Filmwax Radio

The filmmaker Erik Nelson is the guest in the first segment. Erik has a new documentary coming out about called “Daytime Revolution“. For one extraordinary week beginning on February 14, 1972, the Revolution was televised. “Daytime Revolution” 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. The film will have a nationwide theatrical screening in 50 cities on October 9th, the day that would have been John Lennon’s 84th birthday.

The filmmaker Emily Packer graces the podcast in this episode’s second segment. In “Holding Back the Tide“, an impressionist hybrid documentary, Packer traces the oyster through its many life cycles in New York, once the world’s oyster capital. Now their specter haunts the city through queer characters embodying ancient myth, discovering the overlooked history and biology of the bivalve that built the city. As environmentalists restore them to the harbor, Holding Back The Tide looks to the oyster as a queer icon, entangled with nature, with much to teach about our continued survival. The film had its world premiere at DOC NYC 2023, a New York theatrical at DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema and will have a theatrical in Los Angeles beginning October Check the website for details.