Back in early 1972, John Lennon and Yoko Ono co-hosted the very popular daytime talk show The Mike Douglas Show. Now we're about to get an in-depth look at what happened behind-the scenes.
Variety reports that a new documentary, Daytime Revolution, has just completed production, taking a look at that important week of television. The doc has the blessing of Yoko and Sean Ono, who also consulted on the project but do not appear. The doc will feature archival footage of the five Lennon/Ono hosted episodes, along with interviews from the surviving guests, which include political activist Ralph Nader.
“It’s become a cliche that Woodstock was the defining moment of the counterculture,” says the film’s director, Erik Nelson, but “when I watched these broadcasts in their entirety, I realized that, in reality, this week in 1972, when John Lennon and Yoko Ono essentially hijacked the airwaves and presented the best minds and dreams of their generation to the widest possible mass audience of what was then called ‘Middle America,’ was as far as the counterculture would ever get.”
Nelson notes Lennon and Ono's appearance presented “Not just music but a prescient blueprint for the future we now live in."
The Lennon/Ono hosted episodes of The Mike Douglas Show featured a variety of guests, all personally invited by the couple. In addition to Nader, comedian George Carlin appeared on the program, as well as Chuck Berry and Black Panther chairman Bobby Seale and others, with the show touching on a variety of controversial topics.
So far, Daytime Revolution is still looking for a distributor and doesn’t have a release date.
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