Richard Lester

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard Lester Liebman arrived at the University of Pennsylvania at the age of 15, already a graduate of a Quaker school in Philadelphia, studying clinical psychology rather than film. No one watching that prodigy walk across campus in the late 1940s would have guessed he would one day be called the Father of the Music Video. Yet that is exactly the award MTV sent him, decades later, in recognition of a single sequence from A Hard Day's Night. The questions this documentary sets out to answer are how a child prodigy from Philadelphia ended up reshaping British cinema, how a director who hated live television found his way into some of the most energetic films of the 1960s, and what finally made him put down the camera for good.

• 2. A Prodigy Finds Television

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  Lester entered the television industry in 1950, years before most people even owned a set. He advanced from stage hand to floor manager to assistant director to director in under a year, not because of special training but because, as he later recalled, no one else around him knew how to do the work.

  His first notable credit was as music director on Action in the Afternoon, a western series that CBS broadcast live from the studios of WCAU-TV in Philadelphia starting on the 2nd of February 1953. The show aired every weekday, rain or shine, at either 3:30 in the afternoon or 4:00, depending on the week. It ran until the 29th of January 1954 and was unusual for shooting outdoors regardless of weather.

  Live television wore Lester down. In May 1955, after a period spent busking across continental Europe, he moved to London and began directing for the low-budget Danziger Brothers, working on episodes of a half-hour detective series called Mark Saber. That same year he wrote for a comedy called Curtains for Harry, and for a few weeks contributed to The Barris Beat in 1956. The work was modest but it was putting him in proximity to the people who would change his career.

• 3. Goons, Sellers, and the Shape of Comedy

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  A variety show Lester produced attracted the attention of Peter Sellers, who asked him to help translate The Goon Show to television. The result was The Idiot Weekly, Price 2d in 1956, and it landed as a hit. Two more shows followed quickly: A Show Called Fred and Son of Fred, both in 1956.

  Lester later said of A Show Called Fred that it was "broadcast live and that's why I went into film directing where you can do a second take." That single observation explains much about the restless energy he would bring to film: a preference for control, for revision, for the wit that comes from choosing which moment to keep.

  With Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers, Lester made The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film in 1959. The short earned him critical acclaim and, crucially, an audience he had not yet found. John Lennon counted the film among his favourites. When the Beatles were contracted to make a feature film, Lennon's enthusiasm helped put Lester's name on a short list of possible directors. The Goon Show connection, it turned out, was a direct route to Beatlemania.

• 4. A Hard Day's Night and the Swinging Sixties

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  A Hard Day's Night arrived in 1964 as both a commercial and critical success. Lester shaped it as an exaggerated, simplified portrait of the Beatles' public characters, and it functioned as a remarkably effective piece of marketing for the band. The stylistic choices inside it, particularly the multi-angle filming of a live performance, became the template that music videos would follow for decades.

  Immediately after, Lester directed The Knack... and How to Get It in 1965, a sex comedy that won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It was the first of three films he made with actor Michael Crawford, and the first of four credited collaborations with screenwriter Charles Wood.

  The Beatles returned for Help! later that same year. Lester treated it as a spoof of the James Bond spy films then dominating cinemas, and it became another large commercial success. Charles Wood shared the screenplay credit again. By the mid-1960s the British Film Institute would later say of this period that if any single director could encapsulate the popular image of Britain in the Swinging Sixties, it was probably Lester, capturing the vitality and sometimes the triviality of the era more vividly than any other director.

  A Hollywood offer followed: the musical comedy A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 1966, his first American studio assignment.

• 5. Anti-War and the Cost of Principle

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  How I Won the War, released in 1967, marked a deliberate turn. Lester called it an "anti-anti-war movie," and the distinction mattered to him. The film was darkly surreal and satirical; though set in the Second World War it was, as he saw it, an oblique comment on Vietnam. At one point the film breaks the fourth wall and says so directly. Michael Crawford co-starred alongside John Lennon.

  Lester pushed further with The Bed Sitting Room in 1969, a post-apocalyptic black comedy drawn from a play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus. Charles Wood wrote the screenplay, completing a fourth credited collaboration with Lester, though Wood also provided uncredited rewrites across more of Lester's productions.

  Both films failed commercially. The losses left Lester unable to raise financing for projects he cared about, including an adaptation of the Flashman novels by George MacDonald Fraser. That frustration would wait years for resolution. Petulia, made in 1968 with Julie Christie and George C. Scott and a score by John Barry, was the one film of this period that held its own. Barry had also scored The Knack, and his presence gave Petulia a tonal coherence that some of Lester's more experimental work in these years could not sustain.

• 6. The Musketeers and a Career Reborn

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  Producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind hired Lester to direct The Three Musketeers in 1973, working from a script by George MacDonald Fraser, the same novelist whose Flashman books Lester had long wanted to adapt. The film was already shot when the Salkinds decided to divide it into two releases. The second, The Four Musketeers, appeared in 1974. Cast members had signed contracts for a single film, not two, and complained directly to the producers; an agreement was reached to avoid attorneys' fees.

  Both films were critical and commercial successes. The restored cash flow gave Lester the leverage to finally pursue the Flashman project, and he made Royal Flash in 1975, drawn from the second of Fraser's novels.

  Lester also stepped in at short notice as a replacement director on Juggernaut in 1974, a thriller set aboard a cruise liner. The Musketeers' success opened that kind of door. Robin and Marian followed in 1976, starring Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn, adapted from a script by James Goldman. That same year he made The Ritz, based on a play by Terrence McNally. Connery returned for Cuba in 1979, alongside Butch and Sundance: The Early Days, though neither film found an audience.

• 7. Superman and the Donner Dispute

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  Superman II became Lester's most commercially powerful film, though the circumstances around it remain contested. Principal photography on the sequel had begun alongside the first Superman, but work halted so the original could be completed. After Superman was released in late 1978, the Salkinds resumed production on the sequel without informing director Richard Donner, and Lester was placed behind the camera.

  Donner had already shot approximately 75 percent of the footage needed for the sequel. A significant portion of that material was discarded or reshot under Lester so that the director's credit could transfer to him. Gene Hackman, who played Lex Luthor, refused to participate in the reshoots. Lester resolved this by using a body double for new scenes and a voice impersonator to record fresh lines, occasionally looping those lines over existing Hackman footage shot by Donner.

  Some of Donner's original footage was used in television broadcasts of the film. In November 2006, that footage was re-edited into Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut, drawing primarily from Donner's material and using Lester's work only where Donner had not filmed the scene at all.

  Lester directed Superman III in 1983. Critics received it less warmly than its predecessors, but it ranked 14th in worldwide box office that year. The Salkinds had twice transformed Lester's career: first with the Musketeers and then with Superman.

• 8. Retirement and a Late Fellowship

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  Finders Keepers in 1984 starred Michael O'Keefe, Louis Gossett Jr., and Beverly D'Angelo and earned a domestic total gross of $1,467,396. Critic Richard Freedman, writing in The Montana Standard, called it "wonderfully wacky" and concluded that everyone involved ensured "this is one comedy that makes nobody in the audience a loser or a weeper."

  In 1988, Lester reassembled most of the Three Musketeers cast in Spain for The Return of the Musketeers, released the following year. During filming, Roy Kinnear, a close friend of Lester, died after falling from a horse. Lester completed the film, then stopped directing. He returned only once more, to film Paul McCartney's concert film Get Back in 1991.

  Steven Soderbergh was among the directors who argued publicly for a reappraisal of Lester's influence. In 1999, Soderbergh published Getting Away with It, a book of interviews with Lester about his career. It is in that book that Lester speaks openly about being a committed atheist, debating the subject with Soderbergh, who was then agnostic, drawing largely on the arguments of Richard Dawkins.

  In 2012, the British Film Institute awarded Lester a Fellowship, the highest honour the British film industry offers. The ceremony took place on the 22nd of March at the National Film Theatre, and ended with a screening of Robin and Marian. The citation credited him with creating a body of work that had enriched the lives of millions through what it called his brilliantly surreal humour and innovative style, noting that although born in the United States, he had lived in Britain for sixty years.