Jim Morrison: Filmmaker

“The movie will begin in five moments

The mindless voice announced. 

All those unseated will await the next show. 

We filed slowly, languidly into the hall. 

The auditorium was vast and silent. 

As we seated and were darkened, the voice continued. 

The program for this evening is not new. 

You’ve seen this entertainment through and through.

You’ve seen your birth, your life, your death. 

You might recall all the rest.

Did you have a good world when you died?

Enough to base a movie on?” – Jim Morrison (An American Prayer – 1970)

THE MOVIE

Jim emerges from a lake. He makes his way to the edge of a Mojave Desert highway and attempts to hitchhike. He is eventually picked up and travels on an odyssey to…nowhere actually. He recalls, through voiceover, witnessing a car accident as a young child (“there were Indians scattered all over the highway bleeding”). He peruses books at a gas station. He encounters other hitchhikers and a police officer. He comes across a roadkill coyote. He ends up back in L.A. and makes a phone call to poet Michael McClure, confessing to the murder of the man who had picked him up (“Well, this guy gave me a ride, started giving me a lot of trouble, and…I couldn’t take it). The film ends with Jim wandering through L.A. night life.  

The movie is HWY: An American Pastoral (1969), a fifty-two-minute film directed by Jim Morrison and friends Frank Lisciandro, Paul Ferrara, and Babe Hill. Lisciandro and Ferrara both had careers as photographers that intersected with The Doors in varying ways; Lisciandro had studied film at UCLA with Morrison and Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek, and his photographs of rock musicians would appear in Rolling Stone, Rock and Folk (France), NME, Uncut, and Mojo; Paul Ferrara shot many iconic photographs of The Doors, many of which appeared in a souvenir book that would be sold at Doors concerts in 1968. Babe Hill was Jim’s bodyguard and drinking buddy. Additionally, the music was composed by Fred Myrow, a good friend of Eve Babitz, who would later go on to compose the scores to films such as Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer, 1973), Scarecrow (Jerry Schatzenberg, 1973), and Phantasm (Don Coscarelli, 1979).

REALITY

 HWY: An American Pastoral is inspired by Direct Cinema, a form of cinéma verité that employs light and mobile equipment, minimal crews, and little narrative agenda. In Get Close: Lean Team Documentary Filmmaking, Rustin Thompson argues that this approach to filmmaking is a rejection of “sanctioned formats of traditional” filmmaking, and that “films that make assertions add more noise to the echo chamber.” Films that “ask questions,” by contrast, “invite you to be surprised, or at least exposed to a place, a people, or an idea you may know little about.” One example commonly used to describe this process is D.A. Pennebaker’s Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back (1967), which Thompson explores further. Yet, another example that Thompson draws on that also connects with HWY: An American Pastoral is the work of Chris Marker, documentary filmmaker and pioneer of the “video essay.” Marker’s film Sans Soleil (1983), though not a work of Direct Cinema, shares a particular quality with Direct Cinema films: the formal elements of cinema are used to question the relationship between film and reality. 

Questions! Does non-fiction filmmaking really capture reality? Can cinema get closer to a subject’s essence than other art forms or modes of observation? If you love cinema, you’ve definitely asked these questions before…in various ways. Perhaps we should open the doors of perception and engage with these questions through Jim’s filmmaking?   

Starting with HWY: An American Pastoral. The film uses its audio-visual language to question the nature of film and how it mediates reality. Its cinéma verité qualities, for example, come through very early on. The shot of Jim trying to flag down a car near the beginning of the film, for example, lasts for nearly 7 minutes. The camera is hand-held and captures the world around Jim with nervous energy – like a conscious character whose attention is not beholden to traditional narrative logic. At the same time, however, there are moments where the editing and cinematography aim for a surreal and poetic quality. For example, after the long shot of Jim’s initially hitchhiking attempts, there is a series of multiple cuts of Jim swinging his jacket over his shoulder as cars race by (like a matador’s cape). Nature is foregrounded poetically: waterfalls, moonrise over the desert, the wind in Jim’s hair and the glare of sunlight in his face, and, towards the end, city lights and the ambience of L.A. as a counterpoint. Dissolve transitions, such as ones used in this film, are a recurring feature of psychedelic cinema of the era, as well as contemporary films that use this technique to stress a story’s hallucinatory qualities. What HWY: An American Pastoral ultimately provides, for a twenty-first-century audience, is a space to explore…not the nature of reality, but rather what “film reality means.” 

Break on through to the other side!

Film history and film culture have always been tied to what “reality” means to us. The movies should strive to represent life as it is, many have argued: cinematography should capture the world as human beings perceive it; an editor should be mindful of the way that real time occurs; sound should be natural and music minimal and unobtrusive. By contrast, many others have argued for a cinema that deliberately eschews reality: production design that transcends the known world; widescreen framing and fluid camera movements; editing that either stays invisible or calls attention to itself in order to heighten the experience; crafted sound effects and music that deliberately resonates on an emotional level. Just so we’re clear: this is not say that filmmakers should fall into on category or another. To be honest, some of my favorite films bring together both tendencies together in stunning forms of poetic realism (Barry Jenkins and Michael Mann immediately spring to mind). HWY: An American Pastoral brings these two cinematic traditions together in interesting ways, but it is also Morrison’s other film projects and even The Door’s music that considers the vast ways that the physical and spiritual are read by our sensoria. Or, as Morrison once declared: “Let’s just say I was testing the bounds of reality.” 

The music. This convergence of realism and poetics came through lyrically, in compositional style (consider the hybridity of Robby Krieger’s guitar playing), and how the band positioned themselves in the larger rock music scene in Los Angeles. The Doors, according to Barney Hoskyns, were “essentially a collision between garage punk and Beat poetics,” with a sound like an “art-rock version of all those California garage bands.” Garage rock is an undervalued piece of 60s rock history. It’s overshadowed in our cultural memory of the 60s by the success of bands like the Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, The Beatles, and even The Doors for that matter. And yet, local radio stations played garage rock constantly, which explains, in part, how the style laid the groundwork for the punk rock and proto-punk styles of the 1970s. Everyone listened to it, yet no one remembers it. It was raw, minimalist, and aggressive. Recalling the first time he saw the L.A. punk band X in the late 70s, Ray Manzarek noted that both X and The Doors “occupied that film noir Los Angeles represented by John Fante.” By contrast, the poetic and surreal qualities to The Door’s music, a counterpoint to the gritty garage rock influence, contains similarities to cinematic spectacle. There is something panoramic about some of their songs and the band’s live performances (Jim apparently hated playing outdoor festivals, as it interfered with the band’s ability to control the visuals and acoustics). 

Setting aside my feelings on The Doors movie (and of Oliver Stone himself), I’m always intrigued by how Stone recognized this quality of The Door’s music and live shows. For example, the film’s theatrical release featured 70mm screenings in select cinemas (similar to the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master and Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk). The film’s sound was also presented in 70mm 6 track, or Dolby Stereo 70mm, a form of surround sound designed specifically for epic-scale theatrical screenings. What’s also fascinating is that Morrison’s classmate Francis Ford Coppola recognized the same thing. Apocalypse Now (1979) – Coppola’s psychedelic war film that opens and closes with the song The End – is famous for advancing Dolby surround sound technology, as well as 70mm screenings that continue into the present. It’s little surprise that The Door’s cinematographer Robert Richardson (frequent Stone, Tarantino, and Scorsese collaborator) cites Apocalypse Now’s cinematographer Vittorio Storaro as a major influence.   

UCLA

It’s not clear who Oliver Stone is meant to be in his cameo appearance as a UCLA film professor in The Doors. In all likelihood, Stone is portraying Edgar “Ed” Brokaw, whose students also included screenwriter Gloria Katz and director Francis Ford Coppola (in the film’s audio-commentary, Stone states that he modeled his look on Martin Scorsese, Stone’s NYU film professor). Morrison’s short film – believed to be titled A Feast of Friends – is lost forever (Stone and others have searched high and low, to no avail). That was the second film he made at UCLA. The first movie was First Love (1964), shot on the UCLA campus with poet-photographer Max Schwartz and his girlfriend. In the documentary film Obscura (Rod Pitman, 2002), Schwartz recalls:

“It was the summer of 64, and I left UCLA without a diploma. And Jim need a place to live….He was didactic…wanting to shock your universe out, sometimes very gentle and wonderful. He used to like to read passages from Burrough’s The Naked Lunch just to gruesomely shock us because nobody knew that book. It’s totally reflective of Jim’s attitude towards life….A disdain for anything that could stop him.” 

In an article for Esquire around the time Stone’s film was released, writer Eve Babitz also recalls Morrison’s UCLA experience:

“Jim went to college and graduated. My friend Judy Raphael, who went to film school too, remembers Jim as this pudgy guy with a marine haircut who worked in the library at UCLA and was supposed to help her with her documentary term paper one night but ended up talking drunkenly and endlessly about Oedipus, which meant she had to take the course over the summer….Being a film major in the ‘60s was hopelessly square. If you wanted to make a movie, even if you went to UCLA like Francis Ford Coppola and then to Roger Corman School of Never Lost a Dime Picture, you still weren’t cool.”

Morrison and Manzarek attended UCLA film school at a crucial moment in the history of cinema and higher education. Film studies, which at that point had traditionally been a production-based major to train people with aspirations of working in the entertainment industry, was starting to blossom into robust field of academic study and intellectual pursuit – cross-pollinated by disciplines like psychoanalysis, philosophy, art history, literature, and cultural anthropology. Film departments also exposed students to other forms of cinema that operated outside of the Hollywood studio system. According the David James, film schools were the “chief incubators of independent filmmaking in Los Angeles” since World War II – notably UCLA, USC, Cal Arts, Otis, and some community colleges. Students were “invariably exposed to the history of the medium as a whole, not just the American film industry, but also international film styles and, to varying degrees, avant-garde and documentary practices.” Professors like Brokaw and pioneering silent era director Dorothy Arzner may have instructed Jim and his cohort in filmmaking techniques, but it was also the exposure to alternative production models that informed Morrison’s cinematic and lyrical existential quest.

Let’s swim to the moon. Let’s climb through the tide. Penetrate the evening that the city sleeps to hide. 

Guest lecturers and off-beat film screenings were also a fundamental aspect of film education during this period, largely because of the experimental art scene that had developed in Los Angeles up to that point. The Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Blvd – famous for showcasing iconic works of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Ed Ruscha – overlapped with both film and film education in striking ways: the work of experimental filmmaker Wally Bergman was frequently displayed; painter, animator, and filmmaker Jules Engel taught at Cal Arts; and Dennis Hopper, having already appeared in Rebel Without a Cause and destined to bridge film with the counterculture, photographed the gallery’s catalog. This overlap between avant-garde film and the L.A. art scene fostered a culture of experimental filmmaking at the county’s colleges and universities. One frequent guest lecturer who fueled this culture of art cinema was montage editor and experimental filmmaker Slavko Vorkapich, a former chair of USC’s film department and co-director of the influential experimental film The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra (1928).  

Jim’s time at UCLA also coincided with the development of a sizable film and television archive, which I have had the pleasure of conducting research in on several occasions. The film department, according to former professor Raymond Fielding, began receiving donations in 1959, many of which were delicate nitrate prints. In 1965, the collection grew in partnership with the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and the archive was finally realized in 1968 – continuing to expand over the decades and engaging in crucial restoration work to this very day.   

FEAST OF FRIENDS

''Cinema returns us to anima, religion of matter, which gives each thing its special divinity and sees gods in all things and beings. Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science'' Jim Morrison

In 1968, The Doors shot a documentary of their summer tour titled Feast of Friends, borrowing a title from one of Jim’s UCLA shorts. The film was initially released at festivals in 1969 to a luke-warm reception, and later it was fully restored and given a blu-ray release in 2014. Paul Ferrara and Babe Hill acted as co-directors, Frank Lisciandro was the film’s editor, and a young Harrison Ford served as cameraman. When asked what kind of film they were making, Morrison responded: “A fictional documentary….We’re not really making it. It’s making itself….I hope it will leave [the audience] puzzled.” Guitarist Robby Krieger added: “I think the movie might not even be about us, for all we know.” 

A curious moment in the film happens when Morrison has a conversation with Pastor Fred L. Stiegemeier (“Minister at Large”) for the Evangelical and Reformed Church (not clear where, but the footage indicates that it was filmed in Seattle). The preacher had attended one of the concerts shown in the film. Jim asks: “Were you affected by it?” Pastor Fred likens the concert and the music to a secular religious experience or seance, and the two determine that there must be a physical component of the music and concert experience in order for such a spiritual exploration to take place through the music. In a sense, this mini-episode harkens back to the convergence of realism and the surreal as way for creating space cinematically (and through other art forms) through which one can explore aspects of the self that are not normally present during every day circumstances. 

Mr. Mojo Risin’, Mr. Mojo Risin, Got to keep on risin’. 

The music videos that The Doors directed throughout their career (and directed by Manzarek after Morrison’s death) also display this realism/poetic convergence point in different ways. The People are Strange music video is composed of street scenes in an unspecified city, intercut with the band performing the song live (on a sound stage and acapella while standing in a city plaza), observing the city life around them. A year later, they filmed a promotional film for Elektra Records of their song The Unknown Soldier. On the one hand, we have street scenes that foreground gritty realism, in a similar vein as the People are Strange video. Documentary footage from Vietnam, juxtaposed with newsreel footage from the end of World War II, plays at the end of the film. There is also extensive use of hand-held shots, natural lighting, and lens flair throughout. On the other hand, the editing assumes a poetic-rhythming beat – staccato cuts and montage editing. There is the occasional breaking of the fourth wall – part of the formal elements intentionally calling attention to themselves. And, of course there is the visual metaphor of the blood dripping onto flowers as a crucified Morrison, the titular unknown soldier, is executed by firing squad.

In the music video for L.A. Woman, directed by Ray Manzarek in 1985, this tradition of filmmaking collides with the 80s neo-noir sensibilities that L.A. life had come to embody. There are street scenes echoing the everyday realism of earlier Doors videos, and yet the city lights and neon colors are reminiscent of films such as Thief (Michael Mann, 1981) and To Live and Die in L.A. (William Friedkin, 1984). The film uses archival footage of the band in Los Angeles during their heyday, but there are also surreal moments of Día de los Muertos imagery with a twirling, dancing woman. Nature images and time lapse photography are used, the legacy of The Doors and filmmaking is alluded to with a marquee for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Marlene Dietrich and Josef Von Sternberg’s Hollywood Walk of Fame stars, and the viewer is treated to aerial shots that fly through Los Angeles (a very L.A. film device that we can see in films such as Heat, Collateral, Drive, and Nightcrawler).

THE END

“You can trust me, cause I’m your priest. I’m your shrink…I am your main connection to the switchboard of the soul. I am the magic man! Santa Claus of the subconscious. You say it. You think it. You can have it!” – Lenny (Ralph Fiennes) in Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995) 

Set against the apocalyptic backdrop of New Years Eve 1999 in Los Angeles, Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) centers on a special kind of drug dealer: one who sells virtual reality experiences of other’s lives. Lenny (Ralph Fiennes) procures SQUID (a cerebral cortex device, capturing memories and sensations) recordings and sells them to others for profit, giving others “the stuff that you can’t have.” Named after The Doors second studio album and its title track (covered on the film’s soundtrack by Manzarek and the metal band Prong), Bigelow’s film offers a paradoxical turn on the relationship between film, media, and authentic experience explored in films like HWY: An American Pastoral and 1960s UCLA experimental cinema.

Strange days have found us. And through their strange hours we linger alone. Bodies confused. Memories misused. As we run from the day to a strange night of stone.  

On the one hand, Strange Days is a companion piece to Bigelow’s other films – notably Point Break (1991) and The Hurt Locker (2009) – in its exploration of adrenaline addiction, masculinity, and the limits of one’s mortality. “It’s a synthesis of all the different tracks I’ve been exploring,” according to Bigelow, “It’s kind of a transgression: the desire to escape through watching, waiting to cross over, can be insidious, and comes with its own price.” On the other hand, Bigelow’s film advances the idea of cinema as a “tear in the fabric of society, a window onto another universe.” A desire for realism, embodied by the “authentic experience” of SQUID wire-tripping, only fuels the construction of fantasy living and further entrenches the commodified world. While Morrison’s filmmaking and lyrics offered an escape from false consciousness, Strange Days presents a world where this quest, mediated through consumer technology, renders one constantly subservient to this desire. As the character of Faith (Juliette Lewis) puts it: “You know one of the ways that movies are still better than [SQUID recordings]? Cause the music comes ups, there’s credits, and you always know when it’s over.” 

 Further reading

Babitz, Eve. “Jim Morrison is Dead and Living in Hollywood.” Esquire. March 1st, 1991. 

https://classic.esquire.com/article/1991/3/1/jim-morrison-is-dead-and-living-in-hollywood

Hoskyns, Barney. Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes, and The Sound of Los Angeles. NY: St Martin’s Press, 1998. 

James, David E. The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles. Los Angeles: UC Press, 2005. 

Matsumoto, Jon. “Ray Manzerek on X and The Doors.” The Mercury News. December 20th, 2010. https://www.mercurynews.com/2010/12/20/ray-manzarek-on-x-and-the-doors/

Thomson, Patricia. “Our 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award honoree continues to demonstrate an uncontainable spirit of cinematic exploration.” American Cinematographer. February 2019. 

https://ascmag.com/articles/without-limits-robert-richardson-asc

Thompson, Rustin. Get Close: Lean Team Documentary Filmmaking. NY: Oxford UP, 2019. 

Ed Brokaw obituary: https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/inmemoriam/html/EdgarLloydBrokaw.htm

Jim and Ray’s film projects:

http://mildequator.com/filmhistory/sfilm.html

“Strange Days: Kathryn Bigelow’s Thrilling Sci-Fi that Doesn’t Feel As Strange As It Should” by Sven Mikulec, Cinephilia and Beyond (2017)

 https://cinephiliabeyond.org/strange-days-kathryn-bigelows-thrilling-sci-fi-doesnt-feel-strange/