New John Lennon and Yoko Ono documentary shows couple as world’s first ‘reality stars’ according to son Sean

A new documentary about John Lennon and Yoko Ono will show how they were the “first reality TV celebrity couple,” according to their son Sean Ono Lennon.

Helmed by acclaimed Scottish director, Kevin McDonald, the documentary will feature uncovered audiotapes of John Lennon’s phone calls and footage of the couple’s life, including their performances at the One to One benefit concerts in 1972.

Sean made the comments while speaking to Variety magazine ahead of the documentary’s release, called One to One: John & Yoko, saying the project was much more than a “concert film.”

“It’s very multi-layered and has macro and micro narratives that are all equally compelling in different ways,” he said.

Lennon and Ono started filming their daily lives when they lived in England, then began recording their own phone calls after they moved to New York as then US president Richard Nixon “was trying to deport my dad”, according to Sean.

“They were doing that in the early ’70s, before reality television and before social media and before memes — they were already kind of ahead of their time in that regard,” he said.

“As far as I am concerned, it’s like they were the first reality TV celebrity couple.”

While the project focuses on the One to One live shows, it also gave an insight into Lennon and Ono’s life together, according to Sean who remixed the project’s live recordings.

“But really the concert is a window through which you can view the lives of my parents at that time, moving to New York from the UK, and then through their eyes, you view the greater political and cultural landscape of the early ’70s,” he said.

He also credited his parents as pioneers for using memes to spread their ideas, such as “Give peace a chance”, “War is over if you want it” or “Hair Peace” and argued these were the first mass use of “mimetic campaigns for social issues.”

“So it’s fascinating to see how they were able to use the technology to document and record their private lives while also sort of using that level of intimacy to create media that was important to them,” he said.

“They wanted to show who they were and the truth of who they were, and they wanted people to see them unmanicured and unfiltered – and I feel like no one was really doing that at the time.”

Sean was only five years old when his father was killed. In a previous interview, Sean revealed that he got to know his father through his music and had to reconstruct him through “fragments.”

“Learning how to play his songs on guitar was a way to process the loss with an activity that made me feel connected to him,” he said.

Watching archival footage was another way Sean could connect with his father and understand him better.

“So whenever I hear my dad saying anything that I haven’t heard before, even just a little moment, it means so much to me,” he said.

– with BANG