Jacob Fortune-Lloyd as Brian Epstein in Midas Man.James Loxley/Supplied
Early in Midas Man, the new Brian Epstein biopic, viewers are taken back to the Cavern Club, a dank venue in Liverpool. It is November, 1961, and the prefame Beatles are playing a slapdash lunchtime show, with Epstein in the audience. Someone remarks that the young musicians are scruffy. To which an intrigued Epstein replies, “I can work on that.”
And did he ever. Under his management and mentorship, the Beatles became a pop-culture phenomenon.
Played in the film by Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Epstein, the son of Jewish retailers, was a dapper, educated young man who worked in his family’s group of stores, which sold furniture, appliances and records. He looked after the record sales. And while he had no experience managing music acts before the Beatles, he fancied himself a shrewd judge of talent: “I can smell a hit before the vinyl is even dry.” He also had a flair for retail window displays.
Window-dressing is as good a description as any for what Epstein did with the Beatles: He got them out of jeans and leather jackets and into mohair suits, ordered look-alike haircuts and had them tighten up their performances. He also worked his ascot off for them.
“I promise I will look after you,” he says in the film, which premieres at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on May 30. “Like family, only better. No secrets from each other.”
There were secrets, though. Epstein was in the closet at a time when homosexual acts were illegal in England. And despite his Midas touch with music acts – his young discoveries also included Gerry and the Pacemakers, Cilla Black and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas – he hid sadness, loneliness and anxieties. In 1967, at age 32, he was found dead in his bed in London. The cause, according to a coroner, was “incautious self-overdosage.”
Epstein once said that the Beatles expressed a “cross quality of happiness and tragedy” he believed made for the best entertainment. The quote also applied to his life.
“It’s a tragic story,” director Joe Stephenson told The Globe and Mail. “But what I wanted to do was find a way to portray a sense of joy, so that it wouldn’t be a miserable journey the viewer would be going on.”
As for journeys, the road to Midas Man was a long and winding one. British filmmaker Stephenson is the third director attached to project, which began shooting in 2021. Jonas Åkerlund followed by Sara Sugarman left the film for what have been described as creative differences and scheduling issues.
Coming in late, Stephenson relied on producer Trevor Beattie and screenplay writer Brigit Grant to get him up to speed. Grant, a journalist, had access to Freda Kelly, Epstein’s secretary.
Among the cast, in addition to The Queen’s Gambit actor Fortune-Lloyd, are Emily Watson and Eddie Marsan as Epstein’s parents. Jay Leno (as Ed Sullivan) and Eddie Izzard (as former Beatles manager Allan Williams) have bit roles. Stephenson directed Izzard in the 2023 gothic horror film Doctor Jekyll.
That the Beatles are played by relative unknowns was an intentional decision.
“The film is not about the Beatles, it’s about Brian,” Stephenson said. “In my mind, the Beatles were always going to be a slight distraction, but we weren’t going be overwhelmed by their story.”
No Beatles-written material or recordings are used in the film. The Beatles’ Apple Corps is known to be protective when it comes to licensing the band’s songs. Instead, early-career cover tunes such as Please Mr. Postman and Some Other Guy are performed by a mix of musicians and Beatle actors billed as Four Little Hamburgers – a reference to the band’s infamous residencies in red-light Reeperbahn district of Hamburg, Germany.
That chapter of the Beatles career was covered extensively in the 1994 drama Backbeat. Paul McCartney spoke publicly about the film’s minor inaccuracies. He and the other surviving Beatles, Ringo Starr and Pete Best, are not involved in Midas Man.
“They will see it,” Stephenson said. “We know that.”
Epstein’s relationship with the fictional American actor Tex Ellington is covered, but his rumoured real-life affair with John Lennon on a Spanish holiday the two took together in 1963 is not.
“We did try to put in a little bit of chemistry, the way they looked at each other,” Stephenson said. “But we were intent on being factual, and not adding to the speculation.”
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify that Tex Ellington is a fictional character created for the film.