![]() Just three years later, dark clouds had swept in. Life after the Beatles was looking decidedly peachy. And they were about to rack up a monster number one in Wings weepie Mull of Kintyre. McCartney and wife Linda had recently welcomed their third child, James. He was at that point living his best Macca existence. But We All Stand Together actually dates from 1977, when McCartney was pushing on with plans for a feature-length Rupert Bear movie. To modern ears it sounds like a quintessentially Eighties guilty pleasure, to be filed alongside Shakin’ Stevens and the Birdie Song. Soon it was all over the radio and had vaulted to number three in the charts. To many others, however, it is sweetness on a stick. Few things erode a rock star’s mystique quite like than a choir of burping lily-pad dwellers. We All Stand Together, once heard, is not easily forgotten – for better or worse. “Win or lose, sink or swim/One thing is certain we'll never give in.” And then, after 22 seconds of froggy frippery, in comes McCartney crooning the opening verse. And that’s the case even if you’ve barely heard of Rupert Bear or are fuzzy as to what Paul McCartney was up to in 1984. The gently harrumphing frog chorus is immediately recognisable. The “Frog Song”, as it has become universally known, is today one of McCartney’s signature hits. Concealed within, like the syrupy filling of a foil-wrapped chocolate, was a performance that would define McCartney in the Eighties: amphibian power ballad, We All Stand Together. Rupert and the Frog Song is an animated short clocking in at an economical 13 minutes. The curtain raiser was another cinematic curio from McCartney – one that could not have been more different from the snooze-a-thon to follow. Give My Regards To Broad Street had been released as a double bill. An unexpected treat awaited as they took their seats and tucked into their popcorn. At least for Beatles fans lured, potentially against their better judgement, to Give My Regards To Broad Street when it opened in cinemas in October 1984. Strange as it may sound this is, however, a story with a happy ending. He woke in a hospital room filled with flowers: a “thank you” from McCartney, who had personally selected the Sooty helmer to direct his passion project. Shortly afterwards he suffered a breakdown and was hospitalised. ![]() That was just the start of the bad news for Webb, whose previous credits included an episode of the Sooty Show and two of “Seventies Supernatural Kids Drama” Shadows. This was a hard day’s slog: a charmless, incoherent mishmash. Sadly, it lacked any other redeeming qualities. There was, to be fair, plenty of McCartney in the film. This was on the understanding the studio was backing a “Hollywood musical” starring ex-Beatle Paul McCartney. He had put his reputation on the line talking 20th Century Fox into investing £4.4 million in Webb’s debut feature, Give My Regards To Broad Street (initially budgeted at £500,000). And now he stood to be publicly humiliated. Weinstein, just 32, was already notorious in the industry as a bulldog whose bite was considerably worse than his bark. “Next time,” Hollywood’s hottest up-and-coming producer growled, “Show me the script.” Harvey Weinstein leaned close, eyeballing the director. ![]()
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