Fake Fab Four Flip Us Off

Four young actors walked across the most famous crosswalk on Earth. About nine seconds later, the internet decided the whole thing was a catastrophe.

Harris Dickinson (John), Paul Mescal (Paul), Joseph Quinn (George) and Barry Keoghan (Ringo) were filming the Abbey Road cover recreation for Sam Mendes' four-picture Beatles project. Drone footage and paparazzi shots were out before lunch, and the comments started rolling in.

They were not kind.

"The mop tops wearing actual mop tops."

"Don't remember the Beatles as four ugly slightly overweight blokes in atrocious wigs," wrote one fan. "Some of the worst wig work i've ever seen in my life," said another. A third just threw up his hands: "Everything is silly and wrong. Oh dearie me."

And then the killer, the one that had to sting all the way to the production office: "Even Walk Hard did it better." For those who missed it, that's the 2007 spoof where Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Justin Long and Jason Schwartzman played the Beatles for about ninety seconds as a gag.

When your $200 million prestige picture is losing to a Judd Apatow joke, you've got a problem.

The Hair Situation

Here's what's reportedly going on behind the scenes. The wigs aren't finished. A source close to the production says Mendes isn't rattled yet — he's apparently willing to let Sony's in-house effects people gently clean up hairlines in post if it comes to that, something he's done on his films before.

Mescal is said to be using as much of his own hair as he can manage, though he's still in wigs and a fake beard for big stretches. Keoghan grew his out, but it only really works for the tail end of the story, 1969 and after. Dickinson and Quinn are reportedly in wigs one hundred percent of the time — hours in the chair every single morning, hair glued and knitted on.

The same source admits the obvious: shooting outdoors in public, with unfinished looks, while everybody in London has a phone, isn't doing these guys any favors. There's a limit to how much bad press a project this strange and this expensive can absorb.

But the man still has something like eighteen more months of shooting ahead of him. Nothing you're looking at is finished.

Now About Those Fingers

Then came the picture that really got the fans going.

A between-takes shot surfaced of the four of them standing in the bushes in full 1969 kit — John in the white suit, George in the denim, the works. Two of them are casually flipping the bird straight at the camera. 

But the detail that got me was Keoghan. There he is as Ringo, and he's throwing up two fingers with the back of his hand out — which in Britain is not a peace sign at all. It's the V-sign, and it means exactly what the middle finger means, only ruder and considerably older. Which is a funny thing to see on Ringo, of all people. The man has spent the last fifty years greeting every camera, every fan and every hotel lobby with peace fingers and "peace and love." Same two fingers. Hand turned the other way. Completely opposite message.

The fans caught the whole business instantly. "This is supposed to be 1969. I don't recall that the middle finger gesture was a thing back then? Not in the UK anyway," wrote one.

He's got half a point. The middle finger is ancient — the Romans had a name for it — and it was common enough in America by the sixties. But a Liverpool lad in 1969 telling you off would almost certainly have gone with the two fingers, which is what Keoghan did. So at least one of them got the period right.

Of course, none of them were in character. They were four actors standing around between setups, sweating under glued-on hair, mugging at a photographer they hadn't invited.

My Two Cents

Set photos often look terrible. What you're seeing is unlit, uncolored, shot from a drone or through a hedge from a hundred yards away, months before anyone touches it in post. 

I'll also say this — nobody is ever going to look like them. Not really. We've had those four faces burned into our heads since we were kids. Any actor walking into that role is starting the game down three runs.

What I care about is whether they sound right, move right, and whether Mendes can make you feel what it was like in that room when the harmonies locked in. He's got the full catalog and the blessing of Apple Corps and all four estates — first time that's ever happened for a scripted film. That's not nothing.

Ringo's already given his verdict on Keoghan playing him: he says he's in good hands.

If Ringo's not worried about the wigs, I'm not either.

OK, maybe I'm a little worried.  We'll see.