One to One: John & Yoko
In the early 1970s, John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved from an English country mansion into a small apartment in Manhattan, New York. Our initial research brief for this documentary was to recreate their immersion into 24/7 US television serving as a window on the world. The sheer scale of TV they could have watched was overwhelming in itself and also required getting inside the heads of these two prolific artists and activists at such a politically charged time in history.
The requests for archive research grew then more focused as the director Kevin Macdonald and editor Sam Rice-Edwards assessed the material we supplied and tried it out in the edit. This meant we supplied an extraordinarily high volume of material (for which our neat file-naming conventions and workflows really came into their own!)
Poster for the documentary One to One: John & Yoko
We reached far and wide across the US to gather in all types of TV broadcasts from the era. This meant talking to all the major news outlets but also tracking down the owners of entertainment shows and commercials to help us convey the culture of the time. We also discovered a wealth of material held by universities across the US to which individuals and local news stations have donated their archives.
Another seam of audiovisual history that we explored for this project was guerrilla television. Created by early adopters of portable video recording equipment, these, often young, pioneers sought to record views and actions that went against the society mainstream. Just the kind of thing that two self-proclaimed radical artists would be into while Nixon vied to win another term as US president against a backdrop of the initial reporting of Watergate and growing public disgust at the war in Vietnam.
This film covers a very precise time in John and Yoko’s lives so due to the fact that many archive suppliers could only date much of their material to the general “1970s” period, we undertook additional research to trace exactly when in that decade footage had been recorded.
When working in archive production, you accept that your efforts (however considerable) can appear as only a small slice of the finished product. This isn’t the case for One to One: John & Yoko where the archive is the entire film (well, almost). It is, of course, never a single-handed achievement and we would like to congratulate Rosemary Rotundi for her research for the film and Simon Hilton for his management of the Lennon estate’s archive. In addition to Kevin and Sam, the production team were a pleasure to work with and those with whom Shanakee worked most closely are listed below.
When it came to licensing, we worked with almost 50 suppliers and negotiated all sorts of special deals. With some suppliers we arranged bulk discounts while with others, where only a few seconds of their material was being used, we negotiated special reductions in rates and minimum usages. The result is a “fun, fierce and full-blooded” ‘rock doc’ as described by The Guardian, containing “a treasure trove of footage”, according to Variety.
Key people we worked with:
- Director: Kevin MacDonald
- Editor & Co-director: Sam Rice-Edwards
- Producer: Peter Worsley
- Line Producer: Melissa Morton Hicks
- Assistant Editor: Bruna Manfredi
- Associate Producer: Lizzie Webster
- Post Production: Bleat
