John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s ‘Mike Douglas Show’ Stint Subject of New Doc
John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s famous co-hosting stint on The Mike Douglas Show in 1972 is the subject of a new documentary.
Daytime Revolution will be released in select theaters on October 9, which coincides with Lennon’s 84th birthday. Deadline cites a press release on the film, which states, “‘Daytime Revolution’ takes us back in time, as we observe John and Yoko interacting with a transfixed studio audience in revealing Q and A sessions where John Lennon was astonishingly candid about his life after the Beatles. John and Yoko also got to pick the guests, some very controversial at the time, like [anti-war activist and Yippie] Jerry Rubin and Black Panther Bobby Seale, as well as Ralph Nader and George Carlin.”
Chuck Berry was another notable guest during Lennon and Ono’s co-hosting stint. Here’s a sweet clip of Lennon introducing the rock and roll pioneer. (We’ll omit clips of Ono “singing” with Lennon and Berry for the sake of your ears, but feel free to search for those in your own free time.)
Deadline notes that at the time of John and Yoko’s week of co-hosting The Mike Douglas Show, it was an election year and the same year as the Watergate break-in. Despite having the documentary completed in the fall of 2022, director Erik Nelson decided to hold the film back until 2024 when the United States is bracing itself for another presidential election.
Nelson told Deadline, “We pretty much locked ‘Daytime’ down in the fall of 2022, but we made a conscious decision to hold back release until the Election fall of 2024, as we felt very strongly that the film’s optimistic and idealistic message would be a far more welcome ‘letter from home’ the closer we got to what promised to be an apocalyptic and tension-filled November 5th. We were clearly right in that assumption!”
As of publishing, a trailer for Daytime Revolution has yet to be released. It’ll be interesting to see whether the documentary’s “optimistic and idealistic message” will break through and resonate during this tumultuous election cycle. Certainly, any attempt at optimism will always be welcomed by some, and there are likely to be many parallels drawn between 1972 and today. Fingers crossed that Daytime Revolution will get a wider release in theaters or that it will hit streaming platforms well before November 5. It’s setting itself up to be a must-watch.
