Oliver Stone's The Doors

I loved it. I think it captured the spirit of Morrison, the music, the theatrics and the times. It is more of a poetic film than factual. It's fitting for someone who lived his art.

 

That's what I said, too. It's a very well-produced film, but there's so much fiction in it that any real Doors fan would be yelling "WTF?!" every five minutes. Ray Manzarek was apoplectic about the film and spent several years disavowing it; three of the things he pointed out were, The Doors absolutely approved their music to be used in commercials, partly for the money and partly because middle-America would be exposed to their music, and Jim Morrison never threw a TV set during a recording session; they all got along a lot better than was shown in the film; and Morrison was not nearly as defiant on the Ed Sullivan Show appearance in real life, where he kind of mutters the phrase "girl we couldn't get much higher" as opposed to Val Kilmer looking right into the camera and almost yelling it in the movie. It's fair to say that the film was a grossly amplified and exaggerated version of their real life, but some of it was true.

There was also a section in the beginning that kind of implied that Morrison quit school to become a big rock star, but the truth is that he got a degree in filmmaking from UCLA. Morrison was a very bright intellectual, very well-read, and the film emphasizes his downward slide into drugs far more than to show how smart and informed he really was. I think Manzarek was right to speak out against the film, but I can see where if they had made an extremely accurate film about their lives, it would've been a lot more low-key and hard to sell as drama.

 

The film was actually my introduction to the Doors, and I quickly went on to buy all of their albums. So it captured my interest at the time.

I have the film today, but it's not something I can honestly stand to watch. Just like Sid & Nancy, it's related to bands I care about, but it gets pretty loose with the facts and it becomes progressively more depressing. That said, I think Val Kilmer did an amazing job.

I've read No One Here Gets Out Alive. There really isn't a good Doors documentary on film, is there?

 

The Doors Live in Europe is a very interesting film. Many of the events recreated in the movie are here for real. With their tour mates Grace Slick and Paul Kanter telling the story. Including film of Jim collapsing on stage as the Airplane play.

 

Around the time the movie came out, I recall seeing an interview with Val Kilmer on TV, where he was asked about how it felt to play the role of this great rock legend (or something to that effect). His answer was a rather generic statement on how he knew nothing about Jim Morrison and it was just a role (or, again, something to that effect). I was a bit put off by that, thinking, Wow! Way to plug that movie, Val!

Ironically his excellent portrayal of Morrison was about the only redeeming part of the movie, IMO!

 

Kilmer gets a lot of much-deserved praise for his portrayal of Morrison. Kyle Maclachlan doesn't get the same kind of praise for obvious reasons. Manzarek isn't the focus of the film. But his performance is certainly praise-worthy. Maclachlan was spot-on as Manzarek.

 

Perhaps it might take a generation or two to look back at the 1960s a bit more objectively. When Baby Boomers make movies essentially about themselves, sometimes they become a bit too glamorous, dramatic, eventful etc. I think we - and I am one of them whether I like it or not - take ourselves a bit too seriously. We are, after all, the Greatest Generation, right?

 

In 1991, it was hard to be indifferent to this film. I'd been a Doors fan since 1982, when rock films just weren't made. The idea that, nine years later, someone would make a film about Jim Morrison was vaguely mind-blowing.

I enjoyed seeing it at the cinema; but, as with everything I've seen by this director, initial favourable impressions quickly fade and you realise you were sold a pup. Yes, there's great concert footage and Val Kilmer is entirely convincing as Morrison (although JM's intellectual side - a big part of who he was - is entirely neglected in favour of sensationalism) but it's basically just another rise and fall of a star story, with added nonsense about native Americans thrown in for good measure.

Yes, it's a film about JM and the other three barely get a look in. I liked the portrayals of Rothschild and Holzman, though - no idea how accurate they were.

 

I've yet to see "The Doors" film, but I'd guess your statement probably applies to most bio-pic films...

 

That it is...

A film shouldn't diminish an artist's/act's musical legacy: If that were the case, then Buddy Holly and the Crickets' and Jerry Lee Lewis' musical legacies would be flushed down the toilet after what their bio-pic films were...

 

There are a whole slew of terrible rock bio pics that didn't pay real justice to the artist being featured. Clearly, the Tina Turner movie was brilliant (and won many awards and made a few careers), but the recent James Brown movie was awful and oft-putting. This stuff is really hit and miss. The Doors was just way, way heavily overly-dramatized to the point where as much as 50% of it was fiction, but the musical segments were entertaining and Val Kilmer was definitely charismatic.

 

Agree, 100%. When it came out, there weren't many of these being made, so it became popular for that reason alone, as well as Morrison's cult status, IMO.

 

This movie came out during my last year of (6 years) of HIGH school. I remember either Inside Edition??? or some other similar news/gossip TV show???, had Ray Manzerak and I think Rob and John as well. Ray was commenting about the movie with what sounded like dissatisfaction and attacks at the cast and Oliver Stone. I would watch these various interview clips with Ray's negative comments and I just got sick of it and never went to see the movie as sort of a personal boycott with me being biased to Ray since he was one of my favorite members of the band.

Years later it was aired on TV and I would watch bits of it but never finished it. I found the deluxe DVD version used for $2.00 so I bought it recently. I have yet to watch it. I'm not in the anti Oliver Stone camp as far as this movie is concerned. What I did see, I did enjoy. Some of it was over the top but that is common in movies that are a biography of a band or musician. Some extra drama needs to be added to spruce it up.

I can understand Ray's resentment for the movie since he was close to Jim being that they were both in the band. He saw things differently than what Oliver Stone may have presented in his movie (Jim's darker side) but I have to disagree that the movie from what I have seen of it so far was bad. Val Kilmer did a great job. Crispin Glover and his portrayal of Andy Warhol was amazing even though it was a short scene. Plus Meg Ryan too.

Another reason I didn't go to the movie like other movies was due to the fact that I got phobic in theaters and had avoided going to movies for a few years due to this problem.

 

There were some really good rock & roll dramas that have come out over the years. Despite its lapses, the Buddy Holly Story was more good than bad, and I liked La Bamba. There's been at least three Beach Boys movies over the years, and none of them have really done the guys justice (though the recent Love & Mercy had some moments). I worked a little bit on the Jan & Dean TV movie a long time ago and got to talk to co-star Bruce Davison about it, and he told me there was some dark stuff they had to just leave out of the script because it wouldn't play on TV. Almost Famous had a lot of terrific moments but was a huge bomb (which seems to be the fate of films about fictitious rock groups), and I worked a little bit on Walk Hard, which was also a bomb. The Elvis TV movie was sensational and very good, despite some momentary lapses in props and realism (like using 1970s gold records in a scene set in the 1950s, and showing color TV cameras on the Ed Sullivan Show).

It's incredible after all these years that we still haven't gotten a good drama out of the Janis Joplin story, and they also haven't made a movie I'd love to make myself, which is a drama based on the life of Roy Orbison. So there's good stuff out there, but the problem is the longer they wait, the more the potential audience dies off, and the young audience left doesn't give a crap.

 

If you like Olver Stone's over the top style of film making you'll like it. It is really just more mythologizing of Jim.

 

I went to see this in the theatre with my then girlfriend who was a HUGE Doors fan. We split after this infamous scene.

Andy Warhol: Somebody gave me this telephone... I think it was Edie... yeah it was Edie... and she said I could talk to God with it, but uh... I don't have anything to say... so here...

[giving Jim the phone]

Andy Warhol: this is for you... now you can talk to God.

 

Supposedly the God phone thing was real.
At least to Andy.

I seem to recall reading that in Break on Through: The Life and Death of Jim Morrison: James Riordan, Jerry Prochnicky: 9780688119157: Amazon.com: Books

 

The movie is a paranoid delusion and the worst possible acid trip you could ever take. You would have thought that being in the Doors or creating that music was never any fun and was just one long bad trip after the other. So much drama. So much ponderous nonsense. If you enjoy the music of the Doors I would say don't bother watching it.

 

The telephone thing was definitely real. I'm not sure about the dialogue, but Warhol definitely gave him a gold telephone that, according to No One Here Gets Out Alive, he chucked from a car into a trash can.

 

I'm still phobic. The last movie I went to was True Grit . . . seven years ago! It's all DVD and HDTV now. So I'm a year behind. I'm currently waiting for Hacksaw Ridge, Jackie and Moonlight (as well as a new release of Blow-Up) from the local library. Make your own !

 

Not to steer this thread way off topic or anything, but since you brought up other potential bio-films, I have to ask: Do you know anything about a proposed film about Eddie Cochran?

I read that it was being planned, and that it was to star Keifer Sutherland as Eddie, and then nothing after that... (I read this in a magazine sometime around '88/'89 IIRC.) Do you, or anybody here actually, know how far it got into the production phase? Did they start filming or anything, or did it just set in "film development purgatory"?

 

Sorry to hear you have phobia issues with theaters. The more you go, the easier it will get. Unfortunately, avoiding theaters like any phobia makes things worse. I still occasionally from time to time get a little anxiety if the movie has a lot of open areas scenes like the sky, mountains and high places and weird camera moves. Fast action in cars can get to me as well. But none of this is bad enough to the point where I have to leave the theater. Good luck to you.

 

It has some good parts. I'm one of the few who hated Val's performance. Jim was multi-dimensional and capable of great humor and charm in real life. Val's Jim focused only on his Mr. Hyde, or "Jimbo" as Ray called it. The Ed Sullivan scene was terrible but they more than made up for it with the fantastic New Haven performance. An all around entertaining movie but don't look for any truth from it.

 

It started with the bedbugs issue. Then my wife and I realized movies were too much hassle. You had to buy tickets in advance, get there early to get a good seat (I need the aisle), stand in line, listen to someone losing a lung behind you, etc. Watching movies at home, especially free ones, became preferable. We still go see live stuff. It isn't a real phobia. I have a bit of claustrophobia, but I have to be in a real tight space where I feel a though I cannot get out for it to kick in.

 

a lot of the critics don't like his wig!