From RUTLEMANIA.ORG:
(used with permission)

On a tiny budget, but with a hilariously clever and knowing script, Eric Idle and Neil Innes labored to create the story of The Rutles in a movie for NBC Television called All You Need Is Cash. The TV film was originally intended as a late-night special, perhaps to fill in for NBC's Saturday Night on one of its weeks off. NBC was so taken with the project, though, that they moved it to prime-time. The budget wasn't increased in response to the move, but Idle's experience doing Rutland Weekend Television on a chat show budget would pay off here.

An album of music from the show was expected to be released on Arista Records (which had both the Python troupe and Neil Innes under contract in the United States). Amazingly, another Beatles connection arose and changed all that. Former Beatles Press Officer Derek Taylor had moved to the United States several years earlier and was now a Vice President at Warner Bros. Records. He knew about the Rutles TV movie project, and convinced his company to pick up the album from Arista.

Derek Taylor put his immense experience at promotion to work on the Rutles album. Marshalling the impressive might of Warner Bros. Records, he put together a breathtakingly massive promotional campaign. He became Rutles Press Officer Eric Manchester. Although Michael Palin played the role of Manchester in the All You Need Is Cash, Taylor actually was him, writing and issuing press releases, and generally getting the word out. It is Taylor that was responsible for the impressive album package. He gave the project a budget large enough to do it big.

Says Neil : The opportunity of making All You Need Is Cash, the Rutles, sort of came about by accident as well. I was doing a show with Eric called Rutland Weekend Television and he wrote skits and I wrote musical ideas. And one of the things I thought would be cheap and cheerful to do was a parody of A Hard Days Night, and Eric had an idea for a documentary maker who was so boring that the camera ran away from him. And we showed this on Saturday Night Live, and before I knew where we were, could I write 20 more Rutle songs by next Thursday lunchtime? - court t.v. interview, 2000 Well, you never know that you can do these things until you're asked. I mean it wasn't as though I was sort of sitting there, waiting, 'oh if only somebody would ask me to parody the Beatles,' I mean literally it's your job to do it, and you do it." - Nicky Campbell radio interview, 1992 "And that's how I became a parodist. I didn't listen to one Beatles song, I wrote songs based on my memory of them. The hardest part was coming up with genuinely affectionate songs like Hold My Hand, working in stories from your own adolescent experience. We needed something from each period, because The Beatles never did the same thing twice. That was the brief for the film. The thing was to make the lyrics just parallel, or askew, and not use the same tune." Q Magazine, 1996 "I made a conscious decision not to listen to the records; I did everything from my memory of how it ought to sound. The psychedelic lyrics were easy, you just rhymed anything with anything else, but the earlier songs were difficult to get right, because of on the Beatles' trademarks is that the tunes and the words were always just a little bit unpredictable, so I was constantly throwing out tunes because they were too ordinary. The whole Rutles group could play. Ollie Halsall - who did a lot on the songs but is only in the film as Leppo, the fifth Rutle - was an incredibly underrated guitarist and singer, as was John Halsey. Rikki Fataar was a very accomplished all-rounder who'd played with The Beach Boys. The best thing I did was to insist that we all rehearsed together, playing live several times before filming started, so we became a proper band. Ollie did most of the Paul-type singing and Eric had to mime to his vocals. He never quite forgave me for that." - Q Magazine, 1996 Says John Altman, the orchestra arranger of the Rutle songs: The Rutles, I think - I'm trying to think what stage they'd got to - they'd been rehearsing, and they'd recorded a few backing tracks. They hadn't worked out a hook for 'Love Life', how to get it going, so I came up with the 'John Brown's Body' idea, that was mine, at the beginning, to parody the marsellaise on 'All You Need Is Love', and then all the stuff at the end was my idea. And we just all threw ideas out and into the mix. And you'd start listening, you'd hear on 'Penny Lane', there's a flute playing behind the vocals. It's something you never actually notice, and it's just there for a couple of bars. So I put one in for a couple of bars in 'Doubleback Alley'. And I remember playing the tapes to Clive Franks who was Elton John's engineer, who'd been the tape op on all the Beatles sessions, and he was saying, 'How did you know that? That's what we did! Nobody's ever noticed that was there!' So I sort of dug into it. I was never really sure about how George Martin felt about all that. Obviously Neil talked a lot about what the Beatles thought about what the Rutles did, and then years later I sort of met him somewhere and someone introduced me and said, 'This is John Altman, he's...' and George Martin said 'I know who John Altman is!" - John Altman interview "When we did the sessions on the Rutles, when we were doing 'Piggy in the Middle', one of the cellists - I mean, all the string players really got into it, they loved it - and one of the cellists said, 'Oh, the original record is Bram Martin and someone else, the guys who played on the original, and they really played it like this, with the bows like this, so should we do that?' And as soon as they did it, you went 'Wow! That's the Beatles!' And that was like, something that you wouldn't particularly know, but because the cellist listened to the cello on the original record, he would say 'This is how they play, those guys played like this' and as soon as they did it, bingo, you've got another element. You'd written half of it into the arrangement. They put the other half in. So that's why the string playing sounds so Beatley. It really does. They'd got the essence of the string sections that the Beatles used. And every single player who came on did what they knew worked on Beatles tracks. That's why it's so authentic." - John Altman interview

MORE FROM RUTLEMANIA.ORG:

All You Need Is Cash was broadcast March 22, 1978, in a prime weeknight 9:30pm to 11:00pm time slot. Despite a getting almost unanimously good reviews, it got slaughtered. Not only did the show come in last in its time slot, it was the lowest rated show for the entire week (coming in at number 65 out of 65 shows). It did so poorly that NBC, which had rights for two airings, dumped All You Need Is Cash's second airing in its experimental late night Sunday movie slot. The show had its final network airing at 11:45pm on December 10, 1978. (NBC would give up the Sunday late night experiment a few months later anyway; that time slot remains the only one that the American networks have never succeeded in programming.)

All You Need Is Cash did much better outside the US. It first aired in the UK on BBC2 at 8:45pm on March 27, 1978, where it got critical raves and an excellent audience response. So great was the reaction that the show was re-run just two months later on BBC1, May 27, 1978, at 10:15pm.

Real Video lo quality 380K
stream   download

"Eric had it written and recorded Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life, and he said, 'There's something not right with it.' And I said, 'What?' Because having just done the Rutles at that time, John Altman and Steve James and I came along to the studio to listen to it. And it was basically going, 'Always look on the bright side of life.' And these strings were going da da deee da dum… filling in the gaps, you know. And I said, 'Well, you've got a mention of whistling in the opening preamble - when you're chewing on life's gristle pucker up and give a whistle - why don't you have a bit of whistling in there?' 'All right. What do you mean?' So they ran it, and I said, 'Well, take all the strings out and just run the basic thing.' I put the cans on, and they ran it through and I just went, (whistles the whistle), and I said, 'Something like that.' And he said, 'Yeah, all right.' I never got credited for that!

" Life of Brian, I was supposed to do quite a bit in. I was really looking forward to doing the soldier who couldn't stop laughing when Pontius Pilate is going on about his friend Biggus Dickus. But anyway, events are moving swiftly. The script is with Rank and Sir Bernard Delfont read the script, decided that it was blasphemous, and they weren't going to go ahead with it. All of the executives at Rank had gone 100% for it. Drudged the money and everything. Terry Gilliam had even animated the titles, in which I had a huge credit. So basically, Bernard Delfont pulled the plug, and then George Harrison stepped in with the money. But six months had gone by, and in that six months, it was time for me to go and make the first series of the Innes Book of Records. So I literally finished filming that and flew out to Tunesia for the last week of the Life of Brian. Because it was such a… they weren't going to re-do the credits. And because I was on the credits they said, 'You'd better get out here and do something, you bugger!'

"They'd done everything, basically, and I turned up for the last week of filming and stayed in the beach hut with Eric. We were partying into the evening and writing jingles that no one had asked for. And then on a Saturday morning, the very last day of the shoot, and I was dressed up as this prisoner chased around by a gladiator who has a heart attack. And that was my contribution to Life of Brian."

"Life of Brian" - Neil's "weedy Sumarian" - is called "Morris Feinberg" by the fight announcer Michael Palin. (And in the "Crapbook" there is a photo of Neil on his knees, claiming he is remaking "The Jazz Singer")