He only wanted to talk to his hero. What he received was an intimate, life-changing conversation with one of the 20th century's most influential cultural figures.
Jerry Levitan's off-the-cuff chat with John Lennon in the musician's hotel room nearly 40 years ago, transformed last year into a five-minute animated short titled I Met The Walrus, could now win the Toronto lawyer an Academy Award.
It was a Monday morning in May of 1969 and the then-14-year-old Levitan should have been getting ready to go to school. Instead he grabbed his brother's Super-8 camera and at 7am headed downtown to the King Edward Hotel where he had a sneaking suspicion John Lennon might be after hearing the Beatle had been spotted the night before at Toronto's Pearson Airport.
Levitan entered the hotel, zoomed up to the top floor, and knocked on every door, hoping one would lead to the musical icon he'd always dreamed of meeting. A housekeeper saw him and asked if he was looking for 'the Beatle.' He said he was and she directed him to another room a few floors down. He saw Yoko Ono's daughter Kyoko playing outside one of the rooms and knew he'd found "the centre of all things."
"My heart was racing," Levitan recalls in a conversation with
CityNews.ca. "I knocked on the door. It opened up a bit, and I barged my way in, staring at my feet as I was walking. I turned a corner, looked up, and five feet in front of me sat John Lennon and Yoko Ono."
The barefoot Lennon, in the middle of an interview, laughed when he saw the bespectacled, dumbstruck teen in front of him, but his laughter turned to amazement when he saw what Levitan had with him - a copy of John and Yoko's infamous Two Virgins album, confiscated by authorities in parts of North America because the photo of them naked on the cover was deemed obscene.
"He said
(replicating Lennon's Liverpudlian brogue) 'I thought the Mounties came in and took them all from Canada,'" Levitan describes. "He was happy and surprised I had it, did this great autograph and drew a cartoon of him and Yoko on it."
After grabbing some shots of John and Yoko in the room, Levitan boldly asked Lennon if he could return later in the day for an interview. Lennon agreed.
"I realized to my horror I hadn't prepared one question. I had some good questions, some crazy questions, some totally 14-year-old questions," Levitan says, having borrowed a reel-to-reel tape recorder from CHUM Radio for the interview. "I spent a lot of time talking about myself, I wanted John Lennon, my hero, to know who I was. He let me do that, and let me stay, and connected with me. It was important for him, for whatever reason, to give me that quality experience."
What struck Levitan, who aside from practicing law is also a well-known
children's entertainer, was just how 'real' Lennon was.
"Joking with me, listening to what I had to say. The coolness of how he treated me made me appreciate him even more. I knew he was this phenomenal artist, arguably one of the most important cultural artists of the 20th century. (But) you never know, sometimes you meet someone famous and they're an idiot or irritating or rough with you. He was far from that," he reveals.
"I kept trying to read messages into the songs, and he kept knocking me down and saying, 'No, I'm just an ordinary guy. I get up in the morning, I have a coffee, cup of tea. I'm just an ordinary guy writing about me songs. We all are, all four of us.'"
For years Levitan held onto and cherished that half-hour conversation with Lennon, and though he always knew he wanted to do something with it he was waiting for the right opportunity. Three years ago that opportunity came along in the form of Toronto filmmaker-animator Josh Raskin, who had the idea to trim down the audio interview to five minutes and set it to animation. The film marries Lennon's words to evocative pen sketches by artist James Braithwaite and digital illustration by Alex Kurina.
The project cost $50,000, about half of that supplied by Bravo!FACT, and since its release has won a slew of awards including the American Film Institute's Best Animated Short prize and Best Animation at the Middle East International Film Festival.
On February 24, Levitan may also win an Oscar for the film. If he does it'll no doubt be another life-changing experience, although perhaps not quite as profound as that day he met 'the Beatle.'
"So much of who I am today and who I was then is because of that experience," Levitan admits, adding that a part of him died the day Lennon was fatally shot in 1980. "What he did to me, by treating me that way, the things he said to me. I loved him."
I Met The Walrus
Sir Jerry