John Lennon and Yoko Ono hosted the Emmy-winning Mike Douglas Show for a week in February 1972, using the platform to discuss issues important to them. Lennon got candid about his time with The Beatles and his relationship with Paul McCartney. They had prominent guests like musician Chuck Berry, as well as controversial counterculture figures like “Yippie” founder Jerry Rubin who was one of the Chicago 7, Black Panther Bobby Seale, and comedian George Carlin. That week is the focus of the new documentary called Daytime Revolution.
Erni Di Massa was a 24-year-old writer and producer for The Mike Douglas Show at the time. He tells KCRW that it was the most popular series in daytime TV, with about 40 million viewers each week.
Mike Douglas was a World War II vet and a big band singer, Di Massa says. He got a job in 1961 to go to Cleveland and start the idea of a broadcast TV talk show, which was novel during that period.
So how did Lennon and Ono end up hosting for a week? Yoko Ono had been on The Mike Douglas Show a few months before, and saw it as a great vehicle for sharing their “then and now radical beliefs,” explains Erik Nelson, director of Daytime Revolution. They made a deal that gave them a fair amount of creative control.
“All parties, The Mike Douglas folks and John and Yoko and their cavalcade of radicals, really, all agreed to trust one another, which I think was the real interesting part of these shows. Everyone's trusting everybody will be on their best behavior, even though there were tremendous chances that things would go completely off the rails. They never did,” says Nelson.
Di Massa points out that Douglas had a great understanding of music, and other guests on his show included The Go-Go's, Frank Zappa, KISS, and the Rolling Stones. He admired Lennon’s musical ability and was already comfortable with Ono.
Notably, women comprised 80% of the show’s audience, and Ono wanted to reach them, Di Massa says.
In particular, she wanted to share messages of women’s liberation, peace, and inclusion. Those were “utopian ideals that still resonate today,” says Nelson.
On the show, Lennon also discussed his relationship with the Beatles. After the band broke up, he became a political activist.
“The weight of the Beatles was oppressive to all four members, and this was two years almost, after the Beatles had broken up,” explains Nelson. “So John had moved to the U.S., wanted very much to be a part of the U.S. culture, wanted U.S. citizenship, was living in Greenwich Village, and was completely committed to expressing his political views. Unfortunately, he picked maybe the worst time possible to be that political. [It] was just when the unbelievably paranoid Richard Nixon was ramping up for reelection in 1972. Four months before the Watergate break-ins, these shows are broadcast, where these radicals have taken over daytime living room. This was seen correctly, I think, by the Nixon administration as a huge threat. … That's when they basically declared war on John Lennon after these shows were broadcast.”
Nelson says the shows “wrecked John Lennon’s life.” Former Mike Douglas Show producer Roger Ailes became part of the Nixon White House, and pushed to get Lennon out of the U.S.
L to R: Mike Douglas, Yoko Ono, and John Lennon appear in a scene from “Daytime Revolution.” Photo by Michael Leshnov, courtesy of Kino Lorber.
“Nixon was smart enough to know that's exactly what he didn't want: charismatic, affable, communicative John Lennon talking to a guy like Mike Douglas, and by proxy, 40 million Americans. That was a huge threat to Nixon. … Nixon was right to try to get him deported.”
Nelson says this one week of programming was subversive, a Trojan horse, incredibly impactful, seductive, and a “high water mark of the ‘60s and the counterculture.”
“That was really the point of this film — was to italicize this as a moment in American political and cultural history. This isn't about John Lennon. The world doesn't need another film about John Lennon. But the world does need, and America needs, at this particular moment in time, a road map back to a time when we could be civil to one another, we could agree on something, and Mike Douglas could pull off a show like this with these ideas embedded in it,” Nelson says.