BEFORE: This is my 17th Rockumentary in a row, which means I'm just about 1/3 of the way through this chain, assuming the final count stays at 52 films. So far, Mick Jagger has appeared the most times via interview, concert footage or archive footage - not too surprising, since I programmed four films specifically about the Stones. Tied for 2nd place with 7 appearances are Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and Keith Richards. Tied for third with 6 appearances are Brian Jones, Paul McCartney and Charlie Watts, and tied for fourth with 5 appearances are Chuck Berry, Dick Cavett, George Harrison and Little Richard. There's still a lot of game to play, so someone with a lot of face time late in the chain could still shake things up, but appearing in over HALF the films I watched shows you just how much influence Mick Jagger has had on rock.
My main focus so far has been on the 1960's, but that's going to shift in a couple of days. I'm going to take this initial third as sort of a coherent unit, since even the film about Elvis concentrated mostly on the 1960's. Elvis Presley carries over from "Elvis Presley: The Searcher" to appear in more archive footage today...
THE PLOT: A look at the late '60s and early '70s rock band The Doors, including rare footage.
AFTER: On this day in music history, August 2, 1968, the Doors had the number one single on the U.S. charts, which was "Hello, I Love You", their second No. 1 U.S. hit.
This film got sort of "artsy" here, with an actor resembling Jim Morrison getting out of a car wreck in the desert, then hitchhiking his way to L.A., waving to other cars, and then listening to the news on the radio that rock-star Jim Morrison had just been found dead in Paris. This made the footage very trippy, sort of "Twilight Zone" style, like maybe that's Morrison in the afterlife, and the car wreck is a metaphor for death, and then his soul's got to thumb a ride to heaven or something.
There was no actor credited as playing Morrison, so it turns out that IS the man himself, the doc used footage from a rarely-seen 1969 film called "HWY: An American Pastoral", where Morrison is basically just driving to L.A. - that's the whole plot of that film. (well, he hitchhikes, gets picked up, kills the driver and takes the car, but you get the idea...) Adding the news report of Morrison's death to the soundtrack, though, is what gives the footage that spooky vibe. That's a little bit of editing genius.
The rest of this documentary, though, is just more of what we've seen before, in countless news stories and "Behind the Music" segments about The Doors - where the band's name came from, who wrote "Light My Fire", disagreements in the band, alcohol, drugs, bad behavior on stage, failure, success, overdose. It's not just the story of the Doors, in a way it's the same story as EVERY band from that decade, more or less, it just all played out so much faster for Morrison. Under five years from the band's first recording to the news of his death, and it feels like maybe he was burning the candle at all three ends. (Or the candle that burns twice as bright only lasts half as long, take your pick from the many available candle/flame metaphors...)
Of course, I've seen the Oliver Stone biopic about the Doors, starring Val Kilmer, who bore a great resemblance to Morrison at the time that film was made, 1991. (So if you want to get an idea what Jim Morrison might look like if he hadn't died, check out photos of Kilmer now. Warning - the results are not that pretty.) Watching the footage today of Morrison from 1969, I wondered if anyone now working on a film about the Doors might consider casting Paul Rudd. Just a thought. He had long hair and a beard in the movie "Our Idiot Brother" and also gave off a Morrison vibe.
I sort of forgot about Morrison's side career as a poet, and also the fact that he attended film school at UCLA, the same school that Francis Ford Coppola, Gore Verbinski, Alexander Payne and many other fine filmmakers attended. But Morrison was reportedly a "C" student there, made only one film during his time there, before graduating in 1965. Apparently he'd completed most of his college coursework at Florida State before transferring to UCLA. You don't find many rockers with a background in both filmmaking and comparative literature, but hey, art is art, whatever form it takes.
There's a strong focus here on Morrison's behavior on stage, where, during the times when he was conscious, he would work up the crowd by threatening to expose himself, and this got him in some trouble in Florida when he was accused of doing exactly that, only somehow no pictures of his little Mr. Mojo Risin' managed to be taken, so did the event really happen? Despite a lack of evidence, he was convicted in 1970 on counts of profanity and indecent exposure. In early 1971 he moved to Paris, and you have to wonder if he was trying to get out of serving any time.
He died in July 1971 in a bathtub in a Paris apartment, and I'm still waiting for the parts of rock history that aren't now all sad and connected with drug and alcohol abuse. Guess I've got to learn to lower my expectations on that front.
I want to get a plug in tonight for an animated movie opening at the IFC Center in New York City tomorrow, and then in L.A. at the Laemmle Monica Film Center on August 10. It's called "Revengeance", and I worked as an office manager for the animator who co-directed it, and also provided the voice of one character. I should write a full review, but I don't have a slot for it, and anyway, I'm biased. But I thought I'd mention it here because it's all about the L.A. counter-culture, like motorcycle clubs, the drug scene, the club scene, the sleazy underbelly of California, and The Doors' song "L.A. Woman" seems like the perfect backdrop for all that. Please check it out if you're in one of those major cities, and we're going to try to bring it to San Francisco, Seattle and other big cities soon.
Also starring the voice of Johnny Depp (last seen in "Yoga Hosers"), and archive footage of Jim Morrison, John Densmore, Robby Krieger, Ray Manzarek, Jimi Hendrix (last seen in "Janis: Little Girl Blue"), Janis Joplin (ditto), Ed Sullivan (also carrying over from "Elvis Presley: The Searcher"), Richard Nixon (ditto), Martin Luther King Jr. (ditto), Robert Kennedy (ditto), John F. Kennedy (last seen in "How the Beatles Changed the World"), Lyndon Johnson, Adolf Hitler, Andy Warhol, Pam Courson, Paul A. Rothchild.
RATING: 5 out of 10 published poems
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