"Give My Regards To Broad Street" press conference (New York)

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The screening of the film was the night before the press gathering — a group interview in which five or six writers would sit down with McCartney for an hour (a luxurious amount of time, as those press things went).

The McCartney interview was scheduled for mid-morning. Armed with my tape recorder and camera, I naturally got to the Plaza about an hour and a half early and was the first writer shown to the room where the interview would take place. I sized up the table, figured Paul would sit at the head of it (at the end nearest the door), and planted myself next to that spot. […]

At the end of the hour, all the other writers whipped out photos for him to sign, so I did likewise, as he and I chatted casually about the fact that a few days earlier I had interviewed Beatles film regular Victor Spinetti.

Vic, who it turned out had the same hometown in Wales as my mother, had suggested that I ask why he wasn’t in Paul’s new film! So, I did. And McCartney (who had used Spinetti in the music video for Wings’ “London Town”) basically said that he really didn’t have a character in his script that he thought would suit Vic’s talents.

Most of the interview naturally had focused on the “Broad Street” film and McCartney’s career, but I was the only one of the writers to ask McCartney about the Rupert Bear animated short that was being released on the same bill with his feature film.

Twentieth Century Fox had given next to no publicity to the 13-minute “Rupert and the Frog Song,” which featured an adventurous little bear who starred in a popular U.K. comic strip. So, it wasn’t surprising that the other reporters barely were aware of it. […]

When I asked him about “Rupert and the Frog Song,” Paul told me that, beyond the short, he really wanted to “make the big, full-length, Walt Disney sort of thing” about Rupert.

I asked why it had taken 14 years since the first word of a Rupert film for us to get even a short. “Well, people are not keen to make animation these days,” he said. […]

McCartney warmed to the subject after I brought up Rupert, waxing nostalgic about some of his favorite Disney films, saying “I’m trying to make a ‘Jungle Book’ or ‘Lady and the Tramp’ or ‘Bambi.’ I don’t like … modern animation at all. I’m still totally stuck with Thumper. To me, that is the absolute height of animation.”

With classic animation, he said, “you can create that illusion and such emotion that Disney got. Fabulous. So that’s what I’d like to do with Rupert, really.”

Working on “Rupert,” he said, had given him an even greater appreciation for the many details in story and art that make Disney animated classics special.

“When you come to do animation,” he said, “it’s fabulous, ’cause you realize just how good those guys were. Like, in ‘Lady and the Tramp,’ you’ve got two characters, Lady and Tramp. And if you or I were writing it, I think you would have Tramp call her ‘Lady’ But he never does. What does he address her as? ‘Pidge.’ That’s just brilliant. And nobody ever notices it till you try and write one of those.”

Paul repeated that he still had bigger plans for Rupert. “I really want to make the full-length picture,” he said. “What we’ve done with this short is see if we can move him, make him talk and make it work. I think it does work, so if a few more people agree with me, we’ll make the feature.”

Bill King – From New York Magic: The Plaza, a Beatle and Rupert Bear | SOMETHING NEW, October 23, 2024

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