What John Lennon And Brian Epstein Might Have Been Like

XXX 1/2 "The Hours and Times," with David Angus, Ian Hart. Written and directed by Christopher Munch. Neptune Theater, today through Saturday. No rating.

Did they or didn't they? Could the 23-year-old John Lennon and the Beatles' 29-year-old gay manager, Brian Epstein, have become lovers during a trip to Barcelona in the spring of 1963?

It doesn't seem like a question that could sustain a prize-winning feature-length film, and in truth it doesn't. Christopher Munch's "The Hours and Times" isn't quite a feature (it runs only 60 minutes) and ultimately it doesn't answer the question.

But Munch's shoestring-budget movie, which played the Seattle International Film Festival several months ago and returns today for a three-day run at the Neptune, does a superlative job of suggesting what kind of people Epstein and Lennon were in private.

Thanks to Munch's thoughtful script and excellent performances by Ian Hart as Lennon and David Angus as Epstein, "The Hours and Times" does a far better job than such once-over-lightly TV movies as "The Birth of the Beatles" (1979) or "John and Yoko: A Love Story" (1985). It's pure speculation, but handled in a personal way that transcends the docudrama genre.

Surprisingly, its writer-producer-editor-cinematographer-director, who was born in 1962, praises some aspects of those earlier productions. Even though he was born too late to become a Beatlemaniac, he seems to have read all the books and seen all the films in which Lennon and Epstein figure.

Munch claims to have seen the made-for-TV films after he had begun shooting "The Hours and Times," although he did take a look at "A Hard Day's Night," "Darling" and "Don't Look Back" before production began. Like those 1960s films, "The Hours and Times" is in black-and-white, and at times it seems to have been filmed back then. It has a fly-on-the-wall kind of candor.

Munch acknowledges "Don't Look Back," which deals with Bob Dylan's tour of England in the mid-1960s, as an especially strong visual influence: "It's utterly specific to that time. Those images recall that period."

"I was never really a huge Beatles fan," he said. "But I was aware of this friendship, and in 1988 I wrote a script about them. I considered not naming them Epstein and Lennon for a while, but in the end the power of the story seemed diminished by not being about them."

He also became quite interested in Epstein's problems as an openly gay man in a prominent public position in the early 1960s. He died a suicide in 1967.

"It was a difficult time to be a homosexual in England," said Munch. "The photos of Epstein are very revealing. There's a pitch of intensity and an underlying melancholy and longing. Usually he's depicted as a nice, generous, marginal, desperately unhappy man who wanted to be a dress designer.

"At a gay bar in Liverpool, I did connect with a couple of people who knew him then. He seemed to go through a profound inner change before his death, when he became more detached, less involved in the affairs of his artists. That really was a period when he no longer needed as much from the Beatles. I find his whole life very moving."

Munch thinks his film could herald an Epstein revival: "There's an interesting play by Kevin Scott, `An Evening With Brian Epstein,' that's going to be produced this autumn, and HBO is developing a life-of-Epstein movie. Kevin's play has a nice perspective and it skillfully interweaves factual and historical material."

As for his own account of the Epstein/Lennon relationship, he's been somewhat surprised by its success: "It cuts across different lines and gets to a broader audience than a specialty art-house film. It's been sold to Channel 4 in England and it's part of a British Film Institute touring package. I'm pleased the film is out there. That was important to me."

Although he's just turned 30, Munch is already an experienced filmmaker. He made Super-8 films while going to high school in San Diego, and he spent five years in the early 1980s on a feature film about the music business. Next came a drama about unrequited love, "Laura's Garden," starring Lynn Holly Johnson, that was completed in 1987. "The Hours and Times," which he financed and edited himself, was a much smaller project.

"With `The Hours and Times' I essentially had no crew, but I was working with two actors who were physically and spiritually up for this kind of production. The subject matter lent itself to a fairly austere style, and they were troupers."

Munch is now working on "The Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day," a script set in California in the 1940s, which he describes as "an elegiac film about the death of the railroads and how Southern California changed after the war."