The Brooklyn Rail

The new documentary Peter Asher: Everywhere Man traces back to May of 2012 when filmmaker Dayna Goldfine received a call from an old high school boyfriend. His housemate, the retired singer Linda Ronstadt, had an extra ticket to see a new cabaret show by her former manager Peter Asher. Dayna said yes to going even though she’d never heard of Peter. “I went because I wanted to meet Linda.” She left the show eager to tell her husband and filmmaking partner, Dan Geller, all about this British Invasion pop star and producer who’d been at the creative center of rock and roll for decades. She wanted them to tell his story.

Dayna and Dan have been married for forty years. They met while Dan was finishing his graduate film thesis at Stanford. Dayna, herself a Stanford graduate, had been interested in film and had also hoped to one day do something creative with whoever became her life partner. So that they would work together as peers and not with him as her teacher, Dayna took film courses at De Anza College in Cupertino at Dan’s suggestion. Their collaboration has produced acclaimed documentaries including Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song (2021), The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden (2013), and Ballets Russes (2005).

Peter Asher: Everywhere Man weaves scenes from Asher’s “musical memoir” cabaret show, archival footage of the London scene of the 1960s and Los Angeles of the ’70s with present-day interviews with Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, Carole King, Kate Taylor, Natalie Merchant, Lyle Lovett, Steve Martin, Eric Idle, Jane Asher, Twiggy, and Marianne Faithfull (among others), plus excerpts from Paul McCartney’s interview tapes for his 1997 biography by Barry Miles—in 1963, a twenty-one-year-old McCartney moved into the Asher family’s London house after meeting and falling in love with Peter’s sister Jane. He stayed for more than three years.

Years before the McCartney biography, Barry Miles and Peter Asher were part of London’s counterculture scene. From 1965 to 1967, along with John Dunbar, they owned the Indica Bookstore & Gallery. Indica was where Yoko Ono had a show in 1966. John Lennon, an Indica regular, came by to check out the show, and as such, Peter Asher played a role in what would become a most famous introduction. Peter Asher became head of Apple’s A&R (Artists and Repertoire) in 1968, charged with scouting new talent. After signing an unknown James Taylor, he left Apple to become the singer’s manager and producer in 1969.

Directed and produced by Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller with executive producers Michael Drews, Robin Sagon, Morgan Neville, Caitlin Rogers, Keith Putney, and Jonathan Dana, the film features an original score by Laurence Juber and Jeff Alan Ross, with editing by Darren Lund. Distributed by Greenwich Entertainment, the feature-length Peter Asher: Everywhere Man opens in New York City on June 19, 2026.

D.Z. Stone (Rail): Who had the idea to do a documentary on Peter Asher?

Dan Geller: That came through Dayna’s high school boyfriend, who remains a friend and a friend of mine as well these days. He’s a housemate of Linda Ronstadt’s here in San Francisco and he had a plus one for Peter’s show.

Dayna Goldfine: About ten minutes into the show, I was like, “Oh, man, I wish that Dan was here, because this is someone worthy of a documentary.” Just how often do you come across someone who you’ve never heard of, but you realize you should have because he’s been literally integral to every creative and artistic thing that you've been interested in for your whole life?

Geller: At the time, we heard someone else was already making a movie about Peter. But along the way Dayna and I got to be friends with Linda, and every time we would go over to her house, we’d ask, “What’s happening with that Peter Asher movie?” Eventually, Linda told us it had been dropped. Around that time (December 2019), we were in postproduction on our Leonard Cohen movie and Peter was coming back to town to perform his show at the historic Bimbo’s 365 Club. So I got to go with Dayna, and Linda was there to sort of be a matchmaker. The show was everything Dayna had said. It was fascinating from beginning to end. Peter said yes to the documentary right after the show, while we were all still at Bimbo’s. Bimbo’s is where we ultimately staged the show for our film, because the show would be the spine of the movie.

Rail: You staged Asher’s cabaret show at Bimbo’s for the movie?

Geller: We did. We went back to Bimbo’s and rented the place for a weekend. There were probably 250 people at each show. We staged it because we needed to have a whole bank of cameras, and it really needed to be our auditorium.

Goldfine: It was a new creative challenge. I think every time we start a project—not wanting to speak too much for Dan—but I do feel both of us value having each project be slightly different from the past. So getting to use this live performance and trying to figure out how to make it compelling as a spine for a documentary was this new challenge we got to take on.

Rail: How did you find the archival film and photos?

Goldfine: We went with Peter to London, and while we were there he said, “I will show you all the scrapbooks that my mom put together.” To our amazement, Margaret Asher had put together these huge books, hundreds of pages, one for each year of her three kids’ lives. All three were child stars. So, we got all these incredible newspaper headlines and old photos going all the way back to Peter’s first film role with Claudette Colbert, to the first time Peter and Gordon (Asher’s singing duo with Gordon Waller) played together, and then all the way up through the eighties with Linda. Then there’s stuff that came out of the woodwork. For instance, Leslie Kogan Gold, the widow of singer, songwriter, and musician Andrew Gold had road footage that Andy shot from when Peter and the gang were on the road with Linda.

Geller: Amazing Super 8 footage. Leslie was kind enough to say, “Sure, you can license some of this.” And we had archival researchers in England and in the States digging. They know where old film clips are housed and where you can license them. Apple Records (the Beatles’ label) was very nice in opening their archives for us.

Goldfine: Among the most incredible archival materials in the film: Paul McCartney gave us permission to use interviews he had done in the 1990s with Barry Miles for Miles’s biography Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now. We had interviewed Miles, and, before we left London, while we were at lunch, he said, “If Paul gives you permission, you could listen to the cassette tapes of the interviews I did with him.” This was right after we had written to Paul’s manager asking if he would sit for an interview. We thought maybe if he turned us down for the interview, we could hit him up for these archival cassette tapes. That’s kind of how it played out. It took us months to get those tapes. They were in this archive in Liverpool, and to get anything out, we had to get permission from Paul in writing.

Geller: The interviews are so generous and specific and unguarded. Paul talks about meeting Jane Asher for the first time, talks about living with the Asher family, talks about Peter, and about writing “A World Without Love,” the song that catapulted Peter and Gordon to international fame.

Rail: Paul McCartney dated Peter Asher’s sister and lived with his family?

Geller: Yes. Paul lived in the Asher family house on Wimpole Street for several years in the bedroom across from Peter’s. In our film, Peter says it was “because the family took pity on him.” Paul didn’t want to live in the London dump, the garret that the rest of the Beatles were living in when they were not on the road. Paul was fascinated by the Ashers. He’s a kid from Liverpool, suddenly immersed in this very educated family working at the highest level of the arts. The children were in the performing arts and the mom was a professional musician who taught oboe at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and the dad was a physician who was practicing out of the house. For Paul, it was a real eye-opener. And for Peter, it was one of these incredible things that kept happening to him. Paul writes a song John doesn’t really like. Peter knows about the song, asks whether he and Gordon could take a whack at it.…

Goldfine: While we were in London, we interviewed John Dunbar. We were trying to get him to describe what Indica Gallery was like. At a certain point he said, “You know what? You should really get this documentary that I’m in quite a bit that came out in the mid sixties called, Go Go Go Said the Bird.” It was the hardest thing to find. It took months asking everyone until we found our incredible London archivist, Andy Neill, who unbelievably had it sitting on his shelf! It’s an incredible piece of archival material. When you see our film, you’ll see how important it was.

Geller: Go Go Go Said the Bird features clips of Indica and interviews with Dunbar.

Rail: You used scenes from Asher’s cabaret show. Did you also interview him?

Geller: We did. We interviewed him a lot, especially as the film was progressing. We realized there were aspects of his story that were not part of his show, but we wanted to include and needed further examination. Also, we knew we wanted to put on camera many of the artists he’d worked with. That’s why we have Linda and James Taylor and Carole King, and it just goes on and on.

Goldfine: In watching his show, the thought was “Peter’s a great storyteller, but it is all through his perspective. What if we talk to the people he’s telling stories about?”

Rail: Was it difficult to get people to interview?

Goldfine: Peter made it very clear from the beginning, “Look, I’m not going to help you guys in this regard. I’m loathe and uncomfortable and it gives me the shivers calling one of my friends and asking them to do an interview.” He said the same thing to David Jacks, who had spent twenty years researching and writing his book about Peter (Peter Asher: A Life in Music). We and David each managed to get the interviews we needed, nonetheless.

Geller: But it also addresses how people feel about Peter, the people who have worked with him, and what he’s done for them professionally and personally, that they pretty much all said yes.

Goldfine: I think it really helped that we had Linda Ronstadt because she basically doesn’t do interviews anymore. The fact that she was our first interview was so pleasantly surprising to so many other people—it gave us a lot of street cred.

Rail: The film has an original score that Asher produced. Any other music?

Geller: In his show where Peter covered a handful of songs with his band, we got the actual tracks, Beatles’ songs and James’s songs, and then archival clips of these people performing, as well as Peter and Gordon performing. There’s so much great music in it. We mixed the movie up at Skywalker Sound with the intent to immerse the audience in the music, so to be in a theater where there’s music surrounding and you’re living inside it, is really enjoyable. Sure, eventually it’ll go wherever all movies go for people to watch at home.

Goldfine: Oh, go see it in a theater! The best audiences we’ve been in—and we’ve now watched it with several as we’ve gone from festival to festival—are the ones that start singing along with what’s happening on the screen. The first time that happened, we both looked at each other and we’re like, “This is so cool!” See it in a movie theater, and if you feel the impulse to sing, know you’re not alone. Just please do sing.