[MUSIC -- John Lennon -- Imagine]

John Lennon: Imagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try.

Brian Lehrer: Today, October 9, would be John Lennon's 84th birthday. I'm sure there will be flowers, as there always are, to mark the occasion left in Central Park Strawberry Fields near 72nd Street. Maybe you listened to Imagine in his honor., but that version that we were just playing is from a new documentary about a lesser-known and quirky chapter in his life. The week in 1972, when he and Yoko Ono co-hosted the Mike Douglas Show, a very popular afternoon television talk show in its day. They performed, did some art, and booked the guests, who included Ralph Nader in 1972, Eldridge Cleaver, the activist Jerry Rubin. Not the usual fare for daytime television in the '70s. The film is Daytime Revolution, and I'm joined now by the director, Eric Nelson. Hey, Eric, welcome to the show.

Eric Nelson: Delighted to be here on this auspicious birthday, indeed.

Brian Lehrer: Indeed. Just to start, for people too young to remember Mike Douglas, can you explain what the show was, who its audience was, and the kinds of guests you might have expected to see on a given afternoon when John and Yoko are not the co-hosts?

Eric Nelson: Mike Douglas was Mr. America, a decidedly mainstream talk show host on daytime television. In New York, The Mike Douglas Show, I think, aired at 4:30 in the afternoon and occasionally, would do a 60 share. That's 6-0 share of people watching TV in New York, so it was an immensely vital link between New York and middle America, reaching 40 million Americans across the country. It's hard to imagine anything that popular today, but The Mike Douglas Show was that thing.

Brian Lehrer: Right, and that's not the vibe that one would have thought of, with respect to John and Yoko in 1972, but to help make the segue into his relationship with them on the show, here's a snippet of Mike Douglas, from your documentary, singing the Beatles song, Michelle.

[MUSIC -- Mike Douglas -- Michelle]

Mike Douglas: Michelle, my belle,

These are words that go together well.

Brian Lehrer: Not your definition of a hip rendition, I would say.

Eric Nelson: No, I think it's so unhip, it's hip, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: [laughs]

Eric Nelson: Don't you think?

Brian Lehrer: Maybe that's it. He was being campy, but probably without realizing. I'm curious about his offering up his show guest co-hosts. Was he known for this before John and Yoko?

Eric Nelson: Yes, he was. He really defined the word open-minded. He would open up his show to Zsa Zsa Gabor for a week, for instance, that well-known radical Zsa Zsa Gabor. They had a tradition of this. Yoko Ono had done The Mike Douglas Show a few months previous to this, and Yoko being Yoko, immediately sized it up and thought, "This is a place where John and I can do our thing." She did just that for this week, so it was a marriage between the Douglas show that thought Beatle John Lennon for a week would draw ratings and John and Yoko thinking, "This is a perfect platform to get our revolutionary points across."

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a few phone calls. Mostly, we're going to keep talking to Eric and playing clips from the documentary. We're about to play one of Mike Douglas, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono together, introducing the week of co-hosting. Does anybody remember this little slice of history from 1972? 212-433-WNYC? Anyone want to give us a viewer's perspective from your memory bank? 212-433-9692 or ask any question of the director of this film, Eric Nelson, which opens today at various theaters in New York. We'll give you a little of that as we go, but this is 30 seconds from the first show. You hear Mike asking them what they'll want to talk about.

Mike Douglas: I know that you both have some very sincere thoughts about life and people and that people mean a great deal to you. That's perfectly obvious. What would you like to talk about this week, John?

John Lennon: Love, peace, communication, women's lib.

Yoko Ono: Racism-

John Lennon: Racism.

Yoko Ono: -and about prison conditions.

John Lennon: Prisons and drugs.

Mike Douglas: Drugs.

Yoko Ono: Life in general.

John Lennon: Drugs, drugs, anything, that's what's going on now.

Yoko Ono: Also to show the future direction because the future direction is actually beautiful because people are getting very pessimistic these days. Actually, it's going to be very beautiful, and we want to show that people.

Brian Lehrer: What did they then actually go on to do?

Eric Nelson: Well, they brought on Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, George Carlin, a lot of just very alternative guests espousing alternative views. They basically exported the culture of Greenwich Village of 1972 where John and Yoko were living at the time of these shows, brought it down to the Philly studio where Mike Douglas was based, and then exported it wide. We're delighted that the film is opening in Greenwich Village in a theater that's not much bigger than the Mike Douglas studio. We're almost replicating the experiment on John's birthday that they did 52 years ago, except this time-

Brian Lehrer: -the Quad cinema on 13th Street, right?

Eric Nelson: Exactly, so it's a chance to actually replicate this amazing experience live with fellow humans. Theatrical documentaries, or theaters in general, are arguing for their existence right now and we're really thrilled that we can do basically, on John's birthday, restage this happening in the Village. It's a wonderful coincidence, as that's where we're showing tonight.

Brian Lehrer: Daphne in Sleepy Hollow has a memory of this, maybe a very personal memory. Daphne, you're on WNYC, hello.

Daphne: Hi, thanks for taking my call. I don't have the memory because I was three months old, but I've seen the recording. My mom, who's been a Greenwich Village resident for 67 of her 87 years, is a retired New York State Supreme Court judge, and she was a guest that week. I think she was supposed to represent, as Lennon said in that clip, women's lib. She was an ACLU attorney, and Mike Douglas mostly leered at her the whole time and called her a lady lawyer and said she was too pretty to be a lawyer.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, my God, really?

Daphne: Yes. I'd love to see the clip. I think I remember Lennon and Ono just cuddling to the side. I don't think they had much to say about it, but the best part was that George Carlin gave her a ride home from Philly. She had a great time in the car.

Brian Lehrer: What a story, Daphne. Thank you very much. Did you see that as you went through these tapes or these films?

Eric Nelson: Yes, we did. We reached out to her to be in the film because she was terrific. It was a great thing, but she didn't want to relive the memory, I guess, or go back on it. The problem with the film was that it was seven and a half hours. These were, imagine this, 90 minutes a day, they broadcast. We had to make some decisions about how to compress seven and a half hours down to 70 minutes, so it was a ruthless editing job. No, I definitely watched all the guests. That was a memorable appearance, as there were some other interesting appearances.

Brian Lehrer: Geez, a 90-minute-a-day talk show. I guess it was a half an hour shorter than it had to be. You can hear John's passion for embracing action and politics in this clip where he's talking to Ralph Nader about voting in 1972.

John Lennon: If you register to vote, it doesn't say you have to vote. At least you have it. Then if there's somebody around that you can believe in, you've got that vote, but if you don't register and it comes and you want to do something, you've missed it. Somebody put it very succinctly, Richard Neville of Oz, which is an underground scene in London. He said, "Well, we all made a mistake. We should have voted. We should have registered because there's one inch in which we breathe difference between the two parties, and everybody saying, they're all the same. They are all the same, but there's a one-inch in which they let you breathe."

Brian Lehrer: I know from the film that Ralph Nader was very impressed with what John said there. Of course, if this is 1972, this is the year that Richard Nixon got reelected in a landslide against George McGovern.

Eric Nelson: Yes, but if it wasn't for the Mike Douglas Shows, McGovern might not have gotten Massachusetts. Remember, McGovern did get one state. The key with this quote, and what we tried to do in the film, is build an echo chamber from 1972 to the present day. I didn't consider myself a documentary filmmaker when I did this. I considered myself in the transportation business to get people back to 1972. To see and experience these things the way they went down, and then to bring back some of these amazingly prescient ideas to the present day. I don't know if you know this, Brian, but apparently this is an election year and a somewhat fraught election year.

We timed the release of the film theatrically for Lennon's birthday a month before the election. You know, it's like that scene in 2001 when everything lines up perfectly in this cosmic convergence. That's the whole point of the whole thing. Greenwich Village, as I said earlier, is ground zero for this whole experience where the movie's going to live for a week, so Yoko Ono's prescience and John Lennon's humanity have a chance to be redeployed right now when I think we need it the most.

Brian Lehrer: Are you saying there's something about today's political era, the 'Trump era,' if we want to call it that, that led you to make this film? I'm sure some people are wondering, like-

Eric Nelson: Absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: -"Oh, this is really fun, but why this little piece of minutiae from Beatles history?"

Eric Nelson: It's not minutiae and it was a very provocative statement of the best of the counterculture on the biggest forum it ever got. Remember, Woodstock was 500,000 muddy hippies. This reached 40 million people with the best ideas, the best music, and one of the most riveting personalities of the century, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono ain't bad either. It was completely intentional to craft this thing as a hopeful message from the past to the present and the future. I would never have made this film if it wasn't for the current fraught political environment. This is very much a political film, and it's very much extending Yoko's vision. Yoko consulted on the film. She asked to see it again over the weekend because she read the reviews and was like, "Oh, people seem to like this. I'd like to check this out."

Brian Lehrer: That's cool.

Eric Nelson: It's very much it is not a time capsule. It's a time machine.

Brian Lehrer: One more clip then, another controversial guest was Black Panther activist Bobby Seale. Here's a little clip of him describing what's going on in a photo.

Bobby Seale: This is a free food program in Richmond where we gave away some 750 bags of groceries plus free brand-new shoes that we had given.

John Lennon: Brand new shoes you're giving away? It ain't second hand, oh.

Mike Douglas: That's marvelous.

John Lennon: That was the factor.

Bobby Seale: Mr. Albert Howard was speaking to the people there. People talk about freedom this, freedom that. Freedom must ring out in the land. We say, "Okay, we want some free medicine. We need some free clothing. We need some free shoes. We need some free bread. We need some free medical care, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, to actually implement some real freedom."

Brian Lehrer: Eric, how rare was that to have a Black Panther on a mainstream daytime TV talk show?

Eric Nelson: Not just rare, impossible. I mean, that's what's so amazing about this. Mike Douglas opens up that interview segment by bringing up the fact that Bobby Seal used to be a stand-up comedian, which Bobby Seale acknowledges. This was really a unique attempt from mainstream America, personified by Mike Douglas and John and Yoko, who represented this radical fringe, which, of course, so many of the things they talked about are mainstream now.

It's a fascinating collision of cultures that only existed this week. The question, you touched at it, why make this film? My answer is, "How could I not make this film at this present time to sort of a more-

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.

Eric Nelson: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: To sort of? Yes, to connect it to this time. I'm going to sneak in one more.

Eric Nelson: Well, to connect it to its time, yes.

Brian Lehrer: One more memory, caller Teresa in Jeffersonville, New York. Teresa, we have 30 seconds for you. You have something very specific to this, right?

Teresa: Yes. Hi, Brian. I love you. I love your show. I can't wait to see this film. I was twelve years old when these shows were on. I remember the whole week. Every day, John and Yoko, at the end of the show, would glue together one piece of a broken teacup so that at the end of the week, they had repaired this beautiful teacup. I don't know. I was twelve years old. It just struck me as so beautiful and strange. I still mention it to my brother so often, like, "Remember that?"

Brian Lehrer: That is so great.

Eric Nelson: Well, you don't have to remember it.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.

Eric Nelson: The teacup is the star of this movie. We love the teacup as much as you do, so that's all. I will not say more than that, but we're big fans of the teacup.

Brian Lehrer: With the teacup, John, Yoko, and Mike Douglas, Daytime Revolution is playing today at the Quad on 13th Street of Manhattan and Cinema Arts Center in Huntington for John's birthday. Hello, Long Island. Then it starts a longer run at the Quad on Friday. Eric Nelson is the director. Thank you, this is so much fun. Congratulations.

Eric Nelson: Well, thank you very much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Remember, you're invited to join me at 8:00 tonight for our national call-in on affordable health care as an issue in the election tonight at 8:00.

[00:15:20] [END OF AUDIO]

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