Film producer Denis O'Dell, seen often in Peter Jackson's recent "The Beatles: Get Back" documentary and mentioned in the band's tune "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)," died Dec. 20, Variety reports.
Denis O’Dell, a producer on two Beatles’ movies as well as “How I Won the War,” “Robin and Marion” and “Heaven’s Gate,” died Dec. 30 from natural causes in AlmerÃa, Spain at his home in San José, Cabo de Gata. He was 98.
Father of “Exodus: Gods and Kings” producer Denise O’Dell and grandfather of Denis Pedregosa, producer of Netflix hit “The Paramedic,” O’Dell’s connection with movies stretches back to the ‘40s.
He had already produced six movies, such as Brian Desmond Hurst’s “The Playboy of the Western World” in 1962, before his association with the Beatles which begun in professional terms with O’Dell taking an associate producer credit on Richard Lester’s “A Hard Day’s Night,” starring the Beatles and released in 1964.
O’Dell is generally credited with persuading John Lennon to go to AlmerÃa to star in absurdist WWII drama “How I Won the War,” during whose shoot Lennon composed much of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” a milestone in the Beatles’ output. An associate producer on “How I Won the War,” O’Dell took a full producer credit on the made for TV “Magical Mystery Tour,” directed by George Harrison, Lennon and Paul McCartney.
Such was the Beatles’ gratitude to O’Dell that on “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number),” one of the last songs the group recorded, Lennon introduces McCartney by the name of “Denis O’Bell.”
O’Dell would go on to produce big films, such as Sidney Lumet’s 1973 “The Offence,” Lester’s 1975 Flashman-based “Royal Flash” and above all 1976’s “Robin and Marion,” starring Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn, and Michael Cimino’s 1980 “Heaven’s Gate,” where he worked on the film’s prologue, set and shot in Oxford, but had little to do with the rest of the film.
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