imagine the films

  
In 1971, during and after the recording of the Imagine album, John Lennon & Yoko Ono filmed all the proceedings at their Tittenhurst home and studio, their journeys to London and New York, and created a conceptual film also called Imagine, edited to a soundtrack created from their albums, Imagine and FLY. The remaining documentary footage was also later edited to become the Grammy® Award Winning documentary ‘Gimme Some Truth’ (The Making of the Imagine album).

Both films have been restored and remastered from original film negative – Imagine with a completely new remixed soundtrack in 5.1, and Gimme Some Truth with a remastered soundtrack in 5.1, and are being released on Blu-Ray, DVD and digitally (Imagine on iTunes, Gimme Some Truth on iTunes).
  

Reviews

Goldmine: John and Yoko’s restored Imagine film is magnificent
Radio Times: John and Yoko on their own terms and at his solo creative peak
  

  

  

  

Imagine is also being released for a limited theatrical run in September with a soundtrack in 7.1 Surround Sound and Dolby Atmos in selected cinemas and theatres worldwide (get tickets here). Find out more below.
  
  

  
  

  

remixed, restored & remastered

  

Following an intensive restoration process, the original cut of the entire film has been frame-matched to the first generation 16mm camera colour negative. Every frame has been subsequently hand cleaned and restored.

The soundtrack has been remixed and remastered from all the original multitrack audio sources in glorious 7.1 Surround Sound and Dolby Atmos (for theatres) by multi-Grammy® Award winner Paul Hicks, all under the supervision of Yoko Ono Lennon.

  

extra features – cinema version

  

The film is accompanied by an additional 15 minutes of never-before-seen extras including studio footage of John and his band (George Harrison from The Beatles, Nicky Hopkins from The Rolling Stones, Alan White from Yes and Klaus Voormann) performing ‘How Do You Sleep?’ and ‘Oh My Love’ in a specially created Dolby Atmos surround sound ‘Raw Studio’ mix. Created from the original multitrack rehearsal tapes, this unique, innovative and immersive audio experience puts you in the centre of the recording studio while the band play live around you.

Also included is an up-close-and-personal early version of ‘Oh Yoko!’ filmed just before John and Yoko’s ‘Bed-In For Peace’ whilst in their hotel room in the Bahamas in 1969.
  

  


  

  

what is dolby atmos?

  

  
Dolby Atmos creates powerful, moving audio by introducing two important concepts to cinema sound: audio objects and overhead speakers. Together, these completely change how soundtracks are created and heard.

Traditional surround soundtracks confine all sounds to a small set of channels that can deliver sound to you from only a few perceived angles. They cannot put sound above you. Further, sounds exist only as part of a channel mix. If one sound is emphasized in a traditional mix, another must be diminished.

In Dolby Atmos, by contrast, sound can be freed from channels. It enables artists to treat specific sounds as individual entities, called audio objects. These can be precisely placed and moved by the soundtrack creator anywhere in the cinema’s three-dimensional space—they are not confined to specific channels—though the artist can continue to use channel capabilities as desired. The Dolby Atmos cinema processor then determines which of a cinema’s huge array of front, back, side, and overhead speakers it will use to recreate this lifelike movement.

As a result, a Dolby Atmos soundtrack brings alive the onscreen story as never before possible. The movie’s sounds flow all around you to completely immerse you in the action, heightening the impact of the story and creating a powerfully moving cinema experience.

Find out more about Dolby Atmos here.

eagle rock entertainment

  
Eagle Rock Entertainment is the world-leading producer and distributor of music-related audiovisual content. Founded in 1997, the multi award-winning company completes over 50 productions a year including concerts, documentaries, scripted formats and specials representing over 2,000 hours of programming. The vast catalogue includes work by award-winning filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Brett Morgan, Paul Dugdale, Stanley Nelson and Bob Smeaton. Eagle Rock has worked alongside a variety of artists including the Rolling Stones, Madonna, Mumford & Sons, Jay Z, Paul McCartney, Frank Sinatra, Katy Perry, Black Sabbath and Imagine Dragons. Eagle Rock Entertainment is headquartered in London, with offices in New York and Los Angeles, and is part of Universal Music Group.
www.eagle-rock.com

  

  

the making of imagine

  

  
John: The one we’re making now [Imagine] is very loose; they just bring the camera every day and we just decide what to do that day, almost. We’re just making it up as we go along. It will show some of the recording sessions, but I’m not going to do a lot of that like Let It Be because they’re all boring, those things. But there is one song that we can show bits of all the way through, which is ‘How?’ from nothing to the finished thing.

And there might be one I’ll sing all the way through, which is ‘Give Me Some Truth’, because they’ve taped it at the right speed. Others I’ll use as background songs – I don’t know how many to put in yet – backgrounds to Yoko’s artworks downstairs, and there’ll be some shots of us in the house, and the garden, and then the contrast with some of the New York stuff which was shot by other people – and the guy [Jonas Mekas] that always shoots very fast with stills and single-frame stuff. There’s scenes of the party and on the boat, and some from Yoko’s session.
  

  
Yoko: ‘Imagine’ is a complete vision. A succinct bible of truth. It will start to unfold as you believe in it. The film? Well, it just happened naturally. I was well aware of the symbolism of everything – closing and then opening the shutters to let the light in. It’s rather personal, but I had a definite reason why I smiled at the end, in addition to loving being next to John.

John: Yoko’s quite adept in filmmaking and she’d made quite a few films before I’d met her. I used to make 8mm films at home and superimpose and do tricks with it and just play arbitrary records with it. But when I met Yoko she said, ‘Well why don’t you do it seriously?’ So she sort of helped me to develop in that area and I find it’s very similar to recording, just visual. And it’s beautiful to work with. When we did Imagine, we felt great about it, and were saying, ‘This is going to widen the field of film! This is it! This is the seventies! We started off…we were going to do a few clips and we ended up filming every song on the album and a few from Yoko’s album too, and we ended up with a seventy-minute film.
  

  
John: We made an album called Imagine and then we made Yoko’s album FLY, and we were going to make a short film clip and it just went on. We went on filming and filming ’til we had a seventy-minute movie. And it only has two words in it: ‘Good morning’. And all the rest is music. So it’s like a musical. It’s fairly wild and we made it up as we went along.

Yoko: The idea of not saying anything during the film – except in the beginning to just say ‘Good morning’ to each other – was John’s.

We enjoyed making films together. John came up with big ideas, or ideas that seemed big to me at the time. He thought of using a helicopter, which added a new dimension to our film. When John first said, ‘Let’s use a helicopter’, I – who was supposed to have sold out in a big way – thought, ‘Oh dear, aren’t we getting a bit Hollywood?’ The result was that beautiful scene in ‘Jealous Guy’. There was nothing so-called ‘Hollywood’ about that.
  

  
Yoko: It’s called ‘Play It by Trust’. Because the chess pieces on both sides are white, you always have to be aware of which are your pieces. There comes a moment when you feel like maybe you want to cheat, or you want to convince your opponent which pieces were yours. Then there’s a moment when you feel like it really doesn’t matter which pieces are yours or the opponent’s. Actually it’s the same. And we are all one. Life is not that defined. It’s not black and white. You are not there to be an observer; you have to participate. But it’s a participation that hits a very delicate chord in you.

The board goes through many quiet changes, which correspond to the changes within you. It immediately dispenses with the idea of war and a battle, because if you are the same, you don’t have a war. Who are we fighting? And why?

John: I was in a German airport. I had an American army mac on and a guy [Sergeant Peter James Reinhardt] came up and said, I just got out of the army [Imjin Scout Regiment, 2nd Infantry Division, South Korea] and if you’d like these clothes, I’d love to give them to you. I said ‘all right’, and he sent me all these army clothes in the post.

Yoko: Both of us experienced World War II from two opposite sides. We knew what it meant to be in the war. We knew how, suddenly, you could lose everything. We knew that people like us were the ones who really suffered, and the generals and the politicians just kept dishing out lies to keep us pacified.
  

  
John: We’ve got some great footage in our film we’re just making with a man in a bag wandering all over London. And most people don’t take any notice of him. He’s just walking around. It’s fantastic.

Yoko: From the white sneakers, it looks like John in the bag!

I stood in Trafalgar Square in London wearing that bag before I met John, and I was thinking that if everybody wore this bag then there wouldn’t be any racial war, things like that. I get obsessive about things like that and think, ‘Oh, well I should go in front of the White House and wear a bag, and if I get shot maybe the whole world will become peaceful.’

John: We’re all in a bag, you know? I was in this pop bag in my little clique, and she was in her little avant-garde clique. We all intellectualize about how there is no barrier between art, music and poetry but I’m a rock and roller, she’s a poet, so we just came up with the word so you would ask us what Bagism is, and we’d say ‘we’re all in a bag, baby!’ We get out of one bag and into the next.

Yoko: ‘Whisper Piece’ was originally called a ‘Telephone Piece’, and was the start of the word-of-mouth pieces. It is usually performed by whispering a word or a note into an audience’s ear and asking to have it passed on until it reaches the last audience.

One time I did ‘Whisper Piece’ in the Destruction in Art Symposium in 1966 in London. Four or five very hot-blooded Destruction in Art Symposium-type male artists protested that my work was not destructive. But I was not interested in just smashing a piano or a car or something – I was interested in the delicate way that things change – in that kind of destruction which, in a way, is more dangerous. I whispered a word and the word went around and got destroyed.

Fred Astaire was so meticulous. He made us do five takes because he didn’t like the way he was moving. John just loved this kind of thing.
  

  
Yoko: On our way back from installing the Art Spectrum show in Alexandra Palace we saw a march at Marble Arch and immediately joined in. Someone handed John a megaphone and he led a chant of ‘Power To The People’. We marched down Oxford Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, around Eros, along Piccadilly and up to Grosvenor Square where the American Embassy was sealed off by police.

John: Did you hear what it said about Selfridges in the New York Post? ‘John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono were chased through Selfridges by a gang of screaming fans. A thousand fans, most seen to be holding copies of the book, Beatles records and photographs, set upon the couple as they sat in the book department.’ It wasn’t like that at all. It says also that they bought a thousand copies. In fact, four hundred were knocked off!

Yoko: ‘Oh My Love’ was filmed at the beautiful shoin-style tea house designed by Junzo Yoshimura in the Japanese Garden of the Kykuit Rockefeller Mansion & Estate in Sleepy Hollow in upstate New York. We did the filming kind of on the sly because we didn’t have any permits and then pretended we had filmed it in Japan. [laughs] I think it’s OK to admit this now – I hope they don’t mind!
  

  
John: ‘How?’ – it’s a romantic song, and we’re filming on a lake and I’m rowing and it’s meant to be very romantic but the boat wouldn’t leave the shore. It’s going, ‘How can I go forward?’ The boat won’t go, I got the oars on and the oar comes off and in the end I finally make it, half-way through the second verse!

Yoko: When I think of Ascot I think of making the Imagine album and also just being together, strolling around in the gardens. We together declared to the world that we were a working partnership. It was a very intense and beautiful time for us. Both of us were activists already. So we spoke about it and said, ‘Hey, that’s what we can do together!’ World Peace is definitely attainable. We are working on that now. You included.

John: We did a talk show in England and every time the man wanted to talk about ‘Beatles’, because I’m fed up talking about them, I asked him to go in a bag and he did it. The interviewer, Michael Parkinson, the Dick Cavett of England, he was in the bag all the time, so every time the cameras panned to him, the audience broke up, so he could never get the questions out. It was a very good show!

Yoko: John was the most romantic man I ever encountered. He said you have to water your love every day. John used to make me laugh, and I, him. We were great partners in that sense. In the world’s eye we were Laurel and Hardy. In our minds we were Heathcliff and Cathy. In a moment of wisdom we were a wizard and a witch. In a moment of freedom, we were Don Quixote and Sancho. In reality, we were just a boy and a girl who never looked back.

We were on South Beach on Staten Island. ‘Let’s really upset them and end the film with us walking on water.’ (I’ll let you guess whose idea that was!) We tried – that is, I know it looked a bit awkward, but it was a windy day and the waves were rough. Anyway, what you see is what you get. Enjoy.

Yoko:
‘Imagine’ was created with immense love
and concern for the children of the world.

I hope you enjoy it.

love, yoko
21 July 2018

  

  

the making of gimme some truth

  
Andrew Solt (director/producer): It was a busy decade between making Imagine: John Lennon (the documentary feature) and Gimme Some Truth. Yoko asked if I would like to revisit her and John’s world. It appealed to me to again delve into the hundreds of 16mm reels that captured their lives in 1971 at Tittenhurst, their sprawling Georgian estate in Ascot, England.

Gimme Some Truth encapsulates a pivotal moment in their lives. It was a pressure-cooker period after the four Beatles parted ways. Each of them had to venture out on his own for the first time since they had conquered Liverpool dance halls, the Cavern, the Sullivan stage and stadiums across America and the world.

Despite the vice-lock of fame that gripped them, John was now free to do exactly as he desired. He felt less constrained, and like his former bandmates, he could fill an album as he wished – with his own songs.

What Gimme Some Truth captures is the emancipated, artistically freewheeling John. He didn’t mind the cameras focused on him. In fact, he seemed to relish their presence. He wasn’t into hiding. He was into being open and showing us who he was and letting us know what he was feeling and thinking. His calling card was his blatant honesty – like it or not. Camera crews captured the recording process, the searching and the aural experimentation. They also documented the daily goings-on in and around the palatial estate. From the moment they met, Yoko documented whatever transpired in her time with John. And fortunately for us, John was more than willing to go along.

The ‘set’ for their film, like Tittenhurst itself, is white. The rooms are white; the window shutters Yoko opens are white; her flowing robe is white; the carpet is white and the grand piano on which John plays ‘Imagine’ is also white.

We in the room witness the birth of a musical supernova – the evolution of John’s most important artistic creation as a solo artist – a song that has held its lofty perch as a global anthem for almost 50 years.

We get to sit in on the recording of other emotional and brave recordings like ‘Jealous Guy’ (John admits he was), ‘Oh, Yoko!’ (his deep need and passion for the love of his life), ‘How?’ (his confession of personal doubt and vulnerability) and ‘How Do You Sleep?’ (his anger at Paul after their acrimonious split) and more. We witness these songs being recorded with the involvement of Yoko, George Harrison, Phil Spector, Klaus Voormann, Alan White and other musicians.

The Ascot Sound Studio sessions are the nucleus of the film, but we are also privy to various non-musical moments – John & Yoko leading an anti-war demonstration in London; a visit to a packed book signing for Yoko’s Grapefruit; visiting art galleries with eerily sculptured human forms and people actually ‘in’ paintings on the wall; overseeing the installation of a guest playhouse by their lake; being grilled by yet one more inquisitive reporter, and hosting a ‘backyard’ party attended by Miles Davis, Jack Nicholson, Andy Warhol and other guests on a perfectly British sunny afternoon.

A standout vérité moment occurs when John previews his about-to-be-recorded masterpiece, ‘Imagine’, on the piano and pianist Nicky Hopkins comments that he really likes the song. John offhandedly replies – ‘Yeah, that’s the one I like best’. Gimme Some Truth is John & Yoko as they were – unvarnished and honest. We are like flies on the wall in their home and they seem happy to invite us in. This is a very important moment in their lives and in our musical and cultural history. We are present for the creation of one of the most beloved songs in the rock/pop canon.

John & Yoko envisioned a much more perfect world than the one we currently inhabit – one without heaven or hell, no borders or countries, nothing to kill or die for, just people living in peace. The idealism of ‘Imagine’ is as true today as it was the day it was recorded.

  

  

Greg Vines (supervising producer): There are only a few projects in one’s life that come together with ease and grace. After working on the film Imagine: John Lennon for nearly two years, we became familiar with countless hours of footage. One of the most interesting parts of Yoko’s vast collection were the nearly two-hundred hours shot for John and Yoko’s Imagine film (1971). We could only use a few minutes in our documentary, but apparently there was more to be done. It was kind of double fantasy to work on another Lennon project, Gimme Some Truth.

We decided to create short videos for each song on the album and to tie them together with a narrative. It was an invigorating and challenging process. The end product illustrates a very important time in John & Yoko’s life. We were all proud of the film, and we were thrilled when it was honored with a Grammy® Award. For me personally, it was extremely rewarding to have been a part of this memorable project.

Leslie Tong (co-producer and editor): When we learned we were going to be involved with Gimme Some Truth, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Together, we viewed hours upon hours of the studio sessions to come up with a master plan. How many songs had actually been filmed in the studio and how were we going to work with that material? Most importantly, how were we going to tackle editing the iconic song, ‘Imagine’? Since the song was the centerpiece of the film, we had to exercise restraint in balancing ‘Imagine’ with the other tracks. Yoko and I decided to bookend the documentary with the song from its infancy to its final recording and playback. John’s wicked sense of humor is evident when they were plagued with problems while recording in the white room. As John looks into the camera, ‘we have to do this some other day, ladies and gentlemen. It’s taking them an hour to tell us the noise is spreading, you see?’ We wanted to present the events as they unfolded organically. There were light-hearted, honest and some intense moments throughout the recording sessions. Yoko certainly did not shy away from revealing John’s short fuse with the recording engineer during ‘Oh Yoko!’.

As a major John Lennon fan (especially the Imagine album), collaborating with Yoko gave me a candid insight into her as well as that magical period when she and John created one of the greatest albums of all time.

  

  

extras – bluray/dvd

  
1. Jealous Guy (Raw Studio out-take)
2. Gimme Some Truth (Raw Studio out-take)
3. How? (Raw Studio out-take)
4. David Bailey Photoshoot

  

  

extras – theatrical

  
1. How Do You Sleep? (Raw Studio Mix, takes 5 & 6)
2. Oh My Love (Raw Studio out-take)
3. Oh Yoko! (Bahamas 1969)

  

  

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