Yoko Ono and World Wide Video are at war, not love, over hours of what may be fascinating raw and vintage footage of John Lennon right before the Beatles broke up.
The video, recorded from February 8 to 11, 1970, shows Lennon composing the songs “Remember” and “Mind Games,” discussing using illegal drugs (!), and not, I bet, about why the Beatles broke up. Because that hadn’t happened yet.
World Wide, a Massachusetts-based group of memorabilia collectors, wants to release the black-and-white footage as a two-hour film titled 3 Days in the Life, about Lennon during this presumably turbulent time.
The company says it paid more than $1 million for this unseen Lennon video. The footage nearly premiered last year at the private Berwick Academy in Maine, but World Wide yanked it after the school received a stop order from Ono’s lawyers, who claim copyright ownership of the videotapes.
World Wide has filed a suit in U.S. District Court in Boston against Ono for copyright infringement. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for April 30.
According to court documents, World Wide bought 24 original videotapes and their copyrights from Anthony Cox, Ono’s husband before she married John. Cox shot the footage for a documentary he was working on and presumably scrapped when the subject fell in love with his wife.
World Wide asserts that shortly after purchasing the videotapes, along with 10 copies, they were stolen in 2000. The company filed a separate civil suit a year later against a New Hampshire man who agreed to return the copies and locate the originals, court documents show.
The original videotapes are now in Ono’s possession. Ono’s lawyers claim in a countersuit that she purchased them legally from World Wide through a Florida man, who has been named as a defendant in the Massachusetts company’s suit.
Attorney for World Wide Joseph Doyle said in an interview with Rueters, “The decision that should be made in the case is who in fact does have the copyright. We’re saying that we legitimately own the copyright to this film.”
Ono’s lawyer in Boston refused to comment.
Image from Reuters/Yuriko Nakao (file photo from 2003)