Daytime Revolution (2024)
Director: Erik Nelson Run Time: 108 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 2024
Country: United States
Language: English
About the film:
For one extraordinary week beginning on February 14th, 1972, the Revolution WAS televised. Daytime Revolution (2024) takes us back in time to the week that John Lennon and Yoko Ono descended upon a Philadelphia broadcasting studio to co-host the iconic Mike Douglas Show, at the time the most popular show on daytime television with an audience of 40 million viewers a week. What followed was five unforgettable episodes of television, with Lennon and Ono at the helm and Douglas bravely keeping the show on track.
Acting as both producers and hosts, Lennon and Ono handpicked their guests, including controversial choices like Yippie founder Jerry Rubin and Black Panther Chairman Bobby Seale, as well as political activist Ralph Nader and comic truth teller George Carlin. Their version of daytime TV was a radical take on the traditional format, incorporating candid Q&A sessions with their transfixed audience, conversations about current issues like police violence and women’s liberation, conceptual art events, and one-of-a-kind musical performances, including a unique duet with Lennon and Chuck Berry and a poignant rendition of Lennon’s “Imagine.”
A document of the past that speaks to our turbulent present, Daytime Revolution captures the power that art can have when it reaches out to communicate, the prescience of that dialogue, and the bravery of two artists who never took the easy way out as they fought for their vision of a better world.
About the filmmaker:
Erik Nelson is a multiple Emmy and IDA award winning filmmaker who has produced and directed a wide range of feature documentaries for his company “Creative Differences.” These range from producing four films with Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man [2005], Cave Of Forgotten Dreams [2010], Into The Abyss [2011], and the Oscar nominated Encounters At The End Of The World [2007]), to directing Dreams With Sharp Teeth (2008), a biographical look at iconoclastic writer Harlan Ellison. Nelson’s three most recent films, A Gray State (2017)—a harrowing true crime look at the madness inducing culture of conspiracy—and the immersive World War II documentaries The Cold Blue (2019) and Apocalypse ’45 (2021) all demonstrate the director’s range and ability to weave a provocative story out of exquisitely restored archive footage.
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