Paul McCartney planned an alien musical film written by sci-fi legend Isaac Asimov

9 December 2024, 10:33

Paul McCartney has been involved in some pretty weird films over the years.

After The Beatles' lost legal papers recently resurfaced, some much stranger papers associated with Paul McCartney have just been discovered.

Writers of upcoming book The McCartney Legacy, Volume 2: 1974-80 have found something remarkable: a treatment for a sci-fi musical written by McCartney, and an expanded redraft by genre icon Isaac Asimov.

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Asimov is widely acknowledged as one of the masters of science fiction, with his works including the Foundation series, the I, Robot collection of short stories and countless others.

So when McCartney had the loose idea for a movie musical called Five and Five and One about aliens arriving on Earth and morphing into members of his band Wings, Asimov was the perfect collaborator.

Sir Paul travelled to New York to visit Asimov in 1974 to work on his 400-word treatment, but the ex-Beatle ended up nixing the whole project, The Guardian reports.

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It sounds like what they came up with was every bit as strange as past McCartney movies Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine.

"We actually have the correspondence between McCartney and Asimov," said author Allan Kozinn.

"We've got McCartney's treatment and we’ve got what Asimov did with the treatment, which McCartney didn’t particularly like. By early 1975, the project was abandoned.

"What’s interesting is seeing what McCartney’s original idea was and how a science-fiction master like Asimov would try to improve it – and the fact that McCartney turned it down."

Asimov had tweaked some ideas in the story, which he had expanded into a 1,800-word outline.

He made the aliens "energy beings" from a dying planet who can't understand human emotions but are "strangely affected" by music, leaving them to "decide that they must use the musical key to unlock human emotion".

Asimov wrote over the first page of the abandoned rewrite: "Nothing ever came of this because McCartney couldn’t recognise good stuff."