Hold On!

Hold On! (1966)

You've never heard faster beats or seen wilder fun!

Herman's Hermits' first film, in which the British band has the chance to have an American spacecraft named for them.

Date of release
1966-06-22
TMDB
5.7 / 10 (7)
Runtime
1h 25m
Genres
Comedy
Director
Arthur Lubin

Casting

Interesting facts

Hold On! is a 1966 American musical film directed by Arthur Lubin and starring Peter Noone, Shelley Fabares, Herbert Anderson, and Sue Ane Langdon. The film features performances by Herman's Hermits and stars the band as fictionalized versions of themselves. The soundtrack was released as an album, also called Hold On!.

Production info

Hold On!, largely an excuse to string together performances by Herman's Hermits, stars the band as themselves on tour across the United States. The band had already appeared in a film for MGM produced by Sam Katzman, When the Boys Meet the Girls. Katzman decided to put the band in their own film.

The Beatles and The Dave Clark Five had already appeared in films. Peter Noone later joked, "where we jumped out of the loop was…the Beatles ran away from girls and the Dave Clark Five ran away from girls, but we slowed down for the really sexy ones. So we set a new standard for British rock bands!"

The film began production as There's No Place Like Space. James B Gordon was signed to write the script in August 1965. Filming started in September 1965.

The film's name was changed to A Must to Avoid and songwriter P. F. Sloan was commissioned to write a theme song in less than two days. He completed the song and it appears in the film but the studio, realizing the negative connotation of calling a movie A Must to Avoid, then changed the movie's name to Hold On!. Sloan wrote that title song as well.

Noone later said Lubin "was the real thing... He was amazing. And he was a real gentleman. He gave us all kinds of good advice. I was already an actor – I’d already gone through acting school and stuff like that – but none of the others had. They were just thrown into the deep end. And he gave them time to be…themselves, basically."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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