HBO Buys Wacky Idea About The Beatles Not Existing

Max Barth - maxbarth.substack.com
2 min readJun 22, 2020

(HOLLYWOOD, California) “I swear it was real,” says Eric Smith, 32, in his pitch to a packed room of film industry employees. “It was this whole movie about how the Beatles never existed. It was called Yesterday.” The meeting, located in a production company’s headquarters in Los Angeles, fell silent momentarily before the bidding war for the idea began. HBO was the winner, and a mini-series helmed by Smith is reportedly in the works.

Since February of this year Smith, an industry outsider and struggling writer, has attempted to pitch the concept to “anyone who would listen”. He says “industry folks” are generally excited by it, a response he enjoys but finds confusing, due to the fact that he personally remembers seeing the movie in theaters.

The poster for “Yesterday” as Smith remembers it.

“It’s this movie, it came out like last summer, where this guy wakes up and the first thing he does, like any normal person, is ask his friend to pass the “Mean Mr. Mustard” while they eat lunch. No one laughs because they don’t get it. Because the Beatles never existed. So he creates the Beatles music.”

He stops and sighs. “Are you sure you never heard of this?”

It’s unclear what if any relation the famous rock group has to Mr. Smith, or to the idea he has peddled around Hollywood the last few months. But the concept for the film has fans. “I started a Kickstarter, when I realized what had happened, called “Make Yesterday Again” and everyone is donating but they say they don’t remember the film in the first place. It’s really messing with my head, just like the guy from Yesterday when no one had heard of Yellow Submarine by the Beatles so he had to re-write Yellow Submarine.”

Google results for “Yesterday” indicate nothing of interest save the famous McCartney-penned track. Smith claims this is exactly what happened in Yesterday.

“[In the film Smith claims to remember] the guy looks up the Beatles and he can’t find the Beatles. It’s just lower case beetles. It’s a pretty cool scene because you’re like ‘wow, where are the Beatles? Where could they be?’”

Yesterday Again is tentatively scheduled for a Summer 2021 release, and the way Smith describes it, it should be entertaining. “If we can make it half as good as the Yesterday I remember was, it’ll be absolute shit.”

--

--

Max Barth - maxbarth.substack.com

comedian, writer (The New Yorker, Reductress, The Hard Times, Hard Drive, Slackjaw, Points In Case), Libra moon. All my stuff: maxbarthcomedy.com