As many of you may know, I am a huge, big time Beatles fan. Have been for as long as I can remember, and always will be.I have every Beatles album, and they are the musical act I have the most songs in my iPod.
I have always been fascinated by the "Paul Is Dead" mystery that first came to the public's attention in October 1969. I've read a few books and articles on the subject. The story goes that Paul was killed in a car accident in November 1966 and replaced by a guy who had won a Paul McCartney lookalike contest so the band could continue. I even did something about it in my college speech class in 1982. My teacher gave us an assignment to give a "speech to convince" on absolutely any subject under the sun. I picked "Paul McCartney is Dead", and brought in all my Beatles albums and explained to my class that Paul was killed in 1966 in a car accident and was replaced by a double and that the current Paul was a fake.
It was all tongue-in-cheek of course, but my teacher, Mr. Levy, was a big Beatles fan and loved it, and gave me an A.
So, after all these years, I came to the conclusion that "Paul Is Dead" was really either a hoax or an elaborate joke by the group on its fans and media. (No one connected to the group has ever confirmed that it was all just a planned joke. It's just all too much to be a coincidence.)
Earlier this week, I discovered a documentary on NetFlix called "Paul Is REALLY Dead: The Last Testament of George Harrison", which claims that the documentary's producers (something called Highway 61 Productions) got some tapes sent to them in 2005 by persons unknown, and the tapes claim to be George getting the whole "Paul Is Dead" off his chest, and that it really happened and Paul was indeed killed in 1966 and replaced by a Paul lookalike named William Campbell.
The documentary, which is supposedly in George's own words (yeah right) claims an elaborate conspiracy was hatched by the Beatles and MI5, the British intelligence organization, to keep Paul's "death" a secret from the public, and that a mass wave of suicides would happen if Paul's death became public. They enlisted Campbell to be the fake Paul, or "Faul" as the film calls him. He supposedly has all kinds of plastic surgeries to become Paul.
This is just a very sloppily done documentary. They claim that there are clues on the Rubber Soul and Revolver album covers, as John Lennon was anxious to put them out there. But there is one problem with that: both albums came out BEFORE the alleged death of Paul, which they say happened on November 9, 1966. (Rubber Soul in December 1965 and Revolver in July 1966.)
(They also tried to connect John Lennon's murder in 1980 to the attack on George in his English mansion in 1999. They say that MI5 was behind both, and that they would get any of the band should any of the surviving Beatles ever go public with the conspiracy. They claim that John told George a week before his death he was going to go public and tell the world about it. This is beyond ludicrous.)
When I saw this, I knew this whole conspiracy theory they were pushing is a fake. I believe that 99% of all the conspiracy theories I have ever heard, whether about Pearl Harbor up to the 9/11 attacks, are complete BS. They give so-called "conspirators" way too much credit, and the "plots" almost always have tons of holes in them. And this film has more than tons of them.
I won't point out each one, but another that had me laughing was that Fake Paul McCartney was "forced" to marry the woman who had witnessed the original accident and that she eventually lost a leg in another accident years later: Heather Mills. One big problem with this: Heather wasn't even born yet in 1966. So there is plenty of unintentional comedy in this rubbish.
So if you want to watch this, watch "Paul Is REALLY Dead" the way I did: not believing a single word of what you're seeing. I'll never get back the one hour and thirty-five minutes I spent watching this nonsense, but at least it gave me a laugh or two.
