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| One to One: John & Yoko - Directed by Kevin Macdonald |
My first novel, Harley, Life a Person, is about a 14-year-old artist living in the New Jersey suburbs who thinks she's adopted. She has three goals: to find her real father, get to the Imagine Circle in Central Park, and to finish her painting for her high school play. Harley was born on the anniversary of John Lennon's death, in the same hospital, when her mother went into labor at a Lennon memorial concert in New York City.
Harley's Ninth continues the story. It takes place all on one day, October 9th, the day John Lennon was born. Harley has her first art exhibition opening in a gallery in New York City. Harley's Ninth includes a fictionalized version of an actual art exhibition in New York City that I went to presented by Yoko Ono in 2004 to celebrate what would have been Lennon's 64th birthday.
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| From the One to One concert in New York City in 1972 - Photo: John Skelson |
Now, the Scottish filmaker Kevin Macdonald has made a spectacular documentary about the first 18 months that John Lennon and Yoko Ono spent living in Greenwich Village in the 1970s. The film culminates on August 30, 1972 when John Lennon performed in the One to One Benefit Concert, his only full-lenth show after leaving the Beatles. The film premiered at this year’s Venice Film Festival on August 30, 2024, exactly fifty-two years ago.
Kevin Macdonald is more than a decade younger than me. While I was growing up in New Jersey about 45 minutes outside of Manhattan, he was growing up in Scotland. When asked what drew him to make One to One, he said, "I had been, and continue to be, a big Lennon fan. ... I got into the Beatles very young, when I was ten or eleven. I must have heard them on the radio. I asked my parents for a Beatles record for my birthday... I listened to them obsessively and became a fan. And when Lennon was shot in 1980, it was the first star I felt a personal connection with who died in that way. I actually felt it."
By the time John Lennon was shot on December 8, 1980, I was living in New York City. By coincidence, my apartment on West 11th Street was right around the corner of their first tiny apartment on Bank Street.
I, along with the rest of Manhattan, actually felt it, too:
Remembering John Lennon on the 40th Anniversary of his Death
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| Imagine Circle in Central Park, NYC |
What is genius about the film is the innovative format used by Macdonald and co-director & editor Sam Rice-Edwards: rapid clips of TV shows and commercials of that moment in time in the United States, from the Vietnam War to The Price is Right game show to ads for Coca-Cola. And they sprinkle never-before-seen-or-heard before recordings from the Lennon Estate throughout the film -- as if someone was flipping through channels on a television while talking on the phone.
It is not only a film about John Lennon and Yoko Ono. It is a riveting history lesson that brings all the turmoil and innocence of the 70s alive.
It is not only a film about John Lennon and Yoko Ono. It is a riveting history lesson that brings all the turmoil and innocence of the 70s alive.
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| Recreation of John & Yoko's tiny one-room apartment on Bank Street - Photo: Mercury Studios |
In 1971, Yoko convinced John to leave their estate in England and move to a tiny one-room apartment in on Bank Street in Greenwich Village, where they lived before moving uptown into grander digs in the Dakota on the Upper West Side.
At the foot of the bed was a large TV set that they watched obsessively, which becomes a character in the story. One day, they watched an exposé by Geraldo Rivera about the horrific conditions in the Willowbrook children's home, which was the impetus for the One to One Concert at Madison Square Garden on August 30, 1972.
Kevin Macdonald's wife, Tatiana, is an Oscar-nominated set decorator who recreated the apartment exactly as it would have been when John and Yoko lived there, down to the quilt on the bed. The apartment is the only element of the film that wasn't created by the film and audio recordings of John and Yoko themselves. Both John and Yoko had their own cameras, or they had other people filming, and they recorded much of their lives.
John Lennon’s move to New York City was like the arrival of a hurricane. He soon became involved in anti-war and protest movements. He associated with radicals like the Black Panthers and Jerry Rubin and Allen Ginsberg, who delivers a poem about toilet paper in the film that not even his estate knew existed.
John and Yoko suspected that their phone was being tapped (it was), so they started recording their phone calls. Six months into the project, Kevin Macdonald was sent a bunch of recordings of those phone calls. They were old-fashioned tapes from the 1970s that had been sitting in a box somewhere. Sean and Yoko had never even heard them before because they had never been digitized. Some of them are hilarious, like the ongoing quest of trying to find thousands of flies for an art project that Yoko was working on.
The most chilling part of the phone calls was when Jim Keltner, the renowned drummer from Elephant's Memory, the band who backed-up Lennon at the One to One concert asks: "You're not frightened that this might lead to an assassination?" And John says, "Don't worry. I don't aim to get shot. I'm an artist. I'm not a politician."
What is especially haunting on a personal level is that Jim Keltner was my neighbor in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles. In fact, his wife, Cynthia Keltner, is in the acknowledgments of Harley, Like a Person because she was an early reader and helped me get the tone right. Jim has a recording studio in his back yard, and the Beatles and John Lennon would drop by. I was stunned to hear Jim ask that question...
Sean Ono Lennon is the music producer -- and it's great. I just loved the entire film. I wish I could tell you when you can see it, but right now it's still only being shown at film festivals.
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| Kevin Macdonald at One to One: John & Yoko premiere Venice Film Festival, August 30, 2024 Photo: Cat Bauer |
One to One: John & Yoko premiered on August 30, 2024 at the Venice Film Festival on the 52nd anniversary of the original concert. Whenever and wherever you get the chance to watch it, no matter how old or young you are, make every effort to see it.
Ciao from Venezia,
Cat Bauer
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