ONE TO ONE: John & Yoko | YOKO by David Sheff
I have a pathological need to identify every location in NYC that appears in a film or tv or random photo, so when the first shot of ONE TO ONE : JOHN & YOKO appears on the screen, out of focus, fuzzy, zooming in on a crowd of people, I immediately realized they were standing just south of the Seventh Avenue entrance to Madison Square Garden, old electronic sign and all. The majority of this short documentary is filled with these same kinds of short bursts of vivid images, some vintage, some recreated, some stock.
The film sells itself as “An expansive and revelatory inside look at John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s life in Greenwich Village in the early 1970s” which is what made me head to the suburbs on a Thursday night. I recently finished reading the new Yoko biography as well, so I already had a head still at least half-immersed in this time frame. Even if I hadn’t been, I’m still glad I saw it, even though I’m not sure at all how I feel about this new genre of documentary that takes a short amount of archival footage and then builds an idea around it, much like the recent Beatles ‘64 whose entire reason for existence is a bunch of very cool footage from the Maysles Brothers hanging out with the Beatles on that first tour. It wasn’t enough for a standalone film that just focused on that so they interviewed a bunch of people and threaded it through the archival footage, and then released it for streaming.
Caryn Rose
ONE TO ONE : JOHN & YOKO is, at least, more ambitious than that exercise, but it’s still working with a limited amount of archival footage. The title comes from a benefit that J&Y played at Madison Square Garden to benefit the special needs children who were housed in terrible conditions at an institution out on Long Island called Willowbrook. It came to light thanks to an expose from Geraldo Rivera, and thanks to J&Y’s addiction to American television, the cause came on their radar and galvanized them into doing the one post-Beatles concert John Lennon ever got to perform.
I’m not kidding about the TV. I wrote a piece for the Village Voice 10 years ago about John Lennon in New York City and pointed this out: “He was addicted to American television; visitors to 105 Bank Street relate that he kept the TV on all the time, even during business meetings. (Bob Gruen details this in his book John Lennon: The New York Years.)“ It’s why there’s all that footage of the two of them on Dick Cavett. And the filmmakers use their fascination with television to tell the story of those years in the early 70s, joining together archival footage and other material that comes straight off the TV: commercials, talk shows, game shows, news broadcasts, and other random material. It’s staged in what is noted as a recreation of their old apartment on Bank Street, where you see a good ol’ 70s TV right at the foot of their bed.
In another annoying New Yorker habit, speculating on the status of real estate, the footage of the apartment matched what I had seen or heard about it and so I assumed that given Yoko’s extensive real estate holdings that they’d just hung onto it. She actually might own the property but there’s three screens of credits for the stage and recreation so it hasn’t been sitting downtown as a time capsule all these years.
There was a little too much in this film that cut close to home, in that watching crowds sieg heil’ing George Wallace was more than I needed to deal with at this particular time. There’s also footage of John and Yoko coming out of court dealing with deportation hearings, way too much footage of Nixon (‘too much’ in that I don’t want to see that much Richard Nixon ever, not that it was out of context for this time period).
The other device this film uses is the hours and hours of phone calls that John taped during their time there. He explains that he started taping all his calls, a la Warhol, because he strongly suspected (and was correct) that his apartment was bugged and that his phone calls were being recorded by the authorities. (You can hear the clicks and the weird unexplainable noises that were always on the line while listening to these calls!) The filmmakers put up a black screen and then play phone calls and type out the dialogue within the calls on the screen. This sounds tedious but there’s a lot of humor going on in addition to critical pieces of information that they don’t have (or didn’t want) visuals for so they decided to use this particular method.
I particularly enjoyed the sequences where Yoko is yelling at AJ Weberman, a man who made himself famous by digging through Bob Dylan’s garbage cans and publishing his findings. His entrance into the story begins with a camera coming up on a man outside of a townhouse going through a trash can. It becomes a big issue because J&Y are trying to put together a series of concerts that will travel the country -- along with Jerry Rubin (who makes at least half a dozen appearances) and Abbie Hoffman, among others -- to galvanize the young people who are feeling down given Nixon, Kent State, Attica, and Vietnam.
Lennon reveals that Dylan wants to participate but he is pissed off at Weberman and doesn’t feel safe so he doesn’t want to do it. John and Yoko get Weberman to write Bob a letter of apology. It is a thing of beauty to witness. The tour never happens because the Yippies overplay their hand and assume that J&Y will be down with going to Miami for the 1972 Republican National Convention and engaging in violent protest, which they decidedly are not down with, and not just because they’re trying to get permanent residency in the States.
The concert footage is absolutely great and for once the sound in a theater where I am watching a music film was sufficiently loud enough, thanks to Sean Lennon for his production work on the audio. Selfishly I would have preferred to have the entire concert run in sequence because it definitely would have been more impactful, although every single song is pretty fucking impactful. We never got to see John Lennon have a live solo career and this does a great job of reminding us of this sad fact.
The film has a very limited theatrical release (like I think just Friday and Saturday, so check if you care) and then I imagine it will go to streaming, which is a good place for it. I’m happy to have seen it in the theater although am not sure it needed an IMAX showing, but maybe that’s the easiest way to make sure you have decent sound for rock and roll.
I finished David Sheff’s Yoko biography recently and was mostly disappointed. There isn’t going to be another book about Yoko because Sheff had the kind of access that journalists were given in the 70s and 80s (while they also were making $400,000 an article or whatever that viral post said) and the family trusted him when they didn’t trust a lot of other journalists. No one else had access and you can't get it now.
My major problem with the book is that I wanted more on Yoko’s time with Fluxus and way more about her artistic process in general, but the lack of that information may not be his fault. He absolutely does include a great deal about that time period, but he wasn’t there and she may have talked about it as much as she was going to talk about it, so what we have is what we have. For obvious reasons she’s needed to be very circumspect about who was around (and still had to deal with absolutely dreadful security issues as well as plenty of scam artists who rightly saw her as a payday) but that means there aren’t other interviews that you can use to fill things in. My biggest annoyance was that she is still a working artist in her 90s and the latter decades are when she's gotten the most recognition and its relegated to an epilogue. It felt like Sheff was speedwalking through so he can be done with this book already.
Another issue for me is that I actively dislike that 70s/80s celeb magazine profile writing style. It’s that tone where the person writing it wants to make sure that you know that they are inside but they’re also trying to convey that they have journalistic ethics so their writing tends to be stiff and at a remove that might be appropriate in some contexts but not for this book. But that style is just what he does.
If you, like me, wanted a book that just focused on Yoko as an artist, this is not that book. It is a book that does a very good job integrating Yoko’s personal life around her time with John, and giving that aspect a proportional amount of space. He was a Beatle and that was an enormous thing. You can't write a book about Yoko without mentioning John Lennon and once there's a Beatle in the picture it changes everything. And frankly, many people are going to buy this book to read about her life with John. You write books so people will read them, and there's enough of her artistic endeavors that it might get some of those people to change their minds about Yoko, an insane thing I cannot believe we continue to debate in 2025. I don’t think the book I want will ever exist and I’ll probably do an at least partial re-read of this one in the fall when her exhibit opens at the MCA in Chicago (after stints at the Tate and in Germany) and see if I have a different opinion.
Caryn Rose
last week over at Radio Nowhere!
