This is a look at the week in 1972 when John Lennon and Yoko Ono co-hosted the Mike Douglas show. Douglas was the number one person on daytime TV and Lennon and Ono were a major get. Brining friends along with them Lennon and Ono hoped to get their view of the world out to middle America.
Mike Douglas was a big deal. An easing going singer, Douglas was one of the best interviewers I’ve ever seen. He never had an agenda, he simply wanted to just talk to his guests and wanted them to feel at easy and be themselves. When you watch him interview people it becomes clear that his style was more what you get when friends are hanging out in a diner talking. It was this easy going attitude that allowed Lennon to open up and talk about himself, his life and ideas more clearly than he did elsewhere. He wasn’t on, he was just being John, human being.
The film highlights Lennon being John via copious use of clips from the show. The filmmakers smartly don’t cut away when Lennon is talking, they simply use the clips and let him go, thus allowing the clearest portraits of the man since the shows originally aired. The film also highlights how Douglas’ interviews humanized the other guests like Ralph Nader, Bobby Seal and George Carlin who nore chill then in any other interview I’ve ever seen.
The clips of the show and the guests are mixed with interviews with the people who were there. Everyone talks about how this was the first time that they were going before middle America and how it changed themselves and the country.
If there is anything wrong with the film is that outside of explaining how the shows came together and how they opend up minds, the film doesn’t really put things into context of society in general and the political landscape. The film opens and closes with text about Nixon hating Lennon and going after him politically, but out side of a couple of lines we really don’t get any sense of the what a big deal that was. I say this because books were written about Nixon’s war with Lennon, so it should have been a few more references.
That said it’s a minor quibble and the film still demands to be seen. If for no other reason than we get to see Mike Douglas in action.
Highly recommended.
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