Holy Mother Of God - Oliver Stone's The Doors Really Sucks!

And How Two Weeks On the Road Really Took Its Toll

It is probably sadly typical of my life these days that I launch on a different platform and then go silent for a month. That certainly was not my intention, but soon after completing that first post, I had an extended business trip that took more out of me than I expected.

In early July I flew to Munich to attend a week of workshops. This was my second trip to Germany; I had traveled to Frankfurt last year. Given a choice, I much prefer Munich. Frankfurt’s old town was what one wants to see in Germany, but the rest of the city struck me as drab. Munich was green and lovely everywhere I went. On Sundays, when shops are closed in Germany, most Munich museums reduce their entry fee to just 1 Euro, and I enjoyed walking through the Alte Pinakothek and Pinakothek der Moderne before joining some co-workers for beer and pretzels in the famous Chinese Tower beer garden.

My hotel was only a kilometer from the office but I found the walk - over a pedestrian bridge, then through a lovely but very hilly park - really wore me out, especially the walk back to the hotel at the end of a long and challenging day. After I walked it in both directions on the first day I said fuck it and most days after that I took taxi - though one driver in particular expressed surprise that I wanted a taxi for such a short ride and pointed out the pedestrian bridge that I already knew quite well.

Some days I took an electric scooter instead of a taxi. The first time I did that, I followed a suggested route that crosses railroad tracks. I’m zooming along, looking at a train that had just pulled into the station, totally unaware that another train was approaching from the other direction. I scootered across the train track at least 20 feet in front of the train while the engineer (do they still call them that?) blew his horn and leaned out the window, screaming and presumably cursing me out in German.

I had a far less embarrassing time at a fun spot called CALL SOUL Breaking Bar, If you find yourself in Munich and crave cocktails served in chemical beakers, set on fire or served with samurai swords, this is the place for you. Later we wound up at Bar Rennbahn where ... well, maybe the less said, the better.

At the end of the week I had to fly from Munich to Seattle and somehow I managed to catch a cold right before the flight. This made the flight and my week in Redmond quite miserable. I was facilitating a week-long workshop for 80+ people so I couldn’t hide in the hotel or go back home early, I had to just suck it up and get it done.

Once I finally made it back to Austin, I walked smack into some sort of “Heat Dome” - as of this writing Austin has had 28 consecutive days of temperatures of 100 degrees Fahrenheit or higher and it looks to continue for at least the next week, probably longer.

The trip, the cold, the heat all combined to take so much out of me that I did not go to a concert last week that I had tickets for - Steve Miller and Christone “Kingfish” Ingram. It was at an outdoor amphitheater, I already knew it was a really long walk from the parking lot to the venue, and the ticket was only $25 so I said fuck it and stayed home. I’ve never seen Steve Miller live; he’s 79 now, I guess I won’t get the chance again. But here he is with my piano teacher, Barry Goldberg, on Hullabaloo in 1965.

The point is that I have to accept that I’m getting older. I used to travel 2 to 3 weeks every month and never gave it a second thought. Now I find that I need to pace myself or at least be less ambitious in terms of what I do.

I was supposed to be going to Beijing for two weeks later this month (and swing through Hong Kong on the way back) but that has been cancelled. My company uses a visa agency that told me 8 business days for a China visa and then oops! 30 business days. I told my manager I could fly to Hong Kong and have a China visa in four days (since I’m a Hong Kong permanent resident) but he didn’t love the idea.

That means I get to stay home for the month, at least so far. September will bring another disruption as I will be moving (just 5 minutes away from where I’m currently living).

And now, without further ado, on to the review I thought I was going to publish before my trip.

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Hey, The Doors, right? Light My Fire came out in 1967 and I loved it from the first time I heard it, so I’ve been a Doors fan for 56 freaking years. Between 1967 and 1971 they released six studio albums - at least one is brilliant and only one borders on fucking close to awful. Jim Morrison died in a bathtub in Paris in 1971 and that was that. (Well, not quite, they released two albums without Morrison and a third of Morrison’s poems set to music, but you get the idea.) They went out on an absolute high though. Their last album, L.A. Woman, remains my favorite Doors album. And the one before that, Morrison Hotel, was also pretty strong, a good return to form after The Soft Parade, which verged on being a Doors parody album.

Earlier this year, Apple Music released Dolby Atmos mixes of The Doors’ six “main” albums (they didn’t bother with the live or the post-Morrison albums presumably because no one cares). I love Dolby Atmos mixes when they’re done right - it’s as if you’re sitting in the middle of the recording studio or on stage with the musicians, it’s not some gimmicky left/right pan crap. There’s better separation in the mix which often means you can pick out details that you never heard before. I made a playlist of the Dolby Atmos mixes of my favorite Doors tracks (44 songs, 3 hours 7 minutes) and I’ve been playing it a lot. And that led me to think, I haven’t watched the Oliver Stone movie since it came out 30 years ago, I remembered almost nothing about it, I’ll give it a go. I should have taken the fact that I’d forgotten almost everything about it as a hint.

A lot of people were interested in making a biopic of Morrison’s life and almost anyone else would have coughed up something better than the mess that Oliver Stone shitted out.

Now, I like Oliver Stone. He’s written and directed a handful of truly classic films, most of them factually based and many of them politically charged. Platoon is the only film that captured the nightmares I had when I thought I was going to be drafted in 1972. And then there’s Salvador, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, Natural Born Killers, Any Given Sunday. As a writer, he’s also been responsible for Midnight Express, Scarface and others. Not too shabby. But he’s also made some colossal stinkers (Alexander, starring Colin Farrell, is the first one that comes to mind).

So here’s the question: if you’re going to make a film purporting to be the biography of an actual living person, a person whose life was extensively documented across every form of media, why the fuck would you make up half of it? It makes no sense.

It’s not just one or two things and it’s not just messing up the timeline (which happens frequently and is vaguely excusable), there are some very specific things - things that anyone can easily check on - that are just plain wrong. Stone reinvents minor things, such as how Morrison met Pamela Courson, but he invents lots of major things as well.

Sure, no one is in the room when certain conversations take place so you invent dialogue. Everyone does that. Compress events or characters for dramatic purposes in the interest of running time, acceptable. But to change things to the extent that Stone did here cannot be defended.

Here’s one example. The Ed Sullivan Show. 1967. Before The Doors go on to sing “Light My Fire” a network executive comes backstage and tells them they can’t say the word “higher” (as in “girl we couldn’t get much higher”) on network TV. That really happened, and Morrison really did go ahead and sing “higher” anyway. In the film, he not only sings it, he leans into the camera, emphasizes the word “higher” and says “yeah!” after it.

Now look at the actual version.

He sings the line normally. He doesn’t scream “yeah!” He doesn’t lean into the camera. He just stands there singing with his eyes closed. Also the set is wrong - the movie has these plumes of colored smoke rising up around them; no smoke in the film. What’s the freaking point?

One could take issue that the film is called The Doors but it’s not really about The Doors, it’s about Jim Morrison, or rather Oliver Stone’s fantasy version of Morrison. That’s what people are interested in, fine, then why not call it “Jim Morrison” or “Break On Through” or something more accurate. We don’t even get Jim Morrison. We get “Jim Morrison”. Val Kilmer is terrific in the role but his dialogue is all in quotations and he’s such a dick that you wonder why anyone would put up with his shit for more than 5 minutes. There is no indication of who Jim Morrison was as a person, no understanding of his interior process (other than that as a kid he saw a car accident and a Native American bleeding). He speaks in quotes, he’s an obnoxious prick, every other indication is that in real life he was nothing like that.

The rest of the band - Ray Manzarek (Kyle MacLachlan), Robby Krieger (Frank Whaley), John Densmore (Kevin Dillon) - all fade into the background after the first third of the film. Who are they? What made them tick? Did they have their own demons, their own drug or alcohol problems? What conversations did they have with each other as Morrison declined? How did the rest of the band react to Morrison’s untimely death? We don’t get to find out. Meg Ryan stares at Val Kilmer’s lifeless body in the bathtub, we see Morrison’s gravestone at Pere Lachaise Cemetary and a title card comes on to tell us that Pam died three years later.

The cast list includes the real John Densmore, Paul Rothchild, Patricia Kennealy, and Bill Graham (also one of the producers of the film). Paul Rothchild (who produced five of The Doors’ studio albums) gets a credit for “vocal consultant to Val Kilmer.” Robbie Krieger is credited as “guitar coach to Frank Whaley”. Paula Abdul (!) gets a credit for “select choreography for Val Kilmer.” The list of Technical Advisors includes Densmore, Kennealy, Robbie Krieger, and Danny Sugerman (who wrote one of the definitive books about the band).

When you watch the end credits, you get the feeling that all of the preceding shmutz was approved by the surviving Doors. “Special thanks to The Doors for their assistance in making this film, and to John Densmore’s book, Riders on the Storm.” But then they saw the film and disowned it. Kennealy in particular wrote that Stone ignored everything she told him and went with his own version of events. Ray Manzarek claims to have spent more than 12 hours with Stone but his name is curiously missing from the credits. Densmore appears to be the sole surviving member of The Doors who liked the film. Krieger stated that Stone chose to ignore what they told him “in favor of his own vision of the story” (from Wikipedia).

“His own vision of the story”. Why the fuck would I, would anyone other than Oliver Stone, give two shits about Stone’s “vision of the story” if it means “I’m just making shit up to jack up my movie more.” “His own vision of the story.” Those six words sum up why I dislike this film so intensely. There are plenty of great Oliver Stone films out there, and he’s actually made worse films than The Doors. And yet even Alexander, which Stone recut several times trying to make a silk purse out of that sow’s ear, only bores me. The Doors actively pisses me off.

Here’s The Doors live at the Isle of Wight festival in 1970, a year after the Miami Incident, sounding great. That’s a big part of what pisses me off. The Doors survived Miami. They not only continued to tour after that, they came back from their worst album (1969’s The Soft Parade) to make their two best albums. How did that happen? The film doesn’t go there. It should have.