TORONTO: John Lennon joked that since he was a schoolboy he’d always gotten in trouble, maybe because he just had a look about him. Eventually he got into trouble with the US government.
The ex-Beatle’s celebrated battle with the feds is chronicled in The US vs. John Lennon, a documentary tracing how he went from rock star to fierce anti-war protester to ‘undesirable alien’.
The film was made with the cooperation of Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, who said the film is a rich and authentic portrait of the man and what he was fighting for.
“Basically, if you want to know about John, this is John,” Ono told The Associated Press at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the documentary played in advance of its theatrical debut on Friday.
Directors David Leaf and John Scheinfeld were able to mine archival recordings and family photos provided by Ono and secure rights to use about three dozen Beatles and Lennon songs in the film’s soundtrack, including ‘Revolution,’ ‘All You Need Is Love,’ ‘Imagine’ and ‘Give Peace a Chance’.
The film also features extensive new recollections from Ono, who gradually warmed up to the filmmakers after initial suspicions.
“I’m always sceptical, because I’m responsible for the image of John and all that, and I just don’t want to make a mistake,” Ono said. “Quite often, people approach me and they say one thing, then they do the other, so I was very cagy about it at the beginning. But they did a very good job with the music to make sure the music is right. I felt it was a very classy film.”
The materials Ono provided gave the film a wealth of previously unseen images and recorded comments by Lennon, who becomes almost the narrator of his own story.
“What we discovered going through there is that it was in essence the John and Yoko reality show,” Scheinfeld said. “They documented their daily life. There was often a camera around, often a microphone around. She saved it, so we were able to find a lot of those great moments that helped us tell the story.”
The film opens with Lennon’s appearance at a 1971 concert to free John Sinclair, who had been in prison for two years for selling marijuana to undercover police.
Lennon wound up under FBI surveillance as he began hanging out with such counterculture radicals as Bobby Seale, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman and considered headlining a concert tour to help bring out the vote against President Richard Nixon’s re-election.
The Nixon administration’s response was to sic the Immigration and Naturalization Service on Lennon, seeking to deport him, ostensibly because of a drug conviction in England.
The filmmakers trace Lennon’s development from flippant bad boy to a key spokesman against the Vietnam War.
Critics mocked him, calling his antics silly, idealistic stunts that would have no practical results. Yet Lennon kept at it with passion and humour.
On a talk show, Lennon discussed the ‘War Is Over’ billboards he and Ono put up in major cities around the world, the slogan taken from a refrain of their hit song ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’.—AP
