The long and winding road to success (Photo by Jeff Hochberg/Getty Images)

Around this time last year, I came out of a press screening of Yesterday thinking that writer Richard Curtis and director Danny Boyle had wasted a fantastic concept. What if you were the only person on Earth who remembered the Beatles? The film gave the dullest possible answer: you’d become a megastar by playing their songs but you’d feel a bit grubby about it. As I wrote at the time, “Not only does Curtis not answer the questions he has raised; he doesn’t even appear to notice he has asked them.” Now it turns out that a much more interesting take already existed: the original screenplay.
Last week, struggling screenwriter Jack Barth told Uproxx how, in 2012, he wrote a screenplay called Cover Version about an unsuccessful singer-songwriter who — you’ve guessed it — is the only person who remembers the Beatles and presents their songs as his own. But while Yesterday’s Jack Malik, the latest in a long line of sweet but emotionally inept Curtismen, hits the big time, Barth’s protagonist does not.
Barth sold the screenplay to producer Matthew Wilkinson in 2013 and worked on a version with Mackenzie Crook (The Office, The Detectorists), before Wilkinson and co-producer Lee Brazier approached Richard Curtis three years later. “We worked quite intensely with Jack on the script but thought we might need a bigger writer for it,” Brazier told Screen Daily last year. Curtis’s star power quickly brought Boyle, Beatles rights-holders Apple Corps and co-star Ed Sheeran on board.
Barth’s role in the film wasn’t exactly secret but the Uproxx story struck a nerve, triggering news stories and social media uproar. Perhaps it’s down to the irony of the writer of a film about taking credit for someone else’s work apparently taking credit for someone else’s work, or perhaps a lot of people just hate Richard Curtis, but it was widely read as a plagiarism scandal. It’s not. Barth’s idea was bought and paid for, and he received a “story by” credit.
Even if the presence of certain key scenes in Barth’s draft — Jack playing ‘Yesterday’ to his startled friends, John Lennon’s appearance as a humble fisherman, the final gag — casts doubt on Curtis’s claim that he never read it and took nothing but a “one-line plot” from Barth, the film-makers’ only real offence was to shut Barth out of the promotional narrative, thus robbing a man in his 60s of a desperately-needed career boost.
The idea itself was not unique. You only have to consider the number of novels in which Nazi Germany has won the Second World War to see that historical turning points breed counterfactuals, and similar ideas involving the Beatles appear in Australian author Nick Milligan’s 2013 ebook Enormity and Eddie Robson’s Doctor Who audiobook 1963: Fanfare for the Common Men (both published after Barth wrote his screenplay).
The same year, David Quantick’s TV drama Snodgrass imagined a timeline in which John Lennon stormed out of the Beatles in 1962. In a 1996 episode of the sitcom Goodnight Sweetheart, George Formby’s agent attempts to buy ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ from Nicholas Lyndhurst’s time traveller. The differences are more interesting than the similarities. If you gave the same general concept — the Beatles’ music minus the Beatles themselves — to 10 writers, you’d end up with 10 distinct stories angles on the relationship between creativity and success.
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