite with the teenage Lennon and his mum.

"A 15-year-old John Lennon sitting down in the front room with his mother teaching him to play the ukulele and singing George Formby - that was the forerunner of John Lennon the Beatle," said Rae. "And that's quite an interesting story to tell."

Rae insists the film will be the true account of Lennon's formative years. "We have got sources who will confirm everything," said the Edinburgh-born producer.

"We researched the John Lennon story and there was this extraordinary revelation of rediscovering his mother and her nurturing his talents as his first kind of musical mentor."

One key source for Nowhere Boy was Julia Baird, Lennon's half-sister, who wrote a book called Imagine This. She claimed Aunt Mimi more or less took Lennon way from his mother, because the family disapproved of her lifestyle, "living in sin" with another man in the absence of Lennon's seaman father.

"There are lots of people who were at school with him that we're talking to as well, who remember those days very clearly," said Rae.



A young John Lennon and mother Julia Lennon.


He said Lennon had not seen his mother since he was five when a schoolfriend told him she was living round the corner. "He starts a kind of relationship with his mother that he keeps quiet from the aunt.

"Because Lennon met her again and rediscovered her, it allowed that communication between them in a way that we wouldn't have had with the normal angst-ridden teenager, who would be rejecting his mother around 15.

"It's that extraordinary circumstance that allows her to pass on her enthusiasm for entertainment and musicianship."

The relationship, however, lasted only a couple of years. Julia Lennon was killed crossing the road when Lennon was 17.

Pete Nash, of the British Beatles Fan Club, said the relationship between Lennon and his mother has been the subject of discussion and conjecture and there was certainly potential for controversy.

"There was a very strange relationship between John and his mother, which is alluded to in Lennon's diaries," he said.

The film is causing great excitement in the industry, with Kate Winslet and Emily Watson touted as Julia and Mimi. The role of Lennon himself is likely to go to an unknown.

It will be directed by video artist Sam Taylor-Wood and is scripted by Matt Greenhalgh, who wrote Control, the biopic about ill-fated Joy Division singer Ian Curtis.

Lennon had family in Scotland and as a boy went on holiday to Edinburgh and to the village of Durness in Sutherland, though the film will shoot entirely in Liverpool.

Asked if Lennon would have become a star and the Beatles the greatest pop phenomenon of the 1960s without the contribution of Julia Lennon, Douglas Rae responded: "Who can say."



John Lennon and Aunt Mimi.


In contrast to Julia, Mimi tried her best to discourage Lennon's interest in music. "The guitar's all very well, John," she told him, "but you'll never make a living out of it."

www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.2450045.0.0.php

[yerblues1968]

Photos of the lovely Kristin Scott-Thomas, who has been cast to play Aunt Mimi in the John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy.


KRISTIN SCOTT-THOMAS CAST AS JOHN LENNON'S AUNT IN SAM TAYLOR-WOOD'S BEATLE BIOPIC

guardian.co.uk
Mark Brown

Thursday 8 January 2009 19.15 GMT



Anne-Marie Duff has now been cast
to play John Lennon's mother Julia


Versatile actor will feature alongside Anne-Marie Duff as Lennon's mother, with newcomer Aaron Johnson as Lennon.



Aaron Johnson is now cast to play John Lennon.


She's done posh and glacial. She's done mysterious and French. Now Kristin Scott-Thomas is to try tough and Scouse after being cast as John Lennon's formidable aunt Mimi in artist Sam Taylor-Wood's debut feature film.

The film, provisionally titled Nowhere Boy, is to tell the imagined story of Lennon's childhood and the women who helped shape him.



Aunt Mimi and young John Lennon


Cast alongside Scott-Thomas are Anne-Marie Duff - best-known for her TV work in Shameless and Elizabeth I. She will play Lennon's mother, Julia, while newcomer Aaron Johnson, who recently starred as the romantic lead in Angus, Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging, is to star as the young Lennon.

The screenplay has been penned by Matt Greenhalgh, who won acclaim - as well as a Bafta - for his script for Control, the 2007 biopic of Joy Division's lead singer Ian Curtis.

Taylor-Wood's nascent film-making career began last year when she was nominated for an award at the Cannes film festival for her Film4 short Love You More, produced by the late Anthony Minghella.

She is not the only Young British Artist to turn to the silver screen in recent times. Also at Cannes with his Bobby Sands biopic Hunger was Steve McQueen. The brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman are also due to make a full-length film, subject currently unknown.

Nowhere Boy is a co-production between Ecosse Films and Film4. Filming begins in March on the Liverpool streets where Lennon grew up. Interiors will be shot at Ealing studios.


aaron-johnson.org/

www.imdb.com/title/tt1266029/
www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jan/08/john-lennon-biopic

[yerblues1968]

Josh Bolt plays
Pete Shotton in
Nowhere Boy

I'M MADE UP TO BE JOHN LENNON'S BEST MATE

Liverpool Echo
by Tina Miles

Feb 9 2009


A SCHOOLBOY is on the verge of big-screen stardom after landing a role in a new John Lennon film.


Josh Bolt, 14, will join newcomer Aaron Johnson, Golden Globe-nominated actress Kristin Scott Thomas and Shameless star Anne-Marie Duff to film Nowhere Boy.

Josh will play the part of John Lennon’s best childhood friend, Pete Shotton, in the movie based on a book by Lennon’s half-sister Julia Baird.

The Halewood college pupil, who is studying for 11 GCSEs, is due to start filming in London’s Ealing Studios and parts of Liverpool in March.

Josh, of Hunts Cross, said: “I had about four auditions for the parts of John and Paul.

“I was told before Christmas I was not right for the parts – I think I was too young for John – but they said they were still interested and called me down to London to audition for the part of John Lennon’s best friend.

“The director just came in and offered me the part there and then.

“I read the script and I am in all the scenes with Aaron, who plays John, apart from the intimate moments between him and his mum and aunt.

“There is everything in it – there is a nice ending and it gives a good insight into his life.

“I am a massive fan of the Beatles and especially John Lennon, who was my favourite Beatle, so it is really exciting to be part of it.”





It will be the third movie Josh can add to his CV. The teenager, who attends Yula drama school in Aigburth, has already worked with Liza Tarbuck and Connor McIntyre in The Be All And End All. The feature film, directed by Bruce Webb and produced by Whatever Pictures and Tubedale Films, will premiere at FACT in March or April.

Josh will also appear alongside RocknRolla actor Michael Ryan in Children’s Stories, which is written and directed by Allerton-born director Gil Brailey.

He said: “It is fantastic to work with these actors and to be able to say I have done three feature films. I hit it off with Liza Tarbuck straight away.

“I started in the Playhouse and had a part in Much Ado About Nothing in April 2007 and joined classes with Yula shortly after.”

[e-mail]


View a photo of Josh Bolt
www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-news/local-news/2009/02/09/i-m-made-up-to-be-john-lennon-s-best-mate-100252-22884382/

Pictured: Kristin Scott Thomas Transforms Into John Lennon's Aunt Mimi for Latest Role, 12 March 2009
www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1161316/Pictured-Kristin-Scott-Thomas-transforms-John-Lennons-Aunt-Mimi-latest-role.html

John Lennon Movie Filmed in Blackpool, 12 March, 2009
www.blackpoolgazette.co.uk/blackpoolnews/John-Lennon-movie-filmed-in.5063256.jp

www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-entertainment/the-beatles/the-beatles-news/2009/02/09/i-m-made-up-to-be-john-lennon-s-best-mate-100252-22884382/

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Sunset at North Pier Blackpool, Lancashire, England.


LENNON FILMING MOVES ONTO NORTH PIER



blackpoolgazette.co.uk
By Helen Steel


Published Date: 13 March 2009


IT was a case of Pier There and Everywhere as Blackpool's Beatle past hit the boardwalk.



The film crew arriving in Liverpool last week to film Nowhere Boy - a film based on the
life of a young John Lennon


Earlier in the week, the film, starring Four Wedding's Kristin Scott-Thomas, transformed Bel's Cafe on Trafalgar Road, South Shore, where the story revisited the tragic moment a five-year old Lennon had to choose between living with his estranged mother or father.

On the pier the cast relived happier scenes when a 17 year-old Lennon holidayed with his mother Julia in the resort.



The film crew in Liverpool last week to film Nowhere Boy.


And Shameless star Anne Marie Duff, who plays Lennon's mother Julia, and teenage hearthrob Aaron Johnson, who plays the rocker and roller, had a little help from their Fylde coast friends.

Blackpool extras Brett Davis and Chris Cassidy also donned teddy boy outfits to feature in the pier scenes.

Brett, 18, of Marton, landed the part after returning home from college in Liverpool. He explained: "I was looking for jobs and saw that they needed extras for this film.

"It's been really exciting, although quite cold.

"We're only here on a one-day shoot, tomorrow I'll go back to the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts – Paul McCartney's old school – where I'm studying Entertainments Management."

Chris, a 25-year-old budding actor from Marton, is hoping to make it big in the acting world.

He said: "I've really enjoyed it, and the stars have had a few words with us.

"When you're an extra there's not too much to do, but sometimes you get lucky. Today I was asked to appear in the background of a scene in a milkshake parlour – it was a big scene and I really enjoyed that."

Producer Kevin Loader said: "After filming the emotional scene yesterday, the pier scenes reflect a happy period.

"In the older John's life, when he came on holiday with his mother to Blackpool.

"It's thought he got some lyrics from the time he spent here."

Two ice cream units were completely refurbished to fit in with the 1950s look, and the cordon at North Pier held back scores of star-spotters.

Pearl Mina, spokeswoman for North Piers' owner Six Piers, was delighted to host the movie stars.

She said: "It's an honour and a privilege to be part of this excellent production, and with A-list stars visiting it's causing lots of excitement and adding a touch of Hollywood stardust to North Pier.

"It's amazing to think John Lennon was inspired to write many of his lyrics while relaxing on the decking and enjoying the panoramic views."


Last Updated: 13 March 2009 11:29 AM
Source: n/a
Location: Blackpool



www.blackpoolgazette.co.uk/blackpoolnews/Lennon-filming-moves-onto-North.5070545.jp

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Harvey Weinstein, Producer. Actor Morgan Freeman is sitting in
the background. Photo by J. Hausfater.


HARVEY WEINSTEIN, NOWHERE MAN


By PATRICK GOLDSTEIN


March 24, 2009


Paul McCartney's one-time gofer comes full circle by acquiring Nowhere Boy, about John Lennon's pre-Beatles years


For all of us Beatles fans, the news last week that the Weinstein Co. had acquired Nowhere Boy, a coming-of-age tale about John Lennon's tumultuous teenage years in Liverpool, was cause for high hopes. The script, written by Matt Greenhalgh based on a memoir by Lennon's half-sister, Julia Baird, offers a bracingly unsentimental portrait of the fabled artist as a young scamp -- sensitive but bitingly sarcastic, smart but achingly soulful, wildly ambitious but without a ruthless bone in his body.

The script, which I've read, has a host of the most vivid moments from early Beatles mythology but always plays them in the right key, capturing Lennon's artistic drive and caustic wit.

When Lennon and Paul McCartney first meet, at a Quarrymen rehearsal at St. Peter's Church Hall, a friend has brought Paul along, who's come armed with a guitar. The friend says, "Paul plays too." Lennon immediately responds: "With himself?" After he gets a round of giggles, John takes the edge off it, adding "I do. All the time. Good for the wrist muscles."

But for Harvey Weinstein, the acquisition of the film -- now shooting in and around Liverpool -- was more personal. For the veteran film impresario, being involved with a Beatles project was the equivalent of coming full circle. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Weinstein was a skinny, long-haired, bell-bottomed teenager, he worked at Apple Records' New York office. The highlight of his job involved running errands for McCartney and picking up Lennon at the airport. For a 16-year-old Beatles fan, full of Hollywood dreams, it was nirvana.

"My mom knew somebody at the Villanova restaurant on 47th Street, whose owners knew people in show business, so they helped me get a job at Apple," Weinstein told me. "I did everything that needed to be done -- carrying boxes around, mailing out records, working backstage at The Concert for Bangladesh. I remember picking up Lennon at the airport one night, who flew in with Eric Clapton, and I had them both in the back of my car."

The day of the Bangladesh benefit concert, a limousine full of Apple staffers pulled up outside Weinstein's home to take him to the show. "As I went out of the house, my mother, in true Jewish mother fashion, yelled out, 'Don't forget to brush your teeth and wash your face!,' which destroyed whatever semblance of cool I might have had forever," he recalls. "But being around the Beatles, I learned that I was never going to be cool because they had a monopoly on it. They were the most relaxed guys about everything. I mean, the whole world could be falling apart and they'd still be totally cool about it."

After Weinstein and his brother Bob launched Miramax, one of their first releases was Rock Show, a 1980 concert film from one of McCartney's Wings tours. Weinstein has stayed friendly with McCartney over the years, friendly enough that when Weinstein began to organize The Concert for New York the day after Sept. 11, the first person he called was McCartney. "I told him, 'You know, if you do it, everyone else will follow,' " he remembers. "I have to admit that I still pinch myself that having started out as Paul McCartney's assistant, I'm now Paul McCartney's friend."

Nowhere Boy, which is already two weeks into production, follows Lennon from his days as a cheeky 15-year-old to the moment, in 1960, when the Beatles take off for Hamburg, Germany, where they transformed themselves into a world-class band. The young Lennon is played by newcomer Aaron Johnson, while Lennon's Aunt Mimi, who raised him, is played by Kristin Scott Thomas. The film is directed by Sam Taylor Wood, who has been a hot commodity after making the 2008 short Love You More, about a pair of late-1970s teenage Buzzcocks fans.

The film fits snugly in the Weinstein library of projects focusing on the interior lives of artists, be it Shakespeare in Love, Finding Neverland or My Left Foot. "It's really a film about how John found the music that was always inside him," Weinstein says. "When you get to experience his early years, you get to understand what the songs are about, because you see the streets and the scenes and the people that ended up being a part of the songs themselves."

The film is slated for an end-of-the-year award season release here. "I haven't even called Paul yet, but I know that he's read the script," Weinstein says. "God knows what it means to him, having lived through it all. But it really hits close to home for me. It captures a lot of memories for everybody."

Of course, if Lennon were still alive, he'd probably be appalled to hear so much sentiment applied to his life. So let's end with another moment from the script, taken from a scene in which Lennon and McCartney first appear onstage as the Quarrymen.

Introducing their version of a Chuck Berry song, Lennon says, "I present to you . . . Mr. Paul McCartney!" Relieved, since he never knows what Lennon might say next, McCartney says, "Thanks, John. Kind words."

Lennon's reply: "I didn't mean them."

patrick.goldstein @latimes.com



John Lennon Biopic Picked Up By Weinstein Co., March 16, 2009
www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/john-lennon-biopic-picked-up-by-weinstein-1003951972.story

www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-bigpicture24-2009mar24,0,5301694.story

[yerblues1968]

Half-sister Julia (Baird) is pictured sitting next to John Lennon. Also in the photo
are his cousins Leila (standing) and his two other cousins Michael and David.
Photo by OnoLennon.


BEATLES - LENNON'S SISTER FACING LAWSUIT OVER FILM


contactmusic.com


26/03/2009 12:15



A film about the early life of BEATLES legend JOHN LENNON has been thrown into jeopardy - the star's sister is facing legal action over the book on which the movie is based.


Lennon's sister Julia Baird collaborated with Geoffrey Giuliano on John Lennon, My Brother, which was published in the late 1980s.
Baird went on to pen her own book, 2007's Imagine This: Growing Up With My Brother John Lennon.

But Giuliano has accused Baird of basing her biography on his previous research into Lennon's life.

And now he is set to launch a legal battle over new movie Nowhere Boy - which is based on Baird's book - claiming he is entitled to 50 per cent of her earnings from the picture.

He says, "In doing my own research, I filled in a lot of blanks for her. More than half the material in the book is a result of my research.

"Additional information in Imagine This was uncovered by me in my original research. I was the person who conceptualised the original book."

The movie will star Kristin Scott Thomas and Anne-Marie Duff and is set for release in 2010.


View photos of the Nowhere Boy movie. John Lennon movie stars film Nowhere Boy
scenes at Woolton Picture House, Mar. 17 2009 by Gareth Jones.
www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/videos-pictures/pictures-of-liverpool/pictures-of-liverpool-news/2009/03/17/john-lennon-movie-stars-film-nowhere-boy-scenes-at-woolton-picture-house-92534-23168355/i10/


www.contactmusic.com/news.nsf/article/lennons%20sister%20facing%20lawsuit%20over%20film_1098823

[yerblues1968]

THE DAY JOHN LENNON PROPOSED TO ME (PITY I THOUGHT HE WAS JOKING!)


dailymail.co.uk
By Natalie Clarke

Last updated at 9:11 AM
on 09th April 2009


Last month, filming began on a new movie charting the years when John Lennon was an aspiring musician in Liverpool. For one woman in particular, it will be a strange experience watching Nowhere Boy.

Up to now, Patricia Inder has said little about her relationship with Lennon, so her role in his story has been forgotten - she was the stunning beauty with whom Lennon was having an affair while he seeing Cynthia Powell, who would become his first wife.

'To those who weren't there, the Beatles are these superstars, the biggest pop group in history, but to me they were just my mates,' says Patricia. 'We'd pick up some chips from the shop, a few cigarettes and some cheap wine and go back to a friend's flat play records. We all loved rock 'n' roll.

'John and I were friends before we became lovers and he was my first. I suppose I've always loved him.

'For years I could not forget John because he was a Beatle and constantly on the TV and in newspapers. And 50 years on, here we go again.'

Patricia still has the long hair that first entranced Lennon. Asked her age, says she likes to call herself a 'rock angel' - though the fact she met Lennon in 1958, when she was 15 and he was 18, means she is now 66.

The band was then called The Silver Beetles and, as well as Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison (Ringo Starr joined a couple of years later), included Stuart Sutcliffe, the bass guitarist who would die in 1962 from brain hemorrhage aged just 21.

Pat recalls that after one gig, Paul came over and chatted up the girls.

'He said: "Sorry I didn't play your request." I replied: "But I didn't make one."

He then introduced me to the band, who were sitting in the stairwell.

'They were all lovely. John had a great sense of humour and a big personality. We all became mates.'

Patricia, the daughter of a docker and his school cook wife, had a crush McCartney, but he had a girlfriend, Dot.

'We all just hung out together,' she says. 'Paul and John would come back to my mate Sue's place and listen to rock roll, and they would scribble lyrics on of paper they found.

'I'd go and see them play at the Cavern Club. There was such a buzz. I told a friend they would be bigger than Cliff Richard: what an understatement.'

Patricia and Lennon became lovers 1960, when she was 17 and he was 20.

'Until then, I hadn't really been attracted to John,' says Patricia. 'But you know what they say - it's in the kiss. After that I looked at him differently.'

It seems Lennon had planned the seduction of the virginal Patricia.

John said they were doing a gig on a boat on the Mersey and then they were having a party at Sue's flat, but I wasn't to invite anyone else. So John and I got back to the flat and no one else was there.

'I said: "Where is everyone?" He replied: "Oh, I forgot to tell you: it's a party for two, just you and me."

'He said he'd be gentle with me, which I realise sounds corny. Afterwards, we lay wrapped in each other's arms all night long.

'He was my first lover, and I fell madly in love. He was incredibly romantic. He'd tell me I had beautiful eyes and kiss my eyelids.

'He often had his guitar with him and one lovely memory I have is of John and me in bed, with me strumming and him playing the chords. John always wore his socks in bed, I don't know why. We talked about lots of things. He told me he had lost his virginity in the graveyard of Liverpool Cathedral when he was 13, with an older woman.


Brian Epstein at NEMS record shop.

'I used to go to NEMS's record shop in Liverpool, which was owned by Brian Epstein. I told him he should go down the Cavern to see The Beatles. One day he did, and became their manager.'

It would have been perfect, had John not had an official girlfriend, Cynthia, a middle-class girl he'd known since art school.

'I knew about her, but she didn't know about me,' says Patricia. 'John didn't often bring her to gigs, but I do remember one time he brought her to the Cavern. He came up to me and said he'd be over later after he'd put Cynthia in a taxi.

'Obviously, I wasn't happy about the situation and I'd tell John I felt I was wasting my time. His response was that one woman was never enough for a man.

'He would say he was torn between two blondes, that he loved Cynthia, but was in love with me.

'I have nothing against Cynthia. In fact, I'd love to meet her because we'd have a lot to talk about.'

Despite his two-timing, Pat soon discovered John was insecure.

'He thought he was ugly and would ask me what I saw in him. When I told him The Beatles would be big one day, he'd be surprised and say: "Do you really think so?"'

One night, after a gig, she says Lennon asked her to marry him.

'We'd been to a restaurant, just John and I, and had a bottle of wine or two and were a bit tipsy.

'We were in a narrow alleyway when John suddenly said: "Marry me Pat." I was so young and could not believe it, so I just kept saying: "Stop messing about, John." The next day it was forgotten.'

Instead, in August 1962, Lennon married Cynthia after they discovered she was pregnant with their son, Julian.

Paul McCartney took Patricia to one side during a trip to Hamburg. 'He said to me: "Pat, I think you should know: John has got married to Cynthia and she's pregnant.

'It was a terrible shock. I was devastated. I bumped into him at the Cavern and he said we could carry on as before, but I didn't want to. I was heartbroken.'

Soon afterwards, The Beatles became superstars and left Liverpool - and Pat - behind them. In 1965, she took a job as a nanny in Richmond, Surrey, and that year saw her first love for the final time after wangling a backstage pass at a gig at Hammersmith Odeon.

'My friend and I had to fight our way through the crowd to the dressing room. And there was John. He was combing his hair, but when he saw me he dropped it and said: "It's the love of my life."

'He picked me up, swung me around and kissed me. We only had a few minutes to talk because he had to go on stage.'

Pat hung out with The Rolling Stones and was a friend of the model Chrissy Shrimpton. At 24, she met Lemmy, who would later front the bands Hawkwind and Motorhead. They had a son, Paul, who is a record producer in Hollywood.

Patricia says she raised him single-handedly after Lemmy left her when their son was small.

She occasionally bumped into mutual friends of hers and Lennon.

'One or two people said he used to ask after me and said he'd love to see me again,' she says.

Patricia says she had a weird dream the night Lennon was shot in 1980.

'I woke up at about 4am, which was just after he'd been killed,' she says. 'I'd had a dream there was a big hole in the ground. Someone was saying: "Help me!" But I couldn't see them.

'The next day I heard the news. I felt shock and disbelief, it was terrible. He was such a lovely man.'

Patricia is single, but says she hasn't given up on meeting the man of her dreams.

'John spoil it for me,' she says. 'He made me think all men were as romantic, funny and talented as him.

'John was special, he really was. Wouldn't it have been great if I had married him after he proposed? Things may have turned out very differently for both of us.'


www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1168655/The-day-John-Lennon-proposed-pity-I-thought-joking.html

[yerblues1968]

David Morrissey stars in upcoming film Nowhere Boy
Photo taken outside The Who Shop in East Ham,
London on 24th January 2009 by Richard Leach.


MORRISSEY AND DUFF TALK NOWHERE BOY


msn.entertainment.com


Thursday, 30 April 2009



David Morrissey and Anne-Marie Duff have spoken about their new film Nowhere Boy, about John Lennon's childhood.

The film, directed by Sam Taylor Wood, will tell the story of the Beatle's early days growing up with his mother and his Aunt Mimi, played by Kristin Scott Thomas.

David, who co-stars with Anne-Marie in new movie Is Anybody There?, revealed: "I have just finished a film about the young John Lennon called Nowhere Boy with Anne-Marie Duff who plays John's mum Julia."

Anne-Marie said: "Once again he plays my other half, we're very different people this time though it's quite funny. But he does sport a tache once more so that could be a running theme.

"It's been great, we have been working on this film about John Lennon together. Very exciting and we have got one more week to go pretty much and then that's wrapped, so it's been amazing."

The screenplay has been written by Matt Greenhalgh - who won a Bafta for Control, his biopic about Joy Division's Ian Curtis - and is based on the book Imagine This: Growing Up With My Brother John Lennon by John's sister Julia Baird.

John was raised by his Aunt Mimi and apparently grew up not knowing that his real mother, Julia, lived just round the corner. It seems Aunt Mimi disapproved of her younger sister for "living in sin", and Baird's book claims this was driven by jealousy, dating back to childhood sibling rivalry.


entertainment.uk.msn.com/celebrity/news/Article.aspx?cp-documentid=16471961

[yerblues1968]

Kristin Scott Thomas as Aunt Mimi with Aaron Johnson playing John Lennon.
Photo by Eagle Eyes.


THE MIXED-UP BOY WHO WOULD JOIN SGT. PEPPER'S BAND



theglobeandmail.com
ELIZABETH RENZETTI


May 9, 2009



LONDON -- It's 1957 and 15-year-old Paul McCartney is in a cramped kitchen singing the first song he wrote, I Lost My Little Girl. Lounging in the doorway watching him is John Lennon, struggling to reconcile envy and awe.

Lennon's mother, Julia, listens intently and is moved to tears. "Oh, Paul, beautiful," she says. "You wrote that for her, didn't you? Your mother." Paul mumbles a response, an awkward teenage boy. Julia knows that McCartney has lost his mother to illness, how deeply it affected him. "It's awful," she says. "Taken from you at such an early age."

Lennon can't let this show of maternal tenderness pass by: He seizes the opportunity to wound the mother who abandoned him, and whom he only recently rediscovered. "She had cancer," he snarls at Julia. "What's your excuse?"

His mother stiffens, gets up, brushes past him. Lennon blows out a stream of smoke, looking only slightly chastened. It is his birthday party, and in the background boys with towering greased hair and girls in circle skirts dance to Hound Dog, the ferocious, world-changing music from across the ocean. Julia, trying to compensate for the years she's lost with her son, has made John a birthday cake in the shape of a record.

"Cut!" orders director Sam Taylor-Wood, and Aaron Johnson's shoulders sag a little. The actor, (who plays Lennon), is only 19, and mainly famous to legions of love-struck teenage girls for his role in last year's hit Irish comedy Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (the screaming girls are something he has in common with Lennon, at least.) The success or failure of this film, Nowhere Boy, is essentially his burden. When he took the part, he couldn't sing or play guitar; he is from a town near London called High Wycombe, which is a very long way, economically and by train, from Liverpool.

Johnson, with lanky body and angular face, has the look of a young Lennon.

The chip on the shoulder and ugly glasses from the National Health Service, both so central to the myth, are present but concealed (the teenaged Lennon loathed wearing his glasses). A makeup woman comes over to adjust his architecturally-impressive hair, known as a duck's ass to North American proto-rockers and a duck's arse to the skiffle-mad boys of Lennon's childhood who imported the rockabilly influenced sound.

"Aaron's going to be a star," says Nowhere Boy's producer, Kevin Loader, watching from the side of the set, echoing producers' pronouncements since the first clapboard clapped shut. It is, to say the least, a challenging role. Loader says, "He's playing someone we all think we know everything about. He's got to have a confidence and sense of destiny, but he's also a mixed-up teenager whose family is throwing him all over the place. Aaron's got an emotional understanding, for his age, that's just mind-blowing. And he does stillness very well."

At first, the thing Johnson didn't do very well was sing. "We knew we had to get the best actor," says Loader. "The rest could be learned."

It helps that the film is set during Lennon's formative years, when he was learning to play guitar and sing. As well, it's less about music than about why he became a musician, the underpinnings of his genius and insecurity.

While Nowhere Boy ends with a romance of sorts - Lennon's budding friendship with McCartney (played by Thomas Sangster) - it's really about a triangle, although one with three fractured sides. The person who turned Lennon on to music, and taught him to play banjo, was his rebellious mother, Julia (Anne-Marie Duff), who'd left her five-year-old son to be raised by her sister, Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas). Julia died in a traffic accident not long after she and John were reunited, leaving a wound that could never be healed, much as he tried in music (witness the Beatles songs Julia and Mother.)



Thomas Sangster plays Paul McCartney


Back on set, the cast begins rehearsing the party scene, where John's friends from his first band the Quarrymen, including McCartney and George Harrison, are dancing in Julia's living room. "Miming, everyone!" calls the first assistant director, then, more fiercely, "Whispering is not miming!"

Nowhere Boy comes with quite a musical pedigree: The scriptwriter is Matt Greenhalgh, who also wrote the award-winning biopic Control, about short-lived pop hero Ian Curtis of Joy Division. (This script is based on a memoir by Julia Baird, Lennon's half-sister. Recently, Geoffrey Giuliano, who co-wrote an earlier memoir with Baird, has been telling the press that he will launch a lawsuit to get a cut of the movie's profits. "It's nothing to do with us. I haven't heard from anyone's lawyers," Loader says.) Director Sam Taylor-Wood is making her feature-film debut, although last year she made Love You More, about two teenagers who love the punk band the Buzzcocks. As a visual artist she's headline fodder in her native Britain, for video works like David Beckham Sleeping (the title of which is self-explanatory).

In order to keep costs down, Nowhere Boy was shot in consecutive 10-hour days, with the cast nipping out only for brief meal and cigarette breaks. The scenes inside Julia's house were shot at London's legendary Ealing studios, where Alec Guinness once ran around in a dress to great comic effect in Kind Hearts and Coronets. A couple of weeks before my set visit they were shooting in Liverpool and ten days later they were in a London graveyard. The budget is tight, only $13-million, the scheduler tighter.

Sangster, familiar from his role as the pining adolescent in Love Actually, sits strumming his guitar left-handed, a famous McCartneyism that he had to learn for the film. The real McCartney has read the script, and will see an early version of the finished film, but hasn't been in touch with the producers.

"It must be a very odd thing for him," says Loader, who as a boy hung around the set where the Beatles were rehearsing Magical Mystery Tour, hoping in vain for a glimpse. "Imagine if someone were making a movie about your teenage years."

Nowhere Boy begins with Lennon's birth in 1940 during a bombing raid on Liverpool and ends 20 years later, with the Beatles heading for Hamburg. The late 1950s was a seismic moment in Britain for music, when the arrival of American rock and blues records - brought to Liverpool by the Cunard Yanks who worked the ocean liners - set fire to young imaginations across the country. Getting those musical details right, from sourcing period guitars, to building a tea chest bass, to teaching the young actors how to play and sing, was the job of music consultant Ben Parker.

Lennon "would have been pretty terrible at this point in his life," says Parker. "That was on my side. With Aaron, the challenge was not so much to get him to sound like John, but just to find the bit of singer in him. The show-off." Did he find it? Parker raises his eyebrows, meaningfully. What 19-year-old actor doesn't have an inner Freddie Mercury?

"I know people will say, 'Wouldn't John have been better?' But the truth was, at this point, he wouldn't. And that's one of the reasons he brought Paul into the band, because he was so much better. It was quite brave of John, to admit a potential rival."

There's no doubt who is the leader of the band in the next scene. Johnson's all teenage bravado as he jumps on a table in Julia's living room to give a speech. First, an alpha-dog demonstration: He takes a washboard and smashes it over the head of his friend, Pete, who wants to drop out of the Quarrymen. "Apparently washboard players don't get enough chicks," he says as Pete clutches his head. "And he feels like a pansy wearing his mum's thimbles."

The traitor dispensed with, he turns to the rest of the band - the ones who will accompany him to Hamburg and beyond, and the ones who will be left behind. "Where we going to, boys?" And they shout back, joyfully, "to the toppity top, Johnny!"


www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090509.ANOWHERE09ART1226/TPStory/Entertainment

[syelar108]

Cool, we're finally starting to get some info! I guess they haven't said (unless I missed it) whether or not 'Nowhere Boy' will be a theatrical release?

Doesn't sound the legal battle with Geoffrey Giuliano is interfering with this film's production - GOOD! I may own one of his books, but Giuliano is nothing more than an OPPORTUNIST in my opinion!!!

Thanks for the heads up & photo, Yerblues.

[yerblues1968]

Aaron Johnson as John Lennon


MAGHULL PUPIL LANDS ROLE OF BEATLES LEGEND IN NEW JOHN LENNON FILM


Maghull and Aintree Star
by Tina Miles

May 14 2009


A TEENAGE actor from Merseyside has landed a part in a big screen film about the early life of John Lennon.

John Collins, who lives in Orrell Park, got the part of Ivan Vaughan in Nowhere Boy after auditioning at his school, Maghull High.

The 15-year-old will play the close friend of John Lennon, who was responsible for introducing Lennon to Sir Paul McCartney.

The promising actor impressed directors and producers at three auditions, despite having never acted professionally before.

The former Longmoor Community Primary School pupil said: “Apart from school plays, I have never acted before but the head of performing arts, Mr Hewitt, asked me if I wanted to audition for a part in a new film.

“I didn’t know what the film was or how big the film would be until I started looking through my lines. I still can’t believe it when I talk about being in a film about John Lennon.”

John, who is currently studying for 11 GCSEs including drama, said working with an A-list cast, including Anne-Marie Duff, has inspired him to work in the industry.

He said: “Originally I wasn’t sure about becoming an actor because I thought it is a very hard business to get into but I’ve definitely caught the acting bug.”

Nowhere Boy, written by Bafta-winning screenwriter Matt Greenhaigh, is about the younger Lennon just before his mother dies.



Kristin Scott Thomas as Aunt Mimi


From the age of five, Lennon was raised by his Aunt Mimi (played by Kristin Scott Thomas) and did not see his mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff) until he reached his late teens.

The £6million film was shot in Liverpool before the cast headed to London's Ealing studio to film interior scenes.

John said: “I went to the first audition at my school last year and I had another audition at the Adelphi before I was asked to audition for the part in London. I’d never been to the capital before.

“I was nervous when I went to London for the first day of filming because I’d never done anything like it before, I didn’t know what to expect and everyone was using film terms I’d never heard of.

“I met Anne-Marie Duff, Aaron Johnson who plays John, Thomas Sangster, who plays Paul McCartney and another Liverpool actor, Josh Bolt who plays Pete Shotton.



Ann-Marie Duff portrays John Lennon's mother, Julia.


“Anne-Marie and everyone was so nice and that helped relax me.”

John said: “The school has been very supportive and allowed me to have time off to film.

“My mum Ruth and dad John helped me learn my lines.

“I’m a very big fan of the Beatles. My dad has an original Cavern card and has always loved the Beatles. He said he can’t believe that he used to watch them perform and now his son is in a film about them.

“I play a significant part in John’s life but it is a small part.

“I want to concentrate on my GCSE’s but I do want to be an actor and maybe this could lead to other roles.

“I’ve just finished filming in London and I’m really excited about the film coming out."


www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/liverpool-life-features/the-beatles/the-beatles-news/2009/05/14/maghull-high-pupil-lands-part-in-new-john-lennon-film-nowhere-boy-104897-23607790/

[yerblues1968]

JOHN LENNON - LENNON'S SON WORRIED ABOUT FILM


contactmusic.com


19/05/2009 01:30


JOHN LENNON's son JULIAN is apprehensive about a forthcoming movie chronicling his father's life - he's worried the film will tarnish his memory of the late BEATLE.

Nowhere Boy, which stars Aaron Johnson and Kristin Scott Thomas, tells the story of Lennon's childhood in Liverpool, England.

But his 46-year-old son has reservations about the movie, which is directed by Sam Taylor-Wood and will be released on the 29th anniversary of Lennon's death in December (09).

He says, “It's weird. I know what I know, I like what I know, and I don't like some of what I know and I don't particularly want to see someone else's variation on that. But Sam seems extremely nice and the film looks as though it will be something interesting.”



www.contactmusic.com/news.nsf/article/lennons%20son%20worried%20about%20film_1103769

[yerblues1968]

John Lennon in Germany 1966.


NOWHERE BOY TO CLOSE 2009 LONDON FILM FESTIVAL



Sam Taylor-Wood’s John Lennon biopic will close 2009 London Film Festival


Earlier this week we heard that Wes Anderson’s animated version of Roald Dahl’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox was set to open the 2009 London Film Festival. Now we know what the closing film will be.

Nowhere Boy, a memoir of the early life of John Lennon, is the hotly anticipated feature debut of Brit artist/photographer Sam Taylor-Wood, and it has been locked in for closing night duties for this year’s festival. Starring British up-and-comer Aaron Johnson in the lead role, the film, which was partially shot around North London earlier this year, is based on the book written by Julia Baird, Lennon’s younger half-sister.

Many will be eager to see how Wood has made the transition from artist to filmmaker, especially after the success of Steve McQueen’s Hunger at last year’s festival. The fact that her past work has demonstrated that she is uniquely attuned to the world of pop culture holds her in good stead. And, perhaps more encouragingly, her Patrick Marber-penned short, Love You More, in which a teenage couple make love to the sound of The Buzzcocks, was adoringly received when it premiered at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.

That the film has been bestowed with this honour at all does in itself suggest that we could be in for something rather special. We only have to look back to last year, when audience members sheepishly filed in to the Odeon Leicester Square to see a little number called Slumdog Millionare, only to leave the cinema swooning.

And like Slumdog, a glance at the cast list doesn't reveal many faces that would have the local paparazzi slathering (Kristin Scott-Thomas, David Morrissey and Anne-Marie Duff also star), but we can probably bank on Wood’s no-doubt bulging book of celebrity contacts to ensure that the evening is – by some distance – London’s hottest ticket.


www.timeout.com/film/features/show-feature/8328/nowhere-boy-to-close-2009-london-film-festival.html

This year’s London Film Festival kicks off on October 14, and Nowhere Boy will bring the final curtain down on October 29.

[yerblues1968]

John Lennon in 1959.

JOHN LENNON'S DAYS IN THE LIFE

The Observer
Craig McLean

Sunday 1 November 2009

How to tell the story of the young Lennon? First-time director Sam Taylor-Wood, rising star Aaron Johnson and Yoko Ono talk exclusively about new film Nowhere Boy.

Here in the New Clubmoor Hall in Norris Green, Liverpool, they're selling Bateman's Light Dinner Ale at 6d a bottle. The reek of Nelson's Tipped and Senior Service cigarettes fills the air. Moody boys in slim suits and slick DAs mooch about the dance floor. In front of them glamorous girls in pencil skirts and fitted jackets, their hair immobilized by spray, stare at the modest stage. Everyone is watching the boys in the group.

The teenage musicians are trying out their new guitarist. They first met him when they played at a church fête in nearby Woolton. The group's scowls who was this young pretty boy? had turned to smiles when he demonstrated a mean way with Eddie Cochran's Twenty Flight Rock. Pretty good for a left-hander. The kid was in.

Now, three months later, the group are ready to rock 'n' roll for the first time. "Next, ladies and gentlemen," says the singer by way of introducing their new guitarist, "the Scouse Duane Eddy will play Movin' 'N' Groovin'.

It is 18 October 1957 and the Quarrymen are experiencing their first modest taste of fame. This new musical partnership, between 17-year-old John Lennon and 15-year-old Paul McCartney, might be on to something.

Over 50 years later, in April 2009, in a time-capsule Irish pub in the north-west London suburb of Sudbury Hill standing in for the late 50s Liverpool social club Sam Taylor-Wood is controlling the action on day 41 of the 45-day shoot for Nowhere Boy, the artist turned director's depiction of the early life of John Winston Lennon. The screenplay is by Matt Greenhalgh, writer of Control, the acclaimed biopic of Joy Division's Ian Curtis, and is adapted from the first half of the memoir Imagine This Growing Up With My Brother John Lennon by Julia Baird.


John Lennon with his band The Quarrymen.

It has been a fairly quick-fire shoot, with filming taking place here, in Pinner, in Liverpool and at Ealing Studios. There have been myriad period details to attend to, and not just the normal issues of accurate set dressing (the number of cars in the streets in the early 50s; the brands of beer the social club would sell) because the producers know the eyes of legions of Beatles obsessives will be on them.

Did the earth move for Lennon when he heard Screamin' Jay Hawkins's I Put a Spell on You, a single he received from a "Cunard Yank" seaman down Liverpool docks, and if so, what label was it on? Did McCartney use his little finger to play the B7 chord? Would the Quarrymen have used Reslo microphones, and did the teenage Lennon favour a Zenith Model 17 guitar, the teenage McCartney a Gallotone Champion? (The answers: yes; Okeh; yes after he got a bus across Liverpool to learn it; yes; no and no it was the other way around.)

Ensuring the featured songs and the musical performances are accurate and credible has been another priority for the film-makers. "We took the decision early on," says producer Kevin Loader, "that you've got to cast the best actors you can find and then school them in the music." Thus 19-year old Aaron Johnson was given the lead role not because he was a Lennon lookalike or a natural-born rock 'n' roller. "He came in to auditions and wouldn't engage," recalls Taylor-Wood. "He was very much in his own world. He had the right intensity."

Enter Nowhere Boy's music consultant Ben Parker. He started teaching the Buckinghamshire-born Johnson how to play guitar, sing and hold himself like Lennon last December. With the aid of vocal coach Penny Dyer, they worked on emulating Lennon's particular Scouse accent, then his singing voice "John sang from the twang of his own speaking voice," says Parker, one of several self-confessed Beatles fanatics working on the production.

Eighteen months ago music supervisor Ian Neil began a "feasibility study" of the songs the soundtrack would need. He had 10% of the film's £6.7m budget to spend on securing the rights to the classic rock 'n' roll tunes fundamental to the story. Could they use Chuck Berry's Guitar Boogie, part of the Quarrymen's repertoire? Would featuring Elvis Presley tunes bust the bank? And to what degree, exactly, should the music of Lennon and McCartney feature?

Little wonder the pressure is showing here on the fringes of London on this rainy spring day. "I'm going to need a stint in an opium den in Marrakech after this," sighs Taylor-Wood. "I need some heavy drugs to disintegrate everything."




The Official "Nowhere Boy" movie trailer. (1:53 minutes)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6Km9L1Sqd0


She's joking, of course. A music fanatic who's made concert films for the Pet Shop Boys, a video for Elton John and a short film named after Buzzcocks' Love You More, she lobbied hard to make Nowhere Boy after being handed the script by her friend Joe Wright (director of Atonement). The 42-year-old director admits she's sad at the prospect of the shoot ending and not just because, as it will later transpire, she has embarked on a relationship with her leading man.

Imagine that, an artist falling in love with Lennon. "I know, isn't it amazing?" says Yoko Ono when we speak a few months later. "It's not a fictitious situation," Lennon's widow says of Nowhere Boy, "it's very fateful."

How to depict a legend? How to cast fresh light on one of the greatest and most over-analyzed musicians of the rock and pop era?

"There was a point where I suddenly felt, I'm in the middle of a hell of a lot of powerful people," remembers Taylor-Wood. She means Ono, McCartney and the other keepers of the Beatles flame (a young George Harrison also features in the film). "You think, 'Oh dear God, I've just taken on one of the biggest icons in the world,'" she continues. "It's a real person. The family are still here. I want to make this as sensitive to all of them as possible. How am I going to do this without upsetting one of them?

"So I did have a moment where I just thought, 'I don't know if I can do this.' Then I got in the car and turned the ignition on and Lennon came on the radio and I thought, 'OK I'm doing this.'"

The song was (Just Like) Starting Over.

Nonetheless: what new was there to say? Taylor-Wood, a first-time feature film director, answers by saying what she wanted to avoid.

"I didn't want to make a biopic. I didn't want to do the birth and the launch and the beginning. That wasn't interesting to me. It was really the story of this relationship between these two women and how they fed into Lennon's imagination and his music. The powerful influence that these really strong women had on him."


John Lennon's Aunt Mimi Smith and her cat Tim

"These two women" are Lennon's mother Julia and his Aunt Mimi, who raised him as her own. Free-spirited Julia (played by Anne-Marie Duff) had a chaotic life: John's father was away at sea for much of the Second World War, and he remained largely absent after it; during the war Julia fell pregnant to another serviceman; then Julia met a third man (played by David Morrissey) and bore him two daughters. Prim and proper sister Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas) felt this was no environment for a young boy and "stole" John to live with her (at her house, Mendips, now a National Trust property donated to the nation by Yoko Ono).

In the film we see Julia wheeling back into John's life when he's 15. He's dazzled by this glamorous woman he has to see behind his auntie's back. Julia takes him to Blackpool on a day out, introduces him to rock 'n 'roll via Presley's Teddy Bear, teaches him how to play the banjo and explains that rock 'n' roll means sex. Several scenes allude to the son's Oedipal feelings for his mother, a controversial line taken in Philip Norman's recent biography, John Lennon: The Life, but not, unsurprisingly, in Lennon's sister's book.

"I didn't want to overplay that sexual stuff," says Matt Greenhalgh, "but here's a boy at 15 who was raging, as boys do at that age. And he meets this amazing, beautiful woman that he doesn't really know. OK, she's his mother but she still lights up his world."

What similarities if any does the screenwriter see between his depictions of Lennon and Ian Curtis, troubled and ultimately tragic northern icons both? "It's people trying to find love through becoming artists. A need to be loved. But whereas I love Control for its darkness, Nowhere Boy is about the joy of rock 'n' roll. It's all about love and sex. That was new to the world in the mid-50s, so there's a liberating feeling about Nowhere Boy.




Nowhere Boy world premiere at the 53rd London Film Festival,
October 29, 2009 (closing gala). Part 1 of 2. (5:13 minutes)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex3Lp1HpgZY



Nowhere Boy world premiere at the 53rd London Film Festival,
October 29, 2009 (closing gala). Part 2 of 2. (3:28 minutes)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=wG0u1ldzcPE



John Lennon biopic "Nowhere Boy" red carpet at the London Film Festival. (2:30 minutes)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVohr5PrOIU


Director Sam Taylor-Wood and Aaron Johnson (center) with members of the Nowhere Boy
cast at the London Film Festival. Also featured are Kristin-Scott Thomas (Aunt Mimi Smith),
Sam Bell (George Harrison), Thomas Sangster (Paul McCartney), Josh Bolt (Peter Shotton),
Anne-Marie Duff (Julia Lennon).


Indeed there is. The film is affectionate, tender, moving, and not afraid to show the darker side of Lennon's personality. But it also explains where those shadows come from. We see the building blocks of the man and his music how Lennon's world and imagination open up as he reconnects with his mother, and how he connects with the exciting and visceral new world of rock 'n'roll. To fully lay bare the latter, the film's music team put in serious legwork.

John Gosling, the music director, enlisted session musicians who would be good enough to evoke the amateurish performances of the young Quarrymen the actors would then mime to these backing tracks. He and his team hired in vintage kit to purposefully hobble the accomplished players. Engineer/producer Emre Ramazanoglu tracked down five Reslo mics, popular in the 50s "they were our secret weapon," says Gosling, "although they required a lot of soldering." His session musicians had to convey the teenagers' progression, from skiffle merchants to nascent rock 'n' rollers, from Quarry Bank school to bedroom to Percy Phillips's rudimentary studio, where the Quarrymen recorded their only disc, In Spite of All the Danger / That'll Be the Day.

Tragically, just as he found her, Lennon lost his mother Julia was killed by a speeding car on 15 July 1958. Lennon was 17. The only non-contemporaneous song of his that Taylor-Wood wanted to use was the obvious one, Mother, written in 1970 (You had me but I never had you). Without it the film would lack its climactic, devastating emotional punch.

"To get that I had to get Yoko's approval of the film," says Taylor-Wood. Ono, who had given the film the go-ahead, maintained her distance during filming. But the director kept her appraised of progress with email updates (she also emailed McCartney regularly with fact-checking queries "would you have said group or band?").

In early September this year the film was completed to an incredibly tight schedule in order for it to appear as the Closing Gala feature at last week's London Film Festival Taylor-Wood sent the near-finished film to New York. "I didn't want to go myself, sit outside the room waiting for Yoko's reaction. But immediately after she saw it she sent me a very, very beautiful letter saying how much she liked it and saying she would give us permission to use Mother. That was a major moment of relief!"

A film that was kick started by (Just Like) Starting Over had its climax. And there was a final moment of serendipity. Taylor-Wood finished it, tweaking a final sound level, on 9 October: birthday both of John and his and Yoko's son Sean.

Nowhere Boy is brilliantly evocative and provocative, and no one is more pleased than Yoko Ono. "First of all, it is a very difficult subject because so many people think that they own John and have their own version of John. So Sam was very brave. But also she did the right job."

What does Greenhalgh want people to get from the film?

The writer pauses. "That Lennon didn't have it easy," he says. "There's a lot of issues that obviously were still going on in the Beatles and later on which, once you piece them together, this is the final piece of the jigsaw. You understand why he was how he was. His anger, and in some way neediness. It was all down to what happened to him in childhood. It's all very Freudian."

For Aaron Johnson, who is excellent at evoking Lennon's coolness, cockiness and feelings of grief, Nowhere Boy pierces the heart of an artist who, since his death in 1980, has been enveloped in fact-obscuring idolatry and conjecture. In the year running up to what would have been John Lennon's 70th birthday, Nowhere Boy shows us something of the essence of the man.

"After his mum's death I don't think he ever found love until Yoko," says the actor born a decade after Lennon's murder. "It kind of destroyed him and he kept that in. He'd opened up his heart so much that when she did die he had to go back to his roots how Aunt Mimi taught him: to seal it all in."

Producer Kevin Loader points out how "self-conscious Lennon was about how he presented himself later in life". It all stems back to those Liverpool streets, those women, that loss.

"John Lennon was already an artist and a poet," reflects Johnson. "But he didn't know how to express it until his mother came back into his life. It was rock 'n' roll, it was danger and sex and violence and poetry."

Nowhere Boy opens in cinemas on 26 December


www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/nov/01/john-lennon-film-nowhere-boy

Nowhere Boy, John Lennon Biopic, Scored by Goldfrapp, September 21, 2009
www.prefixmag.com/news/inowhere-boyi-john-lennon-biopic-scored-by-goldfra/32811/
Nowhere Boy, Review, 30 Oct 2009
www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/6466589/Nowhere-Boy-review.html

[yerblues1968]

NOWHERE BOY RECEIVES 4 (BRITISH ACADEMY OF FILM AND TELEVISION ARTS)
BAFTA AWARD NOMINATIONS, BAFTA AWARDS TO AIR ON SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2010

6 BAFTA NOMINATIONS FOR FILM4

film4.com

21 January 2010


Nowhere Boy has picked up four nominations including Outstanding Debut for director Sam Taylor-Wood and two Supporting Actress nominations for Anne-Marie Duff and Kristin Scott-Thomas. Nowhere Boy tells the true story of a conflicted young John Lennon, growing up as part of his aunt Mimi's household, only to find out his vivacious young mum is living just five minute's walk away.


List of main nominations for the 2010 BAFTA Awards:

BEST FILM

AVATAR - James Cameron, Jon Landau
AN EDUCATION - Finola Dwyer, Amanda Posey
THE HURT LOCKER - Nominees TBC
PRECIOUS: BASED ON THE NOVEL PUSH BY SAPPHIRE - Lee Daniels, Sarah Siegel-Magness, Gary Magness
UP IN THE AIR - Ivan Reitman, Jason Reitman, Daniel Dubiecki

OUTSTANDING BRITISH FILM

AN EDUCATION - Finola Dwyer, Amanda Posey, Lone Scherfig, Nick Hornby
FISH TANK - Kees Kasander, Nick Laws, Andrea Arnold
IN THE LOOP - Kevin Loader, Adam Tandy, Armando Iannucci, Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Tony Roche
MOON - Stuart Fenegan, Trudie Styler, Duncan Jones, Nathan Parker
NOWHERE BOY - Robert Bernstein, Douglas Rae, Kevin Loader, Sam Taylor-Wood, Matt Greenhalgh

OUTSTANDING DEBUT BY A BRITISH WRITER, DIRECTOR OR PRODUCER

LUCY BAILEY, ANDREW THOMPSON, ELIZABETH MORGAN HEMLOCK, DAVID PEARSON - Directors, Producers – Mugabe and the White African
ERAN CREEVY - Writer/Director – Shifty
STUART HAZELDINE - Writer/Director – Exam
DUNCAN JONES - Director – Moon
SAM TAYLOR-WOOD - Director – Nowhere Boy

DIRECTOR

AVATAR - James Cameron
DISTRICT 9 - Neill Blomkamp
AN EDUCATION - Lone Scherfig
THE HURT LOCKER - Kathryn Bigelow
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS - Quentin Tarantino

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

THE HANGOVER - Jon Lucas, Scott Moore
THE HURT LOCKER - Mark Boal
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS - Quentin Tarantino
A SERIOUS MAN - Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
UP - Pete Docter, Bob Peterson

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

DISTRICT 9 - Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell
AN EDUCATION - Nick Hornby
IN THE LOOP - Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche
PRECIOUS: BASED ON THE NOVEL PUSH BY SAPPHIRE - Geoffrey Fletcher
UP IN THE AIR - Jason Reitman, Sheldon Turner

FILM NOT IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

BROKEN EMBRACES - Agustín Almodóvar, Pedro Almodóvar
COCO BEFORE CHANEL - Carole Scotta, Caroline Benjo, Philippe Carcassonne, Anne Fontaine
LET THE RIGHT ONE IN - Carl Molinder, John Nordling, Tomas Alfredson
A PROPHET - Pascal Caucheteux, Marco Cherqui, Alix Raynaud, Jacques Audiard
THE WHITE RIBBON - Stefan Arndt, Veit Heiduschka, Margaret Menegoz, Michael Haneke

ANIMATED FILM

CORALINE - Henry Selick
FANTASTIC MR FOX - Wes Anderson
UP - Pete Docter

LEADING ACTOR

JEFF BRIDGES - Crazy Heart
GEORGE CLOONEY - Up in the Air
COLIN FIRTH - A Single Man
JEREMY RENNER - The Hurt Locker
ANDY SERKIS - Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

LEADING ACTRESS

CAREY MULLIGAN - An Education
SAOIRSE RONAN - The Lovely Bones
GABOUREY SIDIBE - Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
MERYL STREEP - Julie & Julia
AUDREY TAUTOU - Coco Before Chanel

SUPPORTING ACTOR

ALEC BALDWIN - It’s Complicated
CHRISTIAN McKAY - Me and Orson Welles
ALFRED MOLINA - An Education
STANLEY TUCCI - The Lovely Bones
CHRISTOPH WALTZ - Inglourious Basterds

SUPPORTING ACTRESS

ANNE-MARIE DUFF - Nowhere Boy
VERA FARMIGA - Up in the Air
ANNA KENDRICK - Up in the Air
MO'NIQUE - Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
KRISTIN SCOTT THOMAS - Nowhere Boy

MUSIC

AVATAR - James Horner
CRAZY HEART - T-Bone Burnett, Stephen Bruton
FANTASTIC MR FOX - Alexandre Desplat
SEX & DRUGS & ROCK & ROLL - Chaz Jankel
UP - Michael Giacchino

CINEMATOGRAPHY

AVATAR - Mauro Fiore
DISTRICT 9 - Trent Opaloch
THE HURT LOCKER - Barry Ackroyd
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS - Robert Richardson
THE ROAD - Javier Aguirresarobe

EDITING

AVATAR - Stephen Rivkin, John Refoua, James Cameron
DISTRICT 9 - Julian Clarke
THE HURT LOCKER - Bob Murawski, Chris Innis
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS - Sally Menke
UP IN THE AIR - Dana E. Glauberman

PRODUCTION DESIGN

AVATAR - Rick Carter, Robert Stromberg, Kim Sinclair
DISTRICT 9 - Philip Ivey, Guy Potgieter
HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE - Stuart Craig, Stephenie McMillan
THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS - Dave Warren, Anastasia Masaro, Caroline Smith
INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS - David Wasco, Sandy Reynolds Wasco

COSTUME DESIGN

BRIGHT STAR - Janet Patterson
COCO BEFORE CHANEL - Catherine Leterrier
AN EDUCATION - Odile Dicks-Mireaux
A SINGLE MAN - Arianne Phillips
THE YOUNG VICTORIA - Sandy Powell

SOUND

AVATAR - Christopher Boyes, Gary Summers, Andy Nelson, Tony Johnson, Addison Teague
DISTRICT 9 - Brent Burge, Chris Ward, Dave Whitehead, Michael Hedges, Ken Saville
THE HURT LOCKER - Ray Beckett, Paul N. J. Ottosson
STAR TREK - Peter J. Devlin, Andy Nelson, Anna Behlmer, Mark Stoeckinger, Ben Burtt
UP - Tom Myers, Michael Silvers, Michael Semanick

SPECIAL VISUAL EFFECTS

AVATAR - Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham, Andrew R. Jones
DISTRICT 9 - Dan Kaufman, Peter Muyzers, Robert Habros, Matt Aitken
HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE - John Richardson, Tim Burke, Tim Alexander, Nicolas Aithadi
THE HURT LOCKER - Richard Stutsman
STAR TREK - Roger Guyett, Russell Earl, Paul Kavanagh, Burt Dalton


MAKE UP & HAIR

COCO BEFORE CHANEL - Thi Thanh Tu Nguyen, Jane Milon
AN EDUCATION - Lizzie Yianni Georgiou
THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS - Sarah Monzani
NINE - Peter ‘Swords’ King
THE YOUNG VICTORIA - Jenny Shircore

SHORT ANIMATION

THE GRUFFALO - Michael Rose, Martin Pope, Jakob Schuh, Max Lang
THE HAPPY DUCKLING - Gili Dolev
MOTHER OF MANY - Sally Arthur, Emma Lazenby

SHORT FILM

14 - Asitha Ameresekere
I DO AIR - James Bolton, Martina Amati
JADE - Samm Haillay, Daniel Elliott
MIXTAPE - Luti Fagbenle, Luke Snellin
OFF SEASON - Jacob Jaffke, Jonathan van Tulleken



A brief interview with Anne-Marie Duff for winning Best Supporting Actress at the British
Independent Film Awards for her portrayal of Julia Lennon in "Nowhere Boy." (1:01 minutes)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucnWOc7LMMA



An interview with Anne-Marie Duff at the Phoenix Cinema in East Finchley, London.
She discusses her approach to acting. (6:24 minutes)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VYRvGZ5Vp0



Anne-Marie Duff talks about her challenging role in "Nowhere Boy" being an opportunity
she could not turn down, plus Sam Taylor-Wood's directorial debut. (2:24 minutes)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s6s47LOAPQ

www.t5m.com/the-british-independent-film-awards/best-supporting-actress-anne-marie-duff-at-the-british-independent-film-awards.html
www.film4.com/features/article/bafta-nominations-for-film4
www.bafta.org/awards/film/film-awards-nominations,949,BA.html

[yerblues1968]

NOWHERE BOY TO COME TO THE U.S. THIS FALL


examiner.com

March 31, 9:53 PM


It was reported at the Beatles Examiner that Nowhere Boy, the film about John Lennon’s teen years, would be released in the U.S. on October 8, the day before what would have been his 70th birthday. John Lennon is played by Aaron Johnson. It will be interesting to see how the film is received in the states. So far it has had mixed reviews.



Pictured are director Sam Taylor-Wood, Harvey Weinstein of The Weinstein Company,
film distributor for the United States, Germany, and Latin America, Kristin Scott Thomas,
and Aaron Johnson.


On the one hand, Aaron Johnson has had quite a few accolades for his portrayal as the young Lennon. He just won the Jameson Empire Awards 2010 - Best Newcomer Award. The award ceremony was held at the Grosvenor House Hotel, on March 28, 2010 in London.



Aaron Johnson as John Lennon in the film Nowhere Boy.


On the other hand, there are some pursed lips over the way Aunt Mimi, as well as Julia Lennon were portrayed, by those close to the subject, including Paul McCartney; movie reviews suggest that the script does not follow Julia Baird's book, Imagine This see previous article: www.examiner.com/x-35173-John-Lennon-Examiner~y2010m3d10-Nowhere-Boy-film-about-John-Lennon-to-kick-off-Nashville-Film-Festival.


www.examiner.com/x-35173-John-Lennon-Examiner~y2010m3d31-Lennon-news-of-the-week

[yerblues1968]

Aaron Johnson as John Lennon and Thomas Sangster as Paul McCartney in Nowhere Boy.

THOMAS ADMITS TO McCARTNEY PRESSURE

belfasttelegraph.co.uk

Friday, 7 May 2010


Thomas Sangster has admitted he felt pressure portraying the young Paul McCartney in Nowhere Boy.

The London-born star, who turns 20 on May 16, plays the former Beatles frontman in Sam Taylor-Wood's directorial debut.

"I felt under tremendous pressure to play Sir Paul - I had to portray somebody who's been in the public eye since he was 15 and everyone knows him really well, with hardcore Beatles fans and Sir Paul himself seeing it," he said.

"So you are restricted, you can't make it your own. You can't just do a scouse accent, you've got to do a Paul McCartney scouse accent, you've got to do the right things with your eyes and mouth and eyebrows and so on."



Thomas continued: "I can't sing much, and I had to learn to play the left-handed guitar. It was frustrating because I knew the songs, but my hands couldn't keep up.

"But it was something different I've never done before so it was a bit scary, but once I got into it, it was great," he added.

Thomas never got the chance to meet the legendary musician in person, despite plans for Sir Paul to visit the set.

"It was annoying. He was going to come down but I didn't want him to. I felt like I 'knew' him by the end of the film, like we were closely connected," he added.

Nowhere Boy will be released on DVD and Blu-ray on May 10.

www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/breaking-news/entertainment/thomas-admits-to-mccartney-pressure-14800088.html?r=RSS

[yerblues1968]

Thomas Sangster as Paul McCartney in Nowhere Boy.


SIR PAUL MCCARTNEY ANNOYED BY NOWHERE BOY

May 25, 2010

SIR PAUL McCARTNEY has yet to watch JOHN LENNON biopic NOWHERE BOY -
because he's "peeved" the actor playing his role is too short.

The film stars Kick-Ass' Aaron Johnson as Lennon, while Thomas Sangster portrays McCartney in the story of the late Beatle's early years.



But McCartney is not happy about the height difference between the onscreen pair - because he was just as tall as his Beatles bandmate in real life and insists movie bosses should have put Sangster in "platforms" to make up the extra inches.



He tells Britain's Seven magazine, "I haven't actually seen it, but I hear I'm OK in it. But you know what I'm slightly peeved about? My character, my actor, is shorter than John! And I don't like that. I'm the same size as John, please. Put John in a trench or put me in platforms!"

--IANS-WENN

www.newkerala.com/news/fullnews-114317.html