The Beatles are one of the most influential bands of all time. Name any rock group from the 1960s onward, and they are all, in some way, indebted to the Fab Four. Every member of the band was part of the broader fabric of pop culture, too. George Harrison singlehandedly ensured that Monty Python’s Life of Brian made it to the big screen after its financing fell through and started a movie production company, while John Lennon helped to turn world peace into a personality trait for an entire generation.
One contribution to the world of pop culture that the Beatles do not get enough credit for is helping to inspire an entirely new genre of film. During their 1968 trip to India, where they studied Transcendental meditation, Harrison and Lennon inadvertently inspired a young filmmaker through their blatant competitiveness with each other.
Joe Massot was an aspiring American director who met the Beatles on the set of Help! in 1965. He and Harrison must have gotten along pretty well, because when Massot made his feature directorial debut in 1968 with Wonderwall, the musician provided the soundtrack.
That same year, Massot went to India to hang out with his famous pals and experienced their extreme dedication to the art (and war) of meditation first-hand. There was one specific instance toward the end of the trip that particularly caught his imagination. “I was with George and John, and they were doing this duel of who could out-meditate who,” the director said in a 2001 interview with Elsewhere, annoyingly leaving out who actually won the duel. “I got this idea making a western about two guys having a duel. I went to Hollywood unfortunately and made a deal.”
The unfortunate deal that he was talking about was for the 1971 film Zachariah, which would become the first (and only) electric western. An anachronistic, psychedelic mess of a film, it stars John Rubinstein and Don Johnson as friends in the American desert who find a gun and decide to become world class gunslingers. After realising that their goals are divergent, they split up, and with several deviations into spiritualism and rock n’ roll, they inevitably confront each other in a duel.
It is not, to put it mildly, the greatest film of all time, nor is it anywhere close to the top 100 greatest westerns of all time, but it was the first electric western, a self-ordained sub-genre that was closely related to the acid western, which was emerging in the early ‘70s as well. The electric western never really took off as a distinct category, but Zachariah remains one of the emblematic films of the acid western genre with its trippy allusions to peace, love, and murdering your friends with guns.
It’s not clear whether Harrison and Lennon ever saw the film or even knew that it existed, but Lennon at least was a fan of the broader genre. A year before, he brought Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s genre-defining acid western El Topo to