They say they filmed an evolution

LOS ANGELES -- The documentary filmmakers' hearts were sinking.

Instead of just watching their new work, the reviewer whose rave they craved jotted notes the whole way through a private screening at her fabled New York apartment. She'd watch and write and write some more. Directors David Leaf and John Scheinfeld describe themselves as tense with worry.

They can relax.

Yoko Ono gave their documentary two thumbs up, four stars, the ultimate blessing. She told them that ``The U.S. vs. John Lennon," which opens Friday, was the documentary that the slain Beatle would have loved most of all. Later the famously private Ono reiterated her appreciation in public.

``Basically, if you want to know about John, this is John," she told the Associated Press recently at the Toronto International Film Festival, where she was helping to promote the film.

``The U.S. vs. John Lennon," with its wall-to-wall music and previously unseen home footage, was made with Ono's full cooperation. Anything else would have been unthinkable, the filmmakers say. They needed her to open the vaults to Lennon's music and, in a sense, his life during their New York years.

But they stress that their story of how John Lennon went from mop top to man with an antiwar cause that drew the Nixon administration's ire is steeped in documents and fact and film footage. The little-known story of attempts to have him deported in retaliation is one they have wanted to tell for more than a decade.

``But no one was interested then," Scheinfeld said. ``It was really only in a post-9/11 world, post-Iraq War world, that people began to see that this story has relevance for a contemporary audience."

Added Leaf, ``Perhaps the most gratifying screenings we've had are for young people. They're coming to this story with a relatively blank slate. They know John Lennon was in the Beatles. They know he wrote `Imagine,' know he was murdered. They really don't know much other than that."

In retelling the story of Lennon's activism and his sudden status as an ``undesirable" alien, the pair who served as writers, directors, and producers on the film say they tried to represent all viewpoints: George McGovern, the Democrat who lost to Nixon in 1972, and G. Gordon Liddy, the aide who did some of Nixon's dirty work, both show up to illuminate the times. But ``The U.S. vs. John Lennon" has little appreciation for Nixon, who comes off as petty and paranoid about Lennon's growing influence.

There is, in fact, no mistaking whose side the filmmakers are on. In their world, John Lennon is a deity, always was, always will be. Leaf and Scheinfeld, veterans at making music documentaries, aren't just music fans; they're self-described Beatles fanatics. They danced to his songs as teenagers and admired his anti war activism as college students. His life was the backdrop to theirs.

``The Beatles were my all-time favorite group, and the anti war years were my college years," said Leaf, who went to school in Washington, D.C. ``Put those two together and it's a chance to tell a story that's like a heavyweight fight."

``The U.S. vs. John Lennon" focuses on the years just after the Beatles broke up -- and not, as Beatles mythology has it, because Lennon had taken up with the woman who would become his partner in promoting peace and opposing the Vietnam War. While ``Revolution" plays on the soundtrack, the movie documents his political evolution.

His resulting activism -- and the adoration the ex-Beatle drew -- angered the administration, which attempted to have him deported home to England because of a minor drug arrest there years before. That's the fight in the title.

Eventually Lennon triumphed. He got to stay. The day he found out the fight was over was his birthday, and the day his son Sean was born. Like so much of his life, those moments were captured on film. The trick, for Leaf and Scheinfeld, was to find that footage.

``We cast a very wide net," Scheinfeld said. ``Over the years, we've developed a lot of sources for material. We would go to them and say, `What do you have on John Lennon?' And they'd say, `OK, we have this, we have this.' We knew about the green card and that there was film on it. But for 10 months we were told the footage was gone, done, nowhere to be found. Finally, with three weeks to go before the movie, it was found -- misfiled, mislabeled, in the archive."

Added Leaf, ``On at least two occasions, someone said, `I've been saving this [film clip] for just the right project.' That's part of our detective work. We love that stuff."

Some of the most crucial film and photographs came from Ono herself, since it was personal and hadn't been shown publicly before. Persuading her to sit down for long interviews was equally important.

Many people have seen film of their ``bed-ins," where journalists jockeyed for position while the pair played to the cameras in their pajamas. But now Ono tells of watching the moon alone together afterward, a private moment that meant the most to her. There are many more like it.

``She is perhaps one of the most misunderstood people of the 20th century, despised beyond words during the breakup of the Beatles," Leaf said. ``So by getting her to tell the story from their perspectives, John and Yoko are telling the story of this adventure they went on. . . . There were no strings attached, no censorship in her participation. She just told us stories."

Unlike many documentaries, the film itself has no narrator, only the voices of the people who were there, whether journalists, historians, politicians, or friends of the famous couple. And of course John Lennon, whose charisma comes through every time someone aims a camera at him. Then there are the Beatles and Lennon songs, about three dozen in all, including ``All You Need Is Love," ``Imagine," and, of course, ``Give Peace a Chance." Whether he's singing or speaking, it's Lennon's experience in his own words, with Ono offering commentary and confirmation along the way.

There are also stories the film doesn't tell. It doesn't delve into Lennon's actual drug use or his extramarital affairs. Those omissions were intentional, the filmmakers say, and unrelated to their need to access the film and video archives of which Ono is the gatekeeper. Instead, those parts of Lennon's life proved to be cul-de-sacs, as Leaf put it, dead ends that detracted from the specific story they wanted to tell: how John Lennon ended up under FBI surveillance (for hanging out with countercultural radicals such as Bobby Seale , Angela Davis, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin, for starters) and the government's ham-fisted attempt to shut him up, at least on US soil.

``This story, which is the true story and a very important story, has not been discussed so much as the tabloid thing," Ono said at a New York news conference, according to Reuters. ``I don't think he's coming out as a saint [in the movie]. The struggle that he went through confronting these big powers, it's almost like a very interesting Superman kind of thing -- bad against good."

Bad triumphed in 1980, when a deranged fan shot Lennon to death outside the Dakota apartment building where Ono still lives. Now Leaf and Scheinfeld say they hope to spread his pro-peace (not to be confused with anti war) message on to a new generation.

``What John and Yoko were doing was the first reality show; the difference was they weren't promoting themselves, they were promoting a cause," Scheinfeld said. ``Whether you agree with what John Lennon did or not, you have to admire his courage in doing it. That's the inspirational message here: not what you should think but that you shouldn't be afraid to think and say what you want."

Lynda Gorov can be reached at lgorov@aol.com.