Post by darkstar2 on Aug 2, 2008 19:13:43 GMT
UCLA - SCHOOL OF THEATRE FILM AND TELEVISION
ALUMNUS: JIM MORRISON
Mar 2008 in Scholarship
TFT alum Jim Morrison didn't walk off in a huff when his student film was dissed by a professor, as depicted in Oliver Stone's often fanciful biopic The Doors. The lizard king actually graduated in 1968.
Here, a classmates recalls UCLA campus life with Morrison.
Although he never fulfilled his dream of following his idol James Dean into the movies, Jim Morrison is undoubtedly one of the most famous graduates of the School of Theater, Film and Television. That Morrison, one of the central musical icons of the "acid rock" movement of the 1960s, did indeed graduate from the School (with a B+ average and a BA in Theater Arts) will come as a surprise to those whose only knowledge of his sojourn here derives from a key scene in Oliver Stone's film The Doors (1997), in which the future superstar defiantly declares "I quit!" before stalking out of a screening room when one of his trippy student films is dismissed as "pretentious" by a tweedy professor -- portrayed by Stone himself.
The scene supposedly depicts the tumultuous 1965 screening of Morrison's final undergraduate film project at UCLA. The problem is that some of the people who were in the audience that day remember the occasion vividly, and somewhat differently. In fairness, Stone had to recreate the film's imagery and voice over narration from accounts in various Morrison biographies, because the original footage no longer exists. One Morrison classmate, screenwriter Richard Blackburn '66 (Eating Raoul), recalls hearing a rumor that the film had been "stolen from the vaults" shortly after The Doors became chart-toppers in 1967 with the release of "Light My Fire."
"It sure looked like Jim's film to me," says top Hollywood talent agent and TFT alumnus John Ptak '67, who was a classmate of Morrison's." What you see on the screen is pretty much the way I remember the movie. It was very German, and there was a girl with very little on dancing on a television set." Blackburn remembers the film in strikingly similar terms: "The centerpiece was a young woman doing a striptease on top of a TV set that had footage of a Nazi rally playing on it." Which is pretty much what Stone depicts.
Ptak's overriding objection is to the misleading impression the scene gives of the School itself, as he remembers it. The setting "looks much too neat and fancy," he says, "like a real classroom. In fact it was nothing of the kind. The UCLA film department in those days was more like an art school, a friendly village of ne'er-do-wells. It was not at all the business school environment that film schools have since become. It was housed in a bunch of tin-roofed Quonset huts, like Wake Island in a World War II movie, that were located on North Campus near Parking Lot 5. There were a couple of buildings we called soundstages, but really they were just dirt floors and four walls, with hooks and rods to hang stuff. The screening room was in Building 4F, and it seated maybe 40 people. The late Gary Essert, who years later became the founder of Filmex, was the projectionist."
Essert was not to blame for what happened next: "Jim's film was about eight minutes long but took 20 minutes to project, because the splices kept breaking. Colin Young, who was the head of the film program then and who critiqued the student films, was nothing like the pompous guy Oliver Stone portrayed. He was a Scot with a full beard, Topanga Canyon all the way. I remember word for word exactly what he said when the lights came up -- and you have to imagine this in his thick Scottish brogue: "Mr. Mor-r-rison, one of the first things you're going to have to learn about filmmaking is to get your f**ing film through the projector. Next!" And Jim didn't do anything. He certainly didn't stalk out. He may have slumped down a little in his seat. And then they went on to the next film."
Within a year of this now legendary screening, Morrison and classmate Ray Manzarek hatched the concept of the path-breaking "psychedelic rock" band The Doors during a chance meeting on the beach in Venice, California. By 1967, Jim had morphed into the scandalous superstar known as The Lizard King. Four years after that, in 1971, he died in Paris and was laid to rest in Pere Lachaise Cemetery, alongside Marcel Proust and Oscar Wilde.
One lasting legacy of the artist at TFT has been the Jim Morrison Film Award, founded in 1972 with a donation from Jac Holzman of Morrison's label Elektra Records and augmented with donations from Morrison's parents and the parents of his partner, Pamela Courson. The endowment funds two substantial annual awards for film directing.
Past winners include screenwriter Eric Luke '78 (Explorers), animation director David Silverman '79, MFA '83 (The Simpsons Movie) and actor Adam Brody '05 (The O.C.).
ALUMNUS: JIM MORRISON
Mar 2008 in Scholarship
TFT alum Jim Morrison didn't walk off in a huff when his student film was dissed by a professor, as depicted in Oliver Stone's often fanciful biopic The Doors. The lizard king actually graduated in 1968.
Here, a classmates recalls UCLA campus life with Morrison.
Although he never fulfilled his dream of following his idol James Dean into the movies, Jim Morrison is undoubtedly one of the most famous graduates of the School of Theater, Film and Television. That Morrison, one of the central musical icons of the "acid rock" movement of the 1960s, did indeed graduate from the School (with a B+ average and a BA in Theater Arts) will come as a surprise to those whose only knowledge of his sojourn here derives from a key scene in Oliver Stone's film The Doors (1997), in which the future superstar defiantly declares "I quit!" before stalking out of a screening room when one of his trippy student films is dismissed as "pretentious" by a tweedy professor -- portrayed by Stone himself.
The scene supposedly depicts the tumultuous 1965 screening of Morrison's final undergraduate film project at UCLA. The problem is that some of the people who were in the audience that day remember the occasion vividly, and somewhat differently. In fairness, Stone had to recreate the film's imagery and voice over narration from accounts in various Morrison biographies, because the original footage no longer exists. One Morrison classmate, screenwriter Richard Blackburn '66 (Eating Raoul), recalls hearing a rumor that the film had been "stolen from the vaults" shortly after The Doors became chart-toppers in 1967 with the release of "Light My Fire."
"It sure looked like Jim's film to me," says top Hollywood talent agent and TFT alumnus John Ptak '67, who was a classmate of Morrison's." What you see on the screen is pretty much the way I remember the movie. It was very German, and there was a girl with very little on dancing on a television set." Blackburn remembers the film in strikingly similar terms: "The centerpiece was a young woman doing a striptease on top of a TV set that had footage of a Nazi rally playing on it." Which is pretty much what Stone depicts.
Ptak's overriding objection is to the misleading impression the scene gives of the School itself, as he remembers it. The setting "looks much too neat and fancy," he says, "like a real classroom. In fact it was nothing of the kind. The UCLA film department in those days was more like an art school, a friendly village of ne'er-do-wells. It was not at all the business school environment that film schools have since become. It was housed in a bunch of tin-roofed Quonset huts, like Wake Island in a World War II movie, that were located on North Campus near Parking Lot 5. There were a couple of buildings we called soundstages, but really they were just dirt floors and four walls, with hooks and rods to hang stuff. The screening room was in Building 4F, and it seated maybe 40 people. The late Gary Essert, who years later became the founder of Filmex, was the projectionist."
Essert was not to blame for what happened next: "Jim's film was about eight minutes long but took 20 minutes to project, because the splices kept breaking. Colin Young, who was the head of the film program then and who critiqued the student films, was nothing like the pompous guy Oliver Stone portrayed. He was a Scot with a full beard, Topanga Canyon all the way. I remember word for word exactly what he said when the lights came up -- and you have to imagine this in his thick Scottish brogue: "Mr. Mor-r-rison, one of the first things you're going to have to learn about filmmaking is to get your f**ing film through the projector. Next!" And Jim didn't do anything. He certainly didn't stalk out. He may have slumped down a little in his seat. And then they went on to the next film."
Within a year of this now legendary screening, Morrison and classmate Ray Manzarek hatched the concept of the path-breaking "psychedelic rock" band The Doors during a chance meeting on the beach in Venice, California. By 1967, Jim had morphed into the scandalous superstar known as The Lizard King. Four years after that, in 1971, he died in Paris and was laid to rest in Pere Lachaise Cemetery, alongside Marcel Proust and Oscar Wilde.
One lasting legacy of the artist at TFT has been the Jim Morrison Film Award, founded in 1972 with a donation from Jac Holzman of Morrison's label Elektra Records and augmented with donations from Morrison's parents and the parents of his partner, Pamela Courson. The endowment funds two substantial annual awards for film directing.
Past winners include screenwriter Eric Luke '78 (Explorers), animation director David Silverman '79, MFA '83 (The Simpsons Movie) and actor Adam Brody '05 (The O.C.).
