Today on the Scroll: Local lawyer who infiltrated John Lennon’s hotel in 1969 earns an Oscar nomination for it in 2008.  

Jerry Levitan woke up this morning and learned that he was nominated for a Best Animated Short Academy Award, vindicating John Lennon for the decision not to call security when a 14-year-old Levitan snuck into the King Edward Hotel on May 26, 1969.

The five-minute animated short depicting the experience, I Met the Walrus, was produced by Levitan for $50,000 — about half of which came from Bravo!FACT, a foundation supported by revenues from the cable channel. Director and animator Josh Raskin and two illustrators in their mid-20s supplied a sepia-toned swirl of images to complement a five-minute excerpt of Levitan’s audience with Lennon.

Now, given the Oscar nod, the decision to grant time to a young teenage infiltrator who ran the gauntlet of grown-up reporters is now the most enduring part of John and Yoko’s local stopover on their notorious honeymoon “Bed-In.”  

“I have no messianic tendencies, I don’t think,” says Levitan from his downtown law office, right before heading off for a screening at the Sundance Film Festival. “These guys who did the movie just got it — they were able to embrace my experience, and transmuted to continue spreading John’s message of peace.”

Levitan coveted the 40-minute recording of his conversation, made on a bulky reel-to-reel tape recorder he talked CHUM radio into lending him after Lennon told him to come back later that day. Yet, he didn’t start telling the story until it appeared in short-lived yuppie periodical T.O. concurrent with 1988 documentary Imagine: John Lennon, when the mythology of the 1960s was first under the microscope.

And even now, while occasionally traveling with his film on screenings that have reached as far as Dubai and South Korea, Levitan is taken aback by just how much detail people think that he knows. “I was actually asked if I’m keeping in touch with Paul McCartney these days. And all I can offer in response is — look, I was a kid who spent a few hours around John Lennon, almost 40 years ago.

“The conversation was as much about me as it was about him,” concedes Levitan. It’s in the short, accompanied by drawings inspired by Lennon’s own lithographs and the look and feel of macramé Toronto. “I told him the kids were turning against The Beatles, how they liked the Bee Gees more, because The Beatles were turning into a bunch of dirty hippies. This development was bothering me, and he could see how upset I was, trying to console me. But the topic was completely exasperating to him.”

Lennon was more interested in getting his anti-war message out there, and a few days later he calculated that writing and recording “Give Peace a Chance” in his Montreal hotel room might be a more effective medium than trying to win over schticky DJs and curmudgeonly journalists.

“He was really being ridiculed and savaged for it,” says Levitan, “although what he was saying was really simple stuff. Though, like he told me, though if you go out there acting all wild, yelling and screaming, you’re going to get smacked for doing it.

“What I learned from the experience at 14 is how easy it was to manipulate the media. Most of the reporters were lined up outside John and Yoko’s door at the King Edward because they figured they were going to see a sex show.” The infamously unmusical Two Virgins album with the pair posing naked on the cover had just been released, after all.

What would a 14-year-old unrelenting Beatlemaniac have made of Lennon, sporting the original hipster beard, when his look completely contrasted the appearance that endeared him to kids just five years earlier?

“See, I liked that look,” stresses Levitan. “I would have grown such a beard myself at the time, had my pituitary gland not interfered with such a project.

“He was trying to put himself on very different terrain — artistically, socially, physically. The appearance was a reaction to that, not wanting to be Beatle John anymore. That made him real to me.”  

And, in exchange for his reverence, Levitan has an Oscar nomination to accompany his more recent credits as a children’s musician. The news instantly generated calls from Hollywood types wondering what they can do to market the story beyond the festival circuit. And calls from reporters looking to milk a homegrown angle on the Academy Awards, because it’d be a bit trickier to get Ellen Page to return their messages today.  

“I was talking to a reporter from the Canadian Press who was wondering if I would be willing to cross the picket line of writers if they ended up at the [Feb. 24] ceremony,” he says. “I think they’re a bit more worried about Michael Douglas doing something like that, not Jerry Levitan.”  

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