In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatles fan named Jerry Levitan managed to track down John Lennon at the hotel during his peace bed-in in Toronto. He ended up wangling an exclusive interview with John. The article of his adventure is here:

http://www.levitanlawyers.com/press/1.html

My system's too slow to play the video, but apparently you can hear the interview here:

http://www.cbc.ca/thehour/video.php?id=1935

Enjoy!

Wow. What a fantastic, fortunately un-professionally-filtered recount of a young interviewer's experience. Thanks for posting that!

the text is too small. i don't want to hurt my eyes since i've got an exam tomorrow.

Lucky kid!

Well, he made his luck. He certainly put in the legwork to run John down! :)

Blackmath, don't hurt your eyes. You can play the sound link instead if you have a fast connection.

Quoted from Chris

Wow. What a fantastic, fortunately un-professionally-filtered recount of a young interviewer's experience. Thanks for posting that!

What's so amazing (among other things) is the kid was just winging it. He moved from world peace into John's work into Beatles collaborations, all without a pause. So glib; No wonder he became lawyer! :) Still, I'm sure this is what the Beatles craved-- real interactions from their fans, and Jerry certainly qualified.

Nice little interview.

The story has an "Almost Famous" feeling to it.

The animation snippets are funny and creative. I hope it wins today.

How cool! Thanks, Paul!  :)

It lost to "Peter and the Wolf."

Too bad.

Thanks, Ligger.

Well, I suppose interviewing a wolf is more dangerous than interviewing John, but it's great Levitan's effort was acknowledged anyway.

Just stumbled across this fascinating film on You Tube



I MET THE WALRUS
"In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon's every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries the terrifyingly genius pen work of James Braithwaite with masterful digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon's boundless wit, and timeless message. "

Nice and interesting, thanks. Not much wit from Preacher John here (more "Power to the People" than "All You Need is Love"), but we love him anyway!

Yeah, I saw that the other day. Really cool!

That is so neat. The video is nice too.

thanks for posting this!!