‘Daytime Revolution’: See Trailer for New John Lennon-Yoko Ono Doc
The trailer for Daytime Revolution, the new documentary about John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s famous co-hosting stint on The Mike Douglas Show in 1972, has been released.
In the trailer below, footage of Lennon and Ono’s time with Douglas can be seen in crisp quality. A number of people sat for new interviews to be featured in the film, including Ralph Nader, who was one of many notable guests during that week on The Mike Douglas Show.
The trailer opens with audio of Lennon saying, “I’m 31 now, and I’ve grown up in many ways, and you have to be more politically aware in a day and age like this. It’s almost impossible to close your eyes to it.”
Elsewhere in the trailer, Lennon is seen addressing someone in the audience. He says, in part, “People tend to think that somebody will save them. Only people can save us; only us all deciding to do something about anything, whatever it is. Even making that decision [of] ‘I want to do something’ is a start.”
The overarching theme of political activism was certainly on the mind of Daytime Revolution director Erik Nelson. Lennon and Ono’s stint on The Mike Douglas Show coincided with an election year, and it was also the same year as the Watergate break-in. Despite having the documentary completed in the fall of 2022, Nelson decided to hold the film back until 2024 when the United States is bracing itself for another presidential election.
He 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!”
Daytime Revolution will be released in select theaters on October 9, which falls on what would have been Lennon’s 84th birthday. It’ll be interesting to see whether the documentary’s “optimistic and idealistic message” will break through and resonate during our current 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.
