← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Documenting John & Yoko's Political and Personal Life
00:30:01
Director Kevin MacDonald joins us to discuss the film, “One to One: John & Yoko” which opens in theaters today.
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Alison Stewart
Listener support WNYC Studios.
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This is all of it. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in soho. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. I am really grateful that you are here. On today's show, we'll talk about some up and coming literary talent with Courtney Houdell of the Whiting Foundation. Chef Jake Cohen will be here. He's get us ready for Passover. And we'll talk to Caroline Pardilla. She has a new cocktail cookbook out. It's called Margarita Time. That's the plan. So let's get this started with a new documentary about John Lennon and Yoko Ono. In the new documentary One to One John and Yoko, we learn that John Lennon loved American tv. He soaked it all in from his home, his new home in Greenwich Village. He liked what he learned from it, about the government, the world, even the upsetting things. Like a report from a young TV journalist, Geraldo Rivera, about a hideous mental facility known as Willowbrook. Lennon and Ono decided to put on a concert to benefit the children who had been abused at the Willowbrook State School School on Staten Island, a school for disabled kids. It turned out to be the first and only full length concert John Lennon ever gave after the Beatles. Footage from the concert archival video audiotape of John and Yoko are the building blocks of director Kevin McDonald's documentary. It shows no talking heads, but we see people like Allen Ginsberg and Jerry Ruman alongside Mike Douglas and politicians like George Wallace. Their lives in action in public and in private. We also see the Lennons personal challenges fighting sexism against Yoko, John's naivete about politics. Vulture calls the film thunderous and moving and it's a New York Times critics pick. It's playing in theaters beginning today. Joining me to talk about it is director Kevin McDonald. Nice to speak with you.
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Kevin McDonald
Really nice to be here.
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Alison Stewart
So you had a chance to do a Beatles related film for Apple like 10 years ago, which you turned down. Why did you turn that down and why did you say yes to this one?
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Kevin McDonald
Well, because it feels like there's been so many films about the Beatles, about John, about Paul. And at the time, 10 years ago I thought, well, I don't know what else I can say. But in this case I was offered the opportunity to look at this concert which was being restored and I thought, wow, this is incredible. I realized I'd never seen John Lennon live playing to a big audience. He's playing at Madison Square Gard and when the audio was restored it sounded extraordinary. And the Sort of teenage John Lennon fan in me, because I couldn't resist doing this. But then I thought, how do. How do I do something new with this? And I came up with this idea after I heard a quote that John gave talking about how TV became his window on the world. How he learned about America through watching tv. And they had this huge TV at the end of their bed in Greenwich Village. And he just had it on the whole time. And I thought, I, that's kind of cool. Maybe we see what. We see the world through his and Yoko's eyes as they're watching tv. And we're going from footage of them into TV things that they're seeing on tv. And it's a kind of collage film and an opportunity to make it a different kind of movie.
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Alison Stewart
It's interesting. We see sort of a recreation of what the loft was like. We have many pictures of it, but we see a recreation. Why was that important for you to give the viewer as sort of a base point?
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Kevin McDonald
Well, the only thing that I filmed in this documentary is a reconstruction of this apartment. And they lived in really a very modest apartment, one room apartment, not far from here. Not far from here. It's actually. One of the funny things is that actually I went to visit it last year when I was making the movie. And this staircase, the spiral staircase, was in all the photographs. And everything was there on the pavement. And there was developers redeveloping it and the house next door. And they were turning it into a $75 million mansion, they told me, with a pool in the basement. And I went in the. And I filmed a little digger digging up where their bedroom had been. So it was like. And that was actually at one time the ending of the movie. But it was a little depressing, actually.
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Alison Stewart
It's a little depressing.
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Kevin McDonald
A little depressing, as I thought.
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Alison Stewart
Yeah.
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Unknown
Depressing, yes.
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Kevin McDonald
I'm not gonna go there. Anyway, that's an aside, but no, I decided to do this reconstruction. Cause I wanted to sort of say to the audience, look, we're in the world of John and Yoko. This is how they're. This is where they are. They're in this space. So it's as accurate a representation of their space as possible. So you've got the exact records that John was listening to. You've got the. The books, you've got the same maps on the walls. We located his guitar, his bedspread, all sorts of things. It was. So it became kind of almost like something that you would have a piece of installation art or something. Like that. And I got to work on it with my wife, which was very nice. She's a set decorator. It's the only time I've ever worked with her. So that was an added benefit.
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Unknown
John really liked television.
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Kevin McDonald
He loved television. And that's, that's. That was the thing. When I listened to this interview with him and he's talking about it. It's actually featured in the documentary a little bit audio interview on radio. He really said that for him, this was the way to understand the world. Now. It was like your window on the world. And I remember as a. I'm obviously a little younger than him, but I used to come to America at this period every vacation. Cause my grandmother was American and I used to visit her. And coming from the UK at the same time as John, pretty much where you had three channels, they weren't on in the afternoon. They were on for like five hours a day. And then we had the national anthem at the end of every day. And it was very educational and controlled. And then you'd come to America and it was like this cavalcade of kind of craziness of every aspect of life on American tv. You flick through the channels and you see the preachers and the commercials and the movies. And I think he must have felt what I felt, which is, you see that and you go, oh, my God, the excess of things and people and ideas is very exciting to a European.
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Unknown
How did you decide on that collage? Because it is a collage from things that are happening in real life to commercials, to game shows, to John and Yoko talking to John and Loco's audio. How did you decide? I guess on the pace, on the narrative.
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Kevin McDonald
Well, I think that what we tried to achieve was something which when you first start watching, you think, oh, this is chaos. And then you slowly begin to realize, oh, no, there is narrative here. There are connections. And some of the. Those connections are simple. You know, it's like we show a commercial from Clorox Bleach. And then that Clorox Bleach comes up in a. In one of the other clips when they're talking. And you know, certain characters. There's a guy called David Peel, who was a guitarist, used to play in Washington Square Garden, who they became very friendly with. And, you know, he's mentioned and then you see him, and then he's on a phone call and whatever. And you. These characters start to emerge from it. So we. You know, I've been making documentaries for 30 years or something crazy. And what I really appealed to Me was the idea of, is there a different way to use the artifacts that are left from the past, these shards of somebody's life, and to put them, make them into a film that isn't just a fake narrative with talking heads or whatever, but something that evokes the time and also evokes the fact that, you know, the audience can make their own mind up. They can see connections and see things that interest them, that they're probably people who have made a different narrative of this film in their head. The night that I had. But, yeah, that was the. That was the goal, to do something formally a bit different with the documentary form, but also hopefully fun, because John is incredibly funny. You know, there's like.
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Unknown
He's a funny guy.
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Kevin McDonald
He's a very funny guy. So I think it's entertaining.
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Unknown
I'm speaking with director Kevin McDonald about the new documentary One to One John and Yoko, which details the inner and outer lives of John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the lead up to their 1972 concert. It is in films, it is in theaters today. Sundance asked what filmmakers should keep in mind to be better storytellers. And you said to remember, quote, the silent era was better.
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Kevin McDonald
Did I really say that?
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Unknown
Well, yes, you did.
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Kevin McDonald
No, I think what I meant by that was that, you know, silent cinema was a different art form to sand cinema. You know, when sand cinema came in, in the early 30s, you know, cameras stopped moving. Filmmakers suddenly had to be judged on their voice as well as their ability to emote and their kind of charisma. And of course, eventually san cinema became its own art form, became something interesting. But we shouldn't forget that something was lost when people started talking on screen. And that was the pure. The purity of storytelling through images and the emotional connection through just music and images, which is, you know, they had obviously music on silent movies. And I suppose what I meant was that actually, you know, we forget that cinema is about those things primarily. There's about image and sound and that actually, you know, when we watch things on our iPad or even our TV at home, when we're totally in control of that and we can, oh, let's go and make a cup of tea. Let's make a. Let's. Let's tweet something while we're watch. We're losing something, which was the. The original sort of artistic joy of cinema, which was the big image. And so that's what I meant, that basically we did lose something with silence. And if we. If we stop going to the movies altogether, we're going to, you know, lose something even more. It can't be replaced. Some maybe, you know, watching on your TV is. It's. It's different. It has its own pleasures, but it's not the same as cinema.
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Alison Stewart
In your film One to one, John and Yoko, there are a lot of recordings of phone calls between John, Yoko, John's manager, a whole slew of others. First of all, why do these tapes exist?
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Kevin McDonald
Yeah, that was an amazing find. You know, it's one of the exciting things about being a documentary filmmaker. You sometimes feel like an archaeologist. You know, you spend weeks and weeks with a little brush scraping away, looking for things, and then suddenly you find a gold diadem. And our gold diadem was finding a box full of tapes, which was reel to reel tapes which Yoko, I think it was, actually instigated recording them in exactly the period I was making my film about, late 71, early 1972. And these were phone recordings. They recorded all their phone calls. And the reason they did this was because the FBI, they suspected, and I think it's now acknowledged it's true, were tapping their phone and they wanted to have a record of what they said so that if there was any legal problem, they could say, no, we didn't actually see. Here's. Look, here's actually what we said. But what's so remarkable about them, nobody had ever heard them before that they. That first of all, a lot of it is them talking about looking for flies in the middle of winter in New York for an installation piece that Yokozen goes on and on and on this conversation about how do you find flies and what do they eat and all this. But there's a lot of that. But then there's all these other conversations with, you know, Allen Ginsberg, with David Peel, with. With Allen Klein, who's John's manager and famously, you know, kind of infamous character in the music business at the time. But you hear the real John and the real Yoko talking, it's like it's not them on for an interview. It's not them sort of like pretending so they're not. It's just them on their bed chatting. And so you as an audience member feel like, oh, I'm with them. I'm on that bed that we've seen in the reconstructed flat. And I'm listening to just the chitchat that's going on. And I thought that was really. Yeah, it's a beautiful part of the film. And. And also some of the funniest parts of the film are come from, you know, John's hilarious lines when he's just chatting to people on the phone.
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Alison Stewart
Well, let's listen to a little bit. This clip features Village Voice journalist Howard.
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Unknown
Smith speaking to John Lennon. This is from one to one, John and Yoko.
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Howard Smith
Howard.
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Unknown
Hi. Hi. Some people call and they said they wanted to get in touch with you. Of course, I didn't give you a number. It's the national association for Irish Freedom.
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Howard Smith
Oh, I see.
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Unknown
They're a bunch of young.
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Howard Smith
Let me write it down.
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Unknown
I think may it sounds like they're legitimate.
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Howard Smith
That sounds very interesting.
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Kevin McDonald
They call it.
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Howard Smith
You're Irish. All the people's Irish except for Ringo.
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Unknown
I didn't know that.
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Howard Smith
Well, you see, Liverpool is a port that all the slaves and Irish went through on the way to America. And that's why it was so hit, because we got all the music from the sailors on the boats, you know, like blues and that, which other people wouldn't get.
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Unknown
But you guys were all Jewish?
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Howard Smith
No. Well, that's, that's Ringo's Jewish. You jump for that.
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Unknown
What did you learn about John Legend by, excuse me, John Lennon by listening in to the phone calls. And what did you learn about Yoko?
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Kevin McDonald
Well, I think about John, you learn that. Well, he's. He's very sharp, very quick witted, as you heard there. He can be very naive and enthusiastic. You know, there he is, he's sort of like. Somebody phones him up and said, oh, there's this Irish, you know, political group. I felt you might be interested. Oh yeah, yeah, they sound great. Let's go on a march. And he did. He ended up going the next week actually on a march with these guys for Irish, you know, Irish independence. So there's a kind of a desire to understand the world, to be open to things, to new ideas and new people. That's really kind of beautiful. But sometimes does slip into naivety, there's no doubt about it. But I also learned, I think I learned more about Yoko actually, because. And really I wanted to. I wanted to present a different version of who she is. A human, a very human version. And the first thing that I learned, I did not know, even though I thought I knew a bit about the Beatles, was that one of the reasons they came to America in 1971 was because Yoko's daughter Kiyoko had been kidnapped, effectively by her ex husband. And they knew she was somewhere in the US they didn't know where and they hired various private detectives to try and find her. And this was a saga that went on for 25 years. She wasn't reunited with her daughter until, I think it was like 94 or something like that, so long after John's death. So there was this pain, obviously inherent in EOKA at this time. She's lost her daughter. She's feeling. Asking questions about, was I a good enough mother? Did I deserve to lose her? What? You know, and so that thread of kind of care for children, of questioning your childhood goes right the way through the movie. And John talks about his own childhood and the pain of his mother's early death. And of course, it makes sense of the fact that when they saw Geraldo Rivera's report on Willowbrook, this, you know, frankly, medieval kind of sort of home for disabled children, and they saw the conditions there that they. Their hearts were broken because they were thinking about their own missing children, their own missing childhoods, and they reached out and said, can we do a benefit concert for these kids? And that's how. So everyone thinks of them at that period as being very, very political, and everything came from political place. But actually, I think what's so touching is that this was from a deeply personal place and they played political songs and whatever, but actually it was. It was something for them much more, much more profound than that.
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Alison Stewart
I also got from the calls that Yoko was a. Was a boss, not the boss of the two of them, but had.
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Kevin McDonald
There's total equality between them and respect between them. And they argue with each other and they kind of bicker a bit, in a way. And I think, yeah, I wanted. I wanted to show that by the end, you know, the film sort of does a little subtle turn at the end, becomes really from Yoko's point of view. And she talks about what it's like to be married to someone who, you know, she says, she says, you know, everyone treated me as though I'd stolen their monument. And she says I was a confident person. And then. And I thought of myself as attractive and articulate. And then being married to John, everyone told me just to be quiet, to shut up, to not say anything. And she said, when I, you know, I was treated as a bitch. And then when I came to America, I was upgraded to a witch. And, you know, you really suddenly think, oh, God, it must have been so hard for her to do this. And yet there she is at the end at the first ever international feminist conference, and she's taken John with her, and John is kind of the hanger on. And it's all very much, you know, she is saying, this is who I am and I want to explore feminism. And there's A hilarious scene at the end where John is the only man in the room at the First International Feminist Conference and they have a vote as to whether they should throw him out of the room. And because there's no man in the Feminist conference. And I kind of think which other huge macho rock star would have put themselves in that position and would have kind of wanted to learn, and he really wanted to learn. And that's the thing that is so appealing in the end about, about John, is that he respected and loved Yoko because she educated him and he was willing not to put his ego in the way and to actually learn from her.
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Alison Stewart
I'm speaking to the director Kevin McDonald about his new documentary, One to One John and Yoko. We'll have more after a quick break. This is all of it this week.
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Unknown
On the New Yorker Radio Hour. Donald Trump's war with the courts.
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Trump's legal strategy has been backfiring, I think demonstrably in the lower courts. I thought the Supreme Court was going to send a message to the Trump administration. Back off, guys. That's not what's happened.
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I'll talk with Ruth Marcus on the New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC Studios. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Alison Stewart
You are listening to all of it on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is director Kevin MacDonald. He has a new documentary out. It's called One to One John and Yoko. It details the inner and outer lives of John Lennon and Yoko and the lead up to their 1972 concert at Madison Square Garden. The film is in theaters today. So we also have the political world swirling throughout this film. We see Shirley Chisholm, we see Richard Nixon, we see George Wallace. These were people in the culture as well as Allen Ginsberg. Why was it important to show the culture around John and Yoko?
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Kevin McDonald
Well, because they're watching TV in their apartment. And that's the kind of the conceit of the film. And these are the characters, these are the people who are dominating the airwaves at that time. Obviously, there's bits of the Mary Tyler Moore show or all the other TV shows, the Bonanza and things that are on there. But there's also quite a lot of the news stories, you know, like the Attica prison riot and the deaths that came about because of that. That's what that actually happened just after they'd moved into that apartment. So we have them watching that. And one of the things that just. I didn't set out to make a political film, to be honest, but it became obvious more and more that there was some strange connection, some circularity is going on in the world that so many things that are relevant now were happening then. So you've got, you know, student sit ins and riots because of Vietnam War. And now we've got. The same thing has just been happening with Gaza. You've got a populist politician in the form of Richard Nixon and George Wallace obviously even more so. And some of the things George Wallace says at the rally, one of the rallies, exactly what Trump says, I mean, almost word for word about, you know, you should be so frightened, there's so much, you know, so much crime and we need to clamp down on this and you realize that there's a circularity somehow and where that. I'm not a sociologist, I don't know why that is, but there's something amazing to me that the same questions about race, about the environment, even about populist politicians, but nativism, these same things, they are here now. Even to the extent that yesterday my visa, I couldn't get into the country actually. And that's one of the big obviously aspects of this, of this film is about John and how people are trying to throw him out of the country. Nixon is trying to throw him out of the country because he thinks he's going to influence the election in 19, his re election campaign in 72. And there I was dealing with a very, very nice lawyer yesterday or the day before to help me get a visa because they wouldn't let me in. So it's like I keep saying, I don't know whether this film is sort of talking about now or whether somehow reality is shaping itself to my movie.
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Alison Stewart
So yesterday you were dealing with a visa?
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Kevin McDonald
I was dealing with a visa, yeah, I was dealing with a visa, which I still don't quite know why I was denied. But luckily, through this great lawyer and the auspices of a very friendly politician, should we say who, they managed to get me into the country. So yeah, there's all the same stuff happening again that was happening back then.
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Unknown
Just think about that for a moment. Bob Dylan makes an appearance in this film.
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Alison Stewart
Sort of, sort of makes an appearance. You know, we see a clip of AJ Weberman.
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Unknown
The New York Times described him as Dylan's number one hater. They just, I mean they recently just did an article on him, I believe.
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Kevin McDonald
They did in the New York Times.
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Unknown
Yeah.
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Kevin McDonald
When Complete Unknown came out.
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Alison Stewart
Yeah, yeah.
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Unknown
So how does Dylan serve as a foil to Lennon in the film?
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Kevin McDonald
Well, so one of the things I found on these phone calls is that John and Yoko, well, early on in their time in the U.S. they were asked by Jerry Rubin, you know, very political individual, the founders of the yippies, the Chicago 7, all of that. He befriends John and I think sort of uses him and Yoko a little bit actually. But he invites them to be part of a concert to help release a guy called John Sinclair, who's been imprisoned in Michigan for I think five years for having two joints. And John show up at this benefit and they play a song and lo and behold, two days later this guy's released and they feel like, oh my God, we've got all this power. And of course that's also what then sets the Nixon people crazy because they're like, oh my God, this could be a threat to us. The youth are going to all rally around John Lennon. So that's when they start. That's when they start bugging his phone. But as a consequence of this, John thinks, oh, I'm going to start a whole tour around the country to liberate people from prison, the Free the People tour. And he thinks the only way I'm going to really make this effective is I need Bob Dylan to join me. But there's a problem to it for his plan, which is that Dylan is furious because A.J. weberman, this eccentric character in the Village, has been going through Dylan's garbage can and sort of exposing all these things and you know, embarrassing, embarrassing Dylan. So he decides that I have to persuade A.J. weberman to apologize to Dylan and then Dylan will join my tour. So it's this very kind of convoluted, quite funny, counterculture kind of world. But more than anything else, you feel, isn't it amazing that John and Yoko are both. They're speaking to this rather kooky guy, and maybe that's one way of putting it anyway, but he worked this kooky guy and trying to persuade him to write a letter, apology. And that's what they're spending a lot of their time doing over several weeks. And you think this is extraordinary. Which celebrity these days would be doing something like that?
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Unknown
Can you describe the apartment they're in? It's really quite modest.
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Kevin McDonald
It's really very modest. It's effectively a one room apartment. It's obviously built at the back of an old, you know, early 19th century building in a house, would have been a house in Gretchen Village on Bank Street. And it's an add on which I guess it looks like it must have been a very modest little, little industrial space or something originally. And they Have a bed, big bed. And they have the TV in a white box, the end of the bed, and then they have records and things scatter around, music, everything scattering. People come and visit them there and they sit on their bed and they talk to them there. And people. I've met several people who went there and they said their door was always open. Everybody in the neighborhood come and bang on the door and come in and chat and they were totally accessible. They loved that. They loved the fact that they were part of this community. And unlike in Britain, where all the tabloid journalists were always chasing after them, whatever, they could just sort of, you know, be themselves and be open. And there's a very touching bit, one of the calls where John says, yeah, no, we're loving being here. I got rid of my mansion in London, I got rid of my fancy cars. Yoko's taught me that I don't need any of that stuff, actually. And that we can live this life. And we're like two students again, two young lovers. And it's very sweet somehow. And I think what other sort of multimillionaire movie star of any sort would live in such a. Choose to live in such a kind of modest fashion?
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Unknown
We're talking about, one to one, John and Yoko. The new documentary it's directed is Kevin MacDonald. So of course there's a concert to display here.
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Kevin McDonald
Yeah, we haven't talked about that. That's at the center of the film.
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Unknown
This giant concert which is interspersed throughout the film. How did you decide how much to put into the documentary? So it doesn't become a sort of a concert documentary, but it's a documentary with a concert?
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Kevin McDonald
Yeah, I mean, that's. That it is a documentary with a concert at the heart of it. And in a way, this sort of some way, the story of the film is how did this concert come about? What led to this? This concert, the only concert that. That John gave after leaving the Beatles. I mean, that's, to me, is an amazing thing. So people should, even if you're just slightly interested in this period, but you're a Beatles fan or Lennon fan, you're going to go on, you're going to see John in his prime giving an incredible live performance. I mean, that's the thing it feels, and especially if you see it in imax where it's been shown, it's. It feels like you're there. The sound is so extraordinary. But, you know, we, we, we, we. We took like 10 or 11 songs and we thought these are the songs which speak to the times and the other related to, you know, the Vietnam War. They related to John's personal kind of psychological issues around his mother and his death of his mother. And so there's a song. There is a song Mother in there. There's obviously, Imagine, which we. You know, it's a very difficult song to use in a film because it's, like, one of the most cliched songs ever. It's been overheard. And we sort of found a way, I think, to use it that feels very different and gives it a different perspective. So that was. It was. It was. It was a lot of fun. It was, you know, a privilege to have access to all this material that's never really been seen or heard before and to, you know, be creative with it and make a kind of an unusual version of a music documentary.
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Alison Stewart
What is something that you couldn't get in the film, that you really just wanted to get in the film?
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Kevin McDonald
Well, I don't know if there was that much I really, really wanted to get in the film. But there was. There were things which, you know, I wished that we'd had. So, for instance, we did this thing with Richard Nixon. He's the sort of antagonist of the film, I suppose. And we decided to be a little bit different. You know, we would always show him like a rock star. So he's always associated with music. So he's either playing the piano or there's a choir or this thing. And there's a montage where John's singing Hound Dog. And that's all about Nixon. And it's like his fans are treating him like he's a rock star and sort of women screaming at him and Class in the air. And I had heard that there was a wonderful piece of archive of Nixon singing at the White House. And I wanted to get that, but I couldn't find it. I couldn't find it anywhere. And there's, you know, there's also, you know, there are. This is the thing when you make an archive film, you hear. You know, you're bound by. I can only use material from my period. I wish there was a bit of Bob Dylan, you know, in the village in 1972 that I could put into this. But Bob Dylan was so, you know, such a recluse at that time. There's absolutely nothing of him. So, you know, we couldn't manufacture it.
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Alison Stewart
What is a part of the film that you're really glad you were able to get and to include?
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Kevin McDonald
I think that the piece that actually moves me the most in the film other than the footage around the Willowbrook School. And that which is, you know, shocking and incredibly moving, but other than that, it's. There's. There's a. There's a performance by Yoko near the end, which is just on the piano. She's at this feminist conference in early 73 up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And she sings a song called Age 39 at my hotel Window. And it's the most confessional song I think I almost know from anywhere. And it's. It's Yoko talking about how she's feeling suicidal, looking out of this window, looking at children playing in a playground below her, and about her, the difficulties of being married to John and to this huge celebrity and what it's done to her and how she misses her daughter. And there's something very. It's very poorly recorded and she's just on the piano and it feels so honest and so kind of just emotional and private. It's almost like something you shouldn't be listening to. It's like somebody noodling away themselves on the piano. And that's the thing I love the most, because it encapsulates, I think, what's best about the film, which is the intimacy of it and the way it reassesses who Yoko is.
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Alison Stewart
The name of the film is one to one John and Yoko. I've been speaking with its director, Kevin McDonald. It is in theaters today. Thank you for coming into the studio. So glad you got a visa.
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Kevin McDonald
Thank you. Me too. Me too.
- [30:40]
Unknown
A role that feels like paradise and.
- [30:43]
Always at a heavenly prize angel soft.
- [30:47]
Kevin McDonald
Angel soft Soft and strong so simple.
- [30:50]
Howard Smith
Pick up a pack today angel soft.
- [30:53]
Alison Stewart
Soft and Strong Simple Since WNYC's first broadcast in 1924, we've been dedicated to creating the kind of content we know the world needs. In addition to this award winning reporting, your sponsorship also supports inspiring storytelling and extraordinary music that is free and accessible to all. To get in touch and find out more, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.