After the 1967 death of Beatles manager Brian Epstein, Paul McCartney's answer was to urge the other three members of the group to press ahead with the project that he had been dreaming up, the Magical Mystery Tour television movie. The Beatles were to script, direct, and produce the film themselves, but without Brian's guiding hand this was a recipe for disaster. Musically, they hadn't yet put a foot wrong, but when it came to dealing with the world of cinema they were simply out of their range.
"[Paul] came and showed me what his idea was, and this is how it went ... the production and everything," John Lennon recalled for Rolling Stone interviewer Jann Wenner. "He said, 'Well, here's the segment, you write a little piece for that.' And I thought ... 'I've never made a film, what's he mean, write a script!' So I ran off and wrote the dream sequence for the fat woman, and all the things with the spaghetti and all that. It was like that."