Daytime Revolution Review: In a Fascinating Footnote From the John Lennon-Yoko Ono Annals, Hipster Activists Reach the Middle American Masses

Take yourself back to the good old days when there was only three major television networks and when one single, solitary daytime talk show could attract an audience of 40 million per week – that is twenty percent of the population at that time. Just think, if you can, of a broadcast environment in which a mainstay of afternoon television, to be seen by Republicans and Democrats alike in red states and blue, might turn off a whole slice of his viewership with entertainers famous for their radical activism. You can almost hear the suits’ alarmed cries: “We’ll lose the housewives!”

But this actually occurred in February 1972, especially when John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the writers of the human rights protest song ‘Attica state,’ in which every of the thirty eight deaths in the tragic prison revolt are mourned as well as the unqualified condemnation of the America judicial and penal systems, as guests of the jovial host of the Mike Douglas show for one week. They were able to pick their preferred guest of interest and discuss anything from politics, biofeedback therapy, to the value of a macrobiotic diet. Conceived as a way to bring countercultural sensibilities directly to the squares, Erik Nelson’s doc Daytime Revolutionskillfully reassembles that moment as a lively, vibrant experience.

The Beatles have disbanded two years earlier and Lennon still was a world-famous musician, whereas Ono was still considered to be a more controversial artist at that time. Old guard supporters attributed the legendary band’s dissolution to Yoko Ono – fairly or unfairly as the latter began accompanying Lennon in the studio, albeit as a multimedia artist from Japan.

The couple’s dynamic, however, and Douglas’s friendly nature and businesslike air made the unconventional pairing work almost as soon as they both got over the first rush of nerves. Apparently, Lennon was a big asset to this; he has waded through helping Douglas calm the guests more than once.

When Douglas asks them, in the first of five episodes, what they’ve like to discuss throughout the week, Lennon and Ono answer – Love, peace, communication, women liberation, racism, prison environment, drugs. What they are heavily stating here is that their creativity and politics are well embedded and they firmly affirmed that they are there to preach. That must have been gratifying for his audience; if Douglas felt the least bit of trepidation about how easily digestible that may sound to the masses, he certainly doesn’t show it.

On the surface of it, Douglas has nowhere near the generation interest or orientation that Lennon and Ono possessed. That impression is in part compounded by a lounge act rendition of the Beatles ‘Michelle’ that the former Big Band singer performs as an introduction. Still the jury is out on the fact that Douglas’ relaxed demeanor, as much as Lennon and Ono’s un-posing and uncontrived candor are also why the experiment succeeds.

When Douglas objects to the radical opinion of guest Jerry Rubin saying he might bring a disruptive element of the show, the host remains polite and even inserts a clip of Rubin telling the nation’s disgruntled youth to join the protest and help remove Nixon from office. That moment is emblematic of one of many times that there is an ability to people of different political views to engage and share ideas without fighting as the current trend of maximum-decibel anger demonstrates.

More often, Douglas simply appears amused to be speaking with guests outside his regular booker’s sphere, or engaging with Ono’s group art performance —one of which is the reconstruction of a shattered cup, one fragment each day. While it is fun and friendly, being a show-and-tell model of real life with stars like Ralph Nader, Black Panther chairman Bobby M Seale, and comedian George Carl.

Others are less well known now, such as biofeedback researcher Gary Schwarz, who wires everyone up to electrodes so he can measure their physiological response to music; avant garde musician David Rosenboom; macrobiotic chef Hilary Redleaf, who demonstrates making hijiki pockets; and second generation Asian American folk singers Nobuko Miyamoto (Yellow Pearl) and Chris Iijima, whose lovely protest song ‘We Are the Children,’ is still a message

Some of today’s guests include Miyamoto, Schwarz, Rosenboom and Redleaf all of whom, using video footage of themselves from the shows, speak of their initial reactions when they got a call to appear with Lennon and Ono. Paper planes – Miyamoto love tells a good story of how he resisted attempts by the show’s director from softening some of the words that were perceived as rebellious; Redleaf even waves a payment receipt for $100, having cashed the check.

Listen to her talk about the show, or watch episodes of it in which she performs, such as the one in which she sings the gospel hymn ‘ His Eye is on the Sparrow’singing, and one wonders whether Reed herself can sometimes pin herself a pinch and say ‘Wow! Reed had lasagna with Douglas in Vegas, so apart from the to-and-fro guest Carlin, she connected the two couple environs.

Nader, who at 37 today and now 90 years old, helps provide perspective to explain why these episodes were so shocking. When he came into the show, he provides a how-to guide manual for politically and socially activist students to organize, advocating for enhanced responsible college student citizenship. In the contemporary interview to Rullani he ironically repeats Lennon and Ono’s clear call for youth to come out for a vote by stating that pessimism is constructive in politics than being a cynic.

A curious factoid in all this is if you turn the cameras around Roger Ailes, who began as a publicist for Nixon and risen to become a producer on the show. Recalling that Ailes had first encountered Nixon in a situation where the latter was a guest in a show, that is where Ailes had first met the politician and had gone on to work on the candidate’s first presidential campaign, Nader quipped that anyone could see the potential Fox News CEO eyeing the entire TV production as a machine and thinking to himself ‘Someday, the medium of television is going to be a major instrument of right

Nelson omits an important part of a documentary when he does not mention any changes in public audience for that week, or perhaps any complaints sent to any of the numerous syndication stations that broadcasted the show. Still, a firsthand perspective and some behind the scene stories can be described by E.V. Di Massa, associate producer of the show who was 24 the week of the broadcasts.

However, the accent is more on social change than music and yet there are reminiscences about the Beatles period, his background and early motivation (he and Paul McCartney dreamt of being the next Carole Goffin and Gerry team). It’s told that he once remarked that the basement studio in Philadelphia where The Mike Douglas Show was recorded felt like the group’s famed early gig haunt, The Cavern in Liverpool. Oddly enough, he only gives McCartney the barest hint of endorsement for the first albums with Wings which only a year later released their more successful and critically acclaimed album, Band on the Run.

It is for this reason that while Ono looks like a group of outtakes , the musical interludes can be a little hard on the ears, but on their own are valuable less for their artistry than as documents of the time. Lennon singing at the keyboard on ‘Imagine’ gives a song reduced to histrionic balladry in those years precisely what was missing.

The most notable scene of music is however when Lennon first encounters one of his childhood idols, Chuck Berry who looks as cool as a cat in a fringed pure purple shirt, and white trousers. The joy that can be seen on the faces of the bands when Berry performs his famous guitar-playing duckwalk dance steps during a number with Lennon on the “Memphis, Tennessee” is simply priceless. That the musical segments were performed without proper rehearsal is actually an added bonus.

It is occasionally try-and-miss when it aims to combine original news footage from the period to help place the action in context — Nixon in China, the Vietnam ‘demon rat’ news reel, anti-pot propaganda, protesters against busing to school — but the footage from the shows is righteously royalty.

There’s been no shortage of Lennon documentaries; it was just over a month ago that the Venice Film Festival premiered both One to One: John & Yoko: A year in the life of the two protagonists of the video; Yoko Ono and John Lennon; TWST – Things We Said Today: This is an experiential documentation of the Beatles concert with an audience of 1957 people at Shea Stadium in 1965. But the present reselling of a noble and genuine attempt at making the dream of utopia comprehensible to the bourgeois masses through the medium of popular television provides an interesting insight into a very different epoch in the history of this country.

In the end notes faded on the screen, the Nixon administration attempted to shut the couple up within weeks of the broadcasts, saw Lennon threatened with deportation and started a three-year legal war. Not surprisingly, that chapter was depicted in yet another doc – 2006’s The U.S. vs. John Lennon, which Nelson exec produced.