Releasing on what would've been former Beatle John Lennon's 84th birthday, Daytime Revolution uses archival footage from the five episodes of The Mike Douglas Show that Lennon and Yoko Ono co-hosted in early 1972. The film allows the surviving guests who made appearances on the shows, including political activist Ralph Nader, actor and singer Vivian Reed, and musician Nobuko Miyamoto, among others, to revisit the parts they played in the message being delivered by Lennon and Ono to American living rooms.
It’s no mistake that Daytime Revolution is coming out with the United States presidential election right around the corner. Director Erik Nelson felt it was apt to bring more eyes and ears to these shows at this point in time, saying, “I knew these shows had happened and they weren’t properly celebrated. They represented a real high-water mark of the counterculture and American culture in general, and I felt attention should be paid to them.”
He continued: “With this film, I wasn’t in the documentary filmmaking business, I was in the transportation business. I wanted to transport people back to 1972 and transport those ideas forward into 2024 in this dramatic election year.”
Reminiscing on his involvement, Nader pointed to the political aspects of the shows, saying in the documentary that “citizenship is a profession” to allow people to control their destiny” and “If you vote, you broaden out the difference between the parties in the right way for the next election.”
Just as the shows did, this documentary puts an emphasis on the intersection between culture, politics and history. Broadcast during an election year under the Nixon presidency, with the backdrop of the widely objected-to Vietnam War, the shows advocated for peace and unification. Despite these seemingly universal hopes being voiced, the shows were nevertheless risky, and within weeks of their airing, Lennon was threatened with deportation, an issue that would persist for several years.
Looking at this outcome, one might assume the shows took a radical approach, but as composer-performer David Rosenboom, who was a guest on one of the five shows, said in the film, Lennon and Ono did have an agenda, but it was simply one of “mak[ing] the world better.” Even with this very upfront theme, to this day, there’s still a stigma around the term “hippies.” In a time of social unrest and violence at home and abroad, even the pure message of achieving peace can still produce reactions that label individuals supporting the cause as “unusual.” The countercultural attitude may hit some the wrong way but what this documentary does is let the show’s guests and hosts speak for itself, and through this, may offer a reevaluation for the public of the peace movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. And just like Lennon and Ono’s own intentions, the documentary brings counterculture to audiences in a more digestible way.
“I felt that John and Yoko took a lot of incredibly prescient ideas, an overall trust and a great attitude towards cultural politics and history and put it on daytime television,” Nelson said. “That was the best of the hippie culture. And even the silly stuff on these shows is wildly entertaining. Yoko approached this as a conceptual art project and John was delighted to play a significant part in it, and she pulled it off, in my opinion.”
Television as a tool for spreading a message is a main point of the film, from being used by politicians and musicians, to the other major theme: empowering women. These Mike Douglas Show episodes particularly gave women at home a better insight into political and cultural issues at a time when the floor for discourse was less open to women. Ono even explains this during one of the broadcasts, saying how women were “isolated.” In film, such promotion for giving women the floor in serious debates can be seen with D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’ Town Bloody Hall, but although that was filmed a year prior to these Mike Douglas shows, it was not released until 1979. The very open environment that Douglas ensured to the co-hosts, guests and audience meshed fabulously with the format, making for shows with many exciting, offbeat and, above all, sincere moments. (Lennon’s performance of “Imagine” is especially earnest.)
“The big takeaway was just how good Mike Douglas was,” Nelson said. “He was a terrific host. I was very impressed with how deft a job he did, and how Yoko and John trusted that Mike wouldn’t make them look bad, and how Mike trusted them not to make his show look bad. I think that kind of trust is missing in American media today.” Douglas being willing to give them the floor was key to the shows’ messages effectively coming through the screen. “The shows were structured and John and Yoko took advantage of what they were there to do but they didn’t take advantage of Mike, which I found very impressive.”
The program not only offered a voice to the female liberation movement but also to the Black Panther movement and Asian Americans. The latter performed folk songs that took pride in their roots, highlighting how their immigrant parents helped make America what it was then, and still is today, through the performance of “We Are the Children,” which includes the lyric “We will leave our stamp on America.” Activism on the broadcasts didn’t just come in the form of the signature pair at the forefront; other guests made their appearances worthwhile, spreading similar sentiments on stage, and Lennon and Ono — ever-curious to learn more about others — treated them as nothing less than equals.
Lennon and Ono were given equal footing and treated each other as such, too, making for a film whose subject matter is hard not to get wrapped up in. It’s easy for many to dismiss public personalities such as them when it comes to political stances, but what Nelson’s documentary dials in on is how culture (whether that be expressed in music, film or any other form) and politics are virtually inseparable — not only concurrently but also in how they influence each other, continually developing in their own ways.
“To the question of ‘will you still need John when he’s 84,’” Nelson said, “I think this film answers an emphatic ‘yes.’”
10/5/24 - Screened at the 32nd Annual Hamptons International Film Festival