NEWS
May Pang had a whirlwind, 18-month romance with John Lennon in the 1970s during a break in his marriage to Yoko Ono
By Rachel DeSantis February 27, 2023 10:00 AM
May Pang's whirlwind romance with John Lennon is the stuff of rock 'n' roll lore — and in a new documentary, she's ready to peel back the curtain on their so-called "lost weekend."
PEOPLE is exclusively premiering the trailer for The Lost Weekend: A Love Story, which will tell the tale of a young Pang's 18-month relationship with the former Beatle during his marriage to Yoko Ono.
Pang, 72, was just 19 years old when she landed a job at Apple Records, and before long, she was working as the personal assistant to Lennon and Ono, 90.
An old interview clip of Ono featured in the trailer sees the artist call Pang "a very good assistant," and Pang explains that her job was "taking care of everything, working in the studio, doing clothes, doing the publicity."
by Martin Kielty Published: June 11, 2022
May Pang, who was John Lennon’s mistress during his notorious 18-month “long weekend” in the ‘70s, said the ex Beatle’s episode ended just before an almost certain reunion with Paul McCartney.n 1973, as Lennon’s marriage to Yoko Ono was collapsing, she put her husband and Pang together in the hope that an affair would resolve the situation. Lennon and Pang later moved from New York to Los Angeles where he established a reputation for drunken and outlandish behavior, before suddenly returning to Ono in early 1975.
By Cindy Adams June 7, 2022 7:14pm
‘Lost Weekend’ revisited
May Pang. Once personal assistant to John Lennon who then assisted him more personally than his wife, Yoko Ono. She became John’s lover. Friday, Tribeca Film Festival screens her documentary.
Born 1950, married, divorced, in the music industry, now with long blue hair, she said: “1973, Yoko told me: ‘I’m going to leave him. You should know John’s interested in you.’ I wasn’t interested. I was scared. Also, next day she’d forget. Things came and went with Yoko.
“Eventually he and I moved into East 52nd Street together and she kept the Dakota’s 11 rooms. Previously they’d lived bohemian style, tiny basement apartment in the Village. He says the two of us bonded on our mutual love of music.
“We went to LA together. You start knowing someone superficially. Then I fell in love with him. She kept calling, though she said in ’74 she wanted a divorce — it was her third marriage — and he’d said ‘I’ll be a free man in six months.’ I was the only one honest with him but she wanted me, and him, away. So, for a while, we didn’t see one another. Then one day he called from Cape Town and we were on the phone 1 1/2 hours. She didn’t call me ever.
EXCLUSIVE I’m kvelling, kids.
I’ve had the honor of knowing May Pang for a long time. She’s a great lady, a survivor in rock and roll and life.
Her story about her time with John Lennon has been told in bits and pieces over the years in interviews and books she’s published. But finally there’s a documentary and it’s mind blowing, lovely, funny, touching, and poignant. Every Beatles and Lennon fan will want to see it, own it, live in it.
Three directors — Eve Brandstein, Richard Kaufman, Stuart Samuels — are responsible for “The Lost Weekend: A Love Story.” The film quickly covers May’s early life, then cuts to her working for Apple Records, Allen Klein, and finally John Lennon and Yoko Ono. This is before they lived in the Dakota.
But then, famously, Yoko instructs May to take John, leave, and be his girlfriend. It’s 1972-73, and this period will go on until the beginning of 1975. In that time, John records and releases the “Rock and Roll” album and “Walls and Bridges,” he also produces Harry Nilsson‘s “Pussycats” album. He reunites with Ringo, and with Paul. He becomes friends with David Bowie and Elton John. He also has a period of debauchery with Nilsson that earns this time the moniker “The Lost Weekend.”
The documentary will premiere June 10th at the Tribeca Film Festival and then it will be shown somewhere depending on distribution. It’s a miracle of a film, beautifully made, with incredibly good production values. May narrates most of the film but there are interviews with many people who were around then including Julian Lennon. They have remained friends since he was a child, and Julian obviously adores her. He says nothing about Yoko, and indeed, Yoko is never disparaged. That’s not what this is about.
PUBLISHED JUNE 10, 2022 3:00PM (EDT)
For time immemorial, the history books will no doubt couch John Lennon's story within the context of tragedy. His unfinished life, coming to a sudden and inexplicable end when he was scarcely 40 years old, necessitates that perspective.
Fortunately, we have been gifted with the new documentary "The Lost Weekend: A Love Story," which affords us with a window into 18 months of Lennon's life writ large on the public stage. The former Beatle's "Lost Weekend," a coinage that he drew from the 1945 film noir of the same name, marked an era of intense change, uncertainty and rootlessness for him. But as he told journalist Larry Kane, that period was also one of his "happiest," when he fell in love with a woman and made some of his finest music.
That woman was May Pang, Lennon and wife Yoko Ono's 22-year-old personal assistant. Co-produced and directed by Eve Brandstein, Richard Kaufman and Stuart Samuels, "The Lost Weekend," which premieres at Tribeca Film Festival this weekend, finds a pocket of bright light in Lennon's unfinished story, an era when he mined the simple joys out of living with Pang and reconnecting with his estranged 10-year-old son Julian, as well as with the other former Beatles.
Naturally, Pang narrates her own story, weaving together tales about her early years growing up in Spanish Harlem and her first brush with the music business in the offices of notorious New York City businessman Allen Klein. We witness 13-year-old May falling in love with the four lads from Liverpool and, later, her incredible good fortune in landing a plum job with John and Yoko in the early 1970s. And we observe Pang's obvious bewilderment when Ono suggests that the young woman take up with her husband as the famous couple's marriage fissures out of control.
To the filmmakers' extraordinary credit, no voices are left silent. Yoko is there, front and center, sharing her memories about the Lost Weekend and its inception. Members of the Lennons' inner circle are there, too, including Elton John, photographer Bob Gruen, and Apple Records' Tony King, among a host of others. In perhaps the documentary's most moving scenes, Julian speaks wistfully about life with May and his father during the Lost Weekend.
by Clarence Moye June 8, 2022
Nearly 50 years in the making, The Lost Weekend: A Love Story explores the impact of the 18-month relationship between The Beatles’ John Lennon and his Chinese-American assistant May Pang. With the full blessing of Yoko Ono, Lennon and Pang’s sexual relationship is widely credited for his most artistically and commercially productive period post-The Beatles. She also helped him reconnect with estranged son Julian. Through the documentary, Pang revisits the years with Lennon when she was 22 years old.
From directors Eve Brandstein, Richard Kaufman, and Stuart Samuels, The Lost Weekend: A Love Story premieres Friday, June 10, at Tribeca Film in a sold out online engagement.
Awards Daily is proud to offer an exclusive clip from The Lost Weekend: A Love Story.
Rain Pryor’s one-woman show is headed for the small screen.
TV legend Norman Lear, Will Gluck and his Olive Bridge Entertainment banner and Global Road Entertainment are teaming up with Pryor — the daughter of late comedian Richard Pryor — to develop Fried Chicken and Latkes as a single-camera comedy. A network is not yet attached.
The semi-autobiographical Fried Chicken and Latkes starts with Pryor as a preteen trying to find her place in the world while growing up in 1970s Beverly Hills. Being biracial, half-Jewish and the daughter of the famous and troubled comedian, Pryor’s identity is as big of a challenge as her outspoken, eccentric family life.
by Roy Trakin June 9, 2022
May Fung Lee Pang will be 72 in October, but was barely out of her teens when she boldly entered Apple’s New York offices, lied about being able to type, and secured a job at the Beatles’ multimedia company. She would soon become famous for a much more intimate tie to the group than that, as her very public 18-month affair with John Lennon in the mid-’70s is still a subject of great fascination to his fans, 50 years later.
“Music was my passion,” explains the Spanish Harlem-born author and subject of the upcoming documentary, “The Lost Weekend: A Love Story,” premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival for a sold-out show on June 10. “It was something I loved. I had no real abilities,” she admits of getting her start at Apple, “but answering the phone was easy enough. My mother used to tell me, ‘You have a mouth. You speak English. Go for it.’”
She’s still going for it with her involvement in the new documentary, which captures the whirlwind affair between a 22-year-old Pang and John Lennon that began when Yoko Ono tried to set them up during a period of turmoil in their marriage. The pair headed to Los Angeles for what has become known as “The Lost Weekend” for the former Beatle’s drunken escapades with his pals Alice Cooper, Harry Nilsson, Ringo Starr, Keith Moon and Micky Dolenz, collectively known as the Hollywood Vampires, their hangout upstairs at the Rainbow Bar & Grill on Sunset Blvd. next to the Roxy.
Pang, who was plucked from that Apple job by Ono herself to serve as her and Lennon’s personal assistant before May’s fling with Lennon, insists the phrase “Lost Weekend” doesn’t do justice to the pair’s year-and-a-half affair.
“Yes, Yoko did approach me, and I thought it was insane,” she says about being Lennon’s lover. “I told her I wasn’t interested at all. They were having problems in their marriage; they actually weren’t talking to each other. But John spontaneously decided to go to L.A. on his own and asked me to go with him. Yoko wasn’t even aware we had gone until after we left.”
Although May has written a pair of books about her relationship with Lennon — including 1983’s “Loving John: The Untold Story” and 2008’s “Instamatic Karma: Photographs by John Lennon” — she has hesitated until now to participate in a documentary, finally agreeing to work with a trio of producer-directors in Eve Brandstein (best known as the casting director for “This Is Spinal Tap”), Richard Kaufman (“Real Life: The Musical”) and Stuart Samuels (docs on Bob Marley and Midnight Movies).
“People have been taking my narrative and talking about my life as if they knew everything about me, and they didn’t,” she explains. “I decided it was time to reclaim my own history. It’s my version. I figured, if there was going to be a film about my life, I should be involved. Who better to tell the story than me? I lived it. These are my memories. No one experienced it like I did. Why should I let somebody else talk about my time with John? He understood better than anybody. He used to say to me, ‘May, it’s your opinion. It’s your life. Just be aware that people are going to be talking about you. And they are going to lie about it.’”
Monica Piper’s solo stage show will make its New York premiere. Previews begin Oct. 6 ahead of its Oct. 23 opening at New World Stages. The off-Broadway run will continue through January 2017.
Written and performed by the Emmy Award-winning showrunner of Nickelodeon’s Rugrats, Not That Jewish is described as “the autobiographical telling of a Jew…’ish’ girl’s life,” from growing up in a showbiz family in the Bronx and making her comedy club debut to attending a WASP wedding and navigating an “almost” night with Mickey Mantle.
“Audiences can expect to leave laughed-out, a little teary-eyed and happy to be Jewish — even those who aren’t,” Piper tells The Hollywood Reporter. “It is the culmination of where the years have taken me as a comic, a writer, an actor, a mother, a Jew and a human being.”