A sci-fi movie treatment written by Paul McCartney for his post-Beatles band Wings was abandoned after he and co-writer Isaac Asimov failed to agree on the concept.
The movie, with the working titled Five and Five and One, started out as a brief overview written by McCartney, who started with the idea of shape-changing aliens landing on Earth and taking on the forms of him and his bandmates.
But it stalled after the musician didn’t like sci-fi giant Asimov’s developed treatment, leading the award-winning author to note: “Nothing ever came of this because McCartney couldn’t recognize good stuff.”
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The 1974 documents were discovered by writers Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair, and appear in their latest book The McCartney Legacy, Volume 2: 1974-80, to be published by HarperCollins on Dec. 10.
McCartney’s treatment begins: “A ‘flying saucer’ lands. Out of it get five creatures. They transmute before your very eyes into ‘us’ [Wings]. They are here to take over Earth by taking America by storm and they proceed to do this supergroup style. Meanwhile – back in the sticks of Britain – lives the original group, whose personalities are being used by the aliens …”
He flew to New York to meet Asimov, who then wrote his own treatment. “The picture opens with the arrival on Earth of six extra-terrestrial characters. They are from a dying planet and are looking for a new home. They are wraith-like energy-beings who are parasitic on matter-beings.
“The space-ship is hidden in a handy cave by the occupied lizard creatures who, however, are clearly dying. We know what the energy-beings are saying because they are communicating by thought-waves and we can overhear them…
Paul McCartney Sci-Fi Movie ‘Cooked Up While They Were Smoking’
“They do leave the lizards and appear as cloudy creatures, whom we nevertheless can still clearly understand. … they get into a group of nearby domestic animals, almost asa way of hiding themselves.”
Asimov suggested the aliens found themselves “strangely affected” by human music and “decide that they must use the musical key to unlock human emotion.”
“They’ve just been sitting there,” Sinclair told the Guardian of finding the documents in the archives of Asimov, who died in 1992. “Paul’s treatment reads like something Paul and Linda cooked up while they were smoking something particularly potent.”
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