Doc Talk Podcast Hops Into Time Machine To Explore 1970s Idealism, Radicalism With Makers Of ‘One To One: John & Yoko’ And ‘Suburban Fury’

Nostalgia tends to tint our view of the past a rose-colored hue, casting a glow over intense conflict and deep angst, as if those sentiments weren’t fundamental to the experience of people alive in earlier times.

In the case of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the rose-colored (granny) glasses might be appropriate, at least when looking back at the early 1970s when the famous couple moved to New York City and took up residence in a very modest apartment in Greenwich Village. That’s the era examined in One to One: John & Yoko, the acclaimed new documentary directed by Oscar winner Kevin Macdonald.

The filmmaker joins the latest episode of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast to discuss his film and the burst of idealistic energy John and Yoko felt in their adopted home. But around John and Yoko swirled protests over the Vietnam War, political conflict over the emerging women’s rights and gay rights movements, and a sense that the feeling of endless possibility unleashed in the 1960s was quickly dissipating.

We talked with Macdonald at the 10th anniversary of Doc Stories in San Francisco, the prestigious festival put on by SFFILM. At Doc Stories, we also spoke with director Robinson Devor and producer Jason Reid, makers of another remarkable documentary set in the turbulent early ‘70s, Suburban Fury, which held only its second screening ever after premiering at the New York Film Festival.

The central figure in Suburban Fury is Sara Jane Moore, who attempted to assassinate then-President Gerald Ford in San Francisco in 1975. How did she go from an apparently “ordinary” suburban woman with Republican leanings to FBI informant, tangled up in the effort to track down kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst? The answers help untangle an entire era fraught with anxiety, desperation, and a paradoxically “idealistic” sense that a bullet, properly aimed, could change history.

At age 94, Moore herself – sharp and combative – gives an account of herself and her motives.

Climb into the wayback machine with us for the new episode of Doc Talk, hosted by Oscar winner John Ridley (who recently made a narrative film about another important figure from the early 1970s, Democratic presidential contender Shirley Chisholm), and Matt Carey, Deadline’s documentary editor.

The pod, a 2024 Webby Awards honoree, is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios. Listen to the episode above or on major podcast platforms including Spotify, iHeart and Apple.