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Today there was a wrap party for The Magic Christian, the Peter Sellers vehicle that Ringo had just finished filming. Paul and John attended, as did such luminaries as Sean Connery, Richard Harris, Christopher Lee, Roger Moore, and George Peppard. (For those of you keeping score at home, that’s two Bonds, one Dumbledore, one Dracula, and a Hannibal.)
I am told that some footage from the party appears in the 1969 BBC documentary called Will the Real Mr. Sellers Please Stand Up? I haven’t been able to spot it on a quick perusal, and don’t have time right now to watch the whole thing. Maybe you’ll have more luck; it does seem like a worthwhile watch, if you have 50 minutes on your hands:
As for The Magic Christian itself, it’s a while since I’ve seen it, but my memory is that it’s classic late-Sixties psychedelic filmmaking — colorful and intermittently entertaining, but rambling and incoherent. Perhaps a re-viewing is in order; we shall see.
In other news today, John and Yoko made arrangements to acquire an estate called Tittenhurst Park. It seems to have been a lovely place:
But that name. Tittenhurst. Giggle.
Says The Beatles Bible,
The mansion was located on a 72-acre estate on London Road in Sunningdale, Ascot. Lennon and Ono bought it for £145,000 from Peter Cadbury, an entrepreneur and the son of Sir Egbert Cadbury of the chocolate company Cadbury Brothers.
When John and Yoko moved to New York in the early Seventies, they sold the place to Ringo, who lived there for 15 years or so. Ringo sold it to Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan in 1988. “Since then,” says Wikipedia, “further extensive renovations to the manor have been carried out, and the interior no longer resembles the house lived in by Lennon and Starr.”
Both Plastic Ono Band and Imagine were recorded on the premises, as were, for some reason, a couple of Judas Priest albums. I bet there’s a story there, but our time is up for today.