When You’re Strange: Critique?

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

When You’re Strange: A Film About The Doors? The Trial and Tribulations of Tom DiCillo
The real elephant in the room!

This thread is an attempt at a definitive examination of Tom DiCillo’s documentary ‘When You’re Strange: A Film About The Doors’.

At first glance When You’re Strange: A Film About The Doors seems innocuous enough but an in depth examination will show that to be far from the truth as a seemingly more sinister agenda behind the project rears it’s ugly head.....or will it?

Passed off as a definitive documentary of The Doors it is far from that and just another examination of the Cult of Jim Morrison from the point of view of his surviving bandmates.....or is it?

As with Oliver Stone’s movie ‘The Doors’ Tom DiCillo’s documentary ‘When You’re Strange: A Film About The Doors’ concentrates pretty much the entire film on a rather dubious look at Jim Morrison.....or does it?

For me the film can be divided up using the following criterion to analyse the finished product that for over a year was promised to be the real story of The Doors..

1) Factual errors & poor research:
2) Misrepresentations of Jim Morrison
3) Lack of allowing the footage to speak for itself
4) Made up stuff to look cool to an audience
5) ?? Your take on the film.

Plenty of examples of this abound in the film so lets analyse the whole sorry mess and see the pros and cons of the film collected in one single thread. Of course these areas will overlap but for me it's the easiest way to look at the whole by splitting it into component parts.

Please don't post reviews of the film here as that's not the purpose of the thread.

By all means quote reviews and any other sources you wish but the thread is here for YOUR opinions and observations NOT to highlight others view of the film.

What do YOU think about this film.
I am clearly in the anti camp as I will show in my posts here but lets hear from both sides and see if we can get a decent debate flowing here.

I have lots of stuff to collate and am doing just that at present by bringing all my comments here onto one thread.
But I thought that by posting the intentions of the thread earlier it might stimulate some debate among both those pro and anti and those in between.

I reiterate that I care nothing about the film maker whom I consider a fraudulent fool but do care about his film and the way it portrays my favourite band.

Some might argue...and I look forward to that debate ......that DiCillo has now moved on and we should not deabte this film this way but my argument will be that we still debate Oliver Stone and his film nearly 20 years later so DiCillo is fair game.

So if you have seen it by now lets hear from you.
The Elephant In the Room was it Jim or Tom?

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

I will start off with #1

1) Factual errors & poor research:

The most widespread criticism of the film to me seems to be the lack of research on the part of DiCillo whose film is littered with inaccuracies small and large.
For example.....

Direct film quotes in bold….. ‘Robby Krieger played with ONE band with Densmore when they were at High School’
Not true at all and a decent bit of research would have corrected that error.
Try reading page 30/31 of the Densmore bio for the real story.

We learn that the FIRST song Robby wrote was LMF but even that is not strictly true.

....."So I went home and wrote ‘Light My Fire’ and 'Love Me Two Times'.These are the first two songs I ever wrote....took about an hour' Robby Krieger.....

Seemingly nit picking perhaps but an example nonetheless of bad research no matter how trivial.
If this had been the only example then that would have been fine but the film is awash with inaccuracy.

The idea that the bands FIRST gig was The London Fog is not true either as they played a few gigs in 1965 and an outdoor gig in 1966 before they got the Fog gig.
Their first ‘meaningful’ gig perhaps. First gig NO. Once again bad research.

During the Whisky sequence we learn that Morrison sang The End and included his Oedipal segment but The End was NOT a song about Jim Morrison’s high school girlfriend.
The opening sequence of the song had it’s roots in the Venice Pier rendition Jim did for The Doors and was indeed a goodbye song to his ex Mary but by the time they got to The Whisky moment it had developed into a lot more by the time of the Whisky.
Picky perhaps but all the same relevant as an example of poor research.

The Strange days period is encapsulated in this statement which is not at all correct.
‘the organ features a hint of the carnival both childlike and darkly disturbing . It’s no accident that the 2nd album features circus performers on it’s cover’.
But it was indeed an accident as Jim Morrison had hated the first cover and said put dogs on the new cover. When asked why he said tongue firmly in cheek it spells God backwards. It’s better than having our fucking faces on it was Jim’s response.
The cover was designed by Bill Harvey and page 206 of Follow The Music tells a different tale to DiCillo who insinuates that the cover reflected the music somehow which was far from the case.
Once again poor research and narrative that misrepresents the facts.

The Doors in New York was an important phase of the bands story but DiCillo decides to trivialise this crucial part of the band History with….

‘Holzman sends The Doors to New York City. They are an immediate hit. Andy Warhol becomes infatuated, particularly with Morrison’

He seems to encapsulate the New York story in an appearance on Ed Sullivan late in 1967 and the fact some freak becames infatuated with the bands lead singer.
This was a huge distortion of the actual facts and considering this was supposed to be a documentary it seems to me relevant.
A passing mention of Ondine in 66 and the interest taken by the Crawdaddy writers and Richard Goldstien would seem to me to have been a better use of the time spent talking about New York.
DiCillo simply follows the Stone script by introducing Warhol but there is a point to Warhol in the Stone movie, during the party scene, in that it is a cipher for Morrison's fall to The Dark Side.....Warhol his Darth Vader moment. There is no point other than Warhol is a famous 60s figure to mentioning a rather trivial fact about New York and ignoring more pertinent information.
Opting for sensation over substance.

Tom goes on to inform us that after Morrison’s New Haven brush with the law he went on stage and….

“In the middle of the FIRST song he stops and tells the audience what just happened’.

This is a huge piece of inaccurate research as New Haven is among one of the best documented Doors concerts and DiCillos version not only is wildly inaccurate but also misrepresents Morrison.
In Tom’s version it can be construed that Morrison fuming at being maced went on stage and stuck it to the man.
The actual events give a more measured, precise and calculated approach to his rather inventive little blue man rap which he wove into WTMO about half an hour into the concert.
Morrison was known by this time for interspersing poetry into songs and WTMO was a perfect vehicle for that.
Morrison’s ‘little blue man’ rap a witty piece of storytelling sprinkled into the song which upset the police.
On one hand, Tom’s, malice and on the other, the true tale, cleverness and ingenuity.

When we reach LAW at the end of 1970 we learn that
‘It takes just over a week to record the entire album’ Which is not true at all and actually contradicts DiCillo's earlier slant that Morrison needed jerry Scheff to keep interest in LAW up.
It's true that a lot of the album was laid down in an intense two week period but the recording sessions began in December 1970 and ran into February 1971.
Nit picking again...perhaps...but still poor research and narrative.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

2) Misrepresentations of Jim Morrison

From the outset DiCillo wants to present a particular vision of Jim Morrison and makes an early bid for that Morrison in the the first segment of the film dealing with his pre UCLA days.

'One teacher sent home a note scolding him as self centred'

One little knife cut in this death from a thousand insinuations.......a shallow Morrison preening, vain and self centred and he had not even gotten to LA.
Why not mention that also one of his teachers went to grade a paper he wrote on French poetry and found that he did not understand any of it and had to visit the library to find the books to read to mark Jim's paper. Jim got an A.
There are many examples of how smart Jim was and his quirky sense of humour. He was a fan of MAD magazine and obviously influenced by that kind of humour.
Thoughout the film DiCillo fails to show just how funny Morrison could be preferring to focus on just how drunk he could get.

‘Most of the attention goes to Jim’…. ‘Jim relishes the attention. He seems to have been born instantly ready for fame’
One of many DiCillo quotes during the film that misrepresent Morrison. DiCillo seems to have wanted to focus on a vain preening Jim Morrison who was addicted to fame and was nothing without the limelight. Stone was heavily criticised for his Morrison in The Doors movie but even his Morrison was not as shallow as DiCillos.

‘His FIRST on stage arrest had come early in New Haven’This was a particularly cruel and poor piece of research from DiCillo and one that can be categorised as both poor research and misrepresentation of Morrison.
DiCillo insinuates that Morrison was arrested often with this comment and gives an impression of an out of control wild man which is a similar theme throughout the documentary.
He mentions the reason for the arrest but had already set the scene with this wildly inaccurate statement and set the thought in the viewers mind that this was a common occurrence with Jim Morrison instead of being a one off event due to a set of circumstances that were perfectly understandable and not because of a crazed Jim Morrison.


We learn a few things about LAW such as that to keep Morrison interested Botnick brought in Jerry Scheff Elvis bass player.
Now I did not know that Jim was uninterested in the LAW album and needed someone like Scheff to keep up his involvement in the session.
This portrays Morrison as indolent towards these sessions and plays to DiCillos’ Elephant In The Room theory which is prevalent throughout the whole film.
From what I have seen about LAW recording sessions the opposite was true after Paul Rothchild left and all 4 Doors were keen to prove their ex producer wrong.
Botnick did not as DiCillo suggests 'bring in Scheff' and it seems more likely that the band invited him to participate in the sessions.

“I went to some of the rehearsals I was a little hippie at that point wearing a headband. Jim was nice to me, he’d say ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ One day he showed up late and he gave each of the guys in the band a dollar because he was late.”
This little snippet from Adam Holzman son of Jac, Head of Elektra Records seems to contradict the sense Jim needed Elvis mates keep his interest up......Like Stone was accused of DiCillo never really shows the humorous side of Jim Morrison in this film.

The use of Jim Morrison audio to make points during the film that were not the purpose of that audio are of particular note and another example of DiCillo’s hypocrisy.
Jim Morrison left his fans with a lot of coherent, articulate and intelligent audio footage in which he covers much of what makes up this film.
Sadly he was not accorded the same courtesy the rest of the band were and allowed to contribute to the film instead was simply used as a tool to tell a fraudulent tale from a bunch of fraudulent people after a buck.

'Sometimes the drinking helps Morrison....
What an incredibly irresponsible and stupid comment from this arce DiCillo. How on earth does HE know this?
How exactly did getting piss drunk HELP Jim Morrison.
We learn a few moments later that 'sometimes it doesn't' No Shit Sherlock
One question I would love to see answered here is where exactly was John Densmore when this tripe was being put together. Was he himself drunk during his early screenings of WYS that he could not see the hatchet job that was unfolding with regards his dead friend or was it that he just did not care?
This film will generate a lot of interest regardless of how shit it is and will as a consequence bring in a lot of dollars...eh John?

"Morrison takes a hard turn from psychedelics to booze" we are told round about the Soft Parade session but that was in late 1968 and Morrison was a boozer well before that he was a near alcoholic before he met the band and was getting pissed at gigs in 1967. The Action House in June of that year the shortest ever Doors gig when a drunken Jim was helped off stage after a couple of minutes when he started to do a striptease......which moves us nicely into another DiCillo revalation.....
One of the biggest misrepresentations of Morrison is the most controversial for me and that is the 'but no one talks about the elephant in the room' segment.
Now that for me was cruel and unnecessary and added to a piece of footage that shows Morrison seemingly twitching oddly adds to the overall sense of drugged up drink fuelled insanity that is a central theme of this travesty.
Why was he twitching? We don't know. He could have been drunk and was self destructing on a drug flashback or he could have been fooling about or even had an itchy back.
We don't know but Tom sure as hell does not allow the footage to speak for itself.
Maybe John developed his rash because he was using the wrong type of soap.

It's a similar story with DiCillo's first introduction of the evil 'Jimbo' which shows a scene of Morrison snarling and taking a swing at a camera. 'Jimbo' not someone to mess with. But the scene that accompanies Jimbo is simply a bit of footage of Jim messing around with his mates who were filming for the Feast Of Friends.
There was nothing sinister about it simply larking about but add that to 'Jimbo' and it takes on a different angle and seems to be a drunk Morrison attacking a cameraman.

At the end segment DiCillo tells us that when Morrison got to Paris .....
'The solitude of the writer offers little of the kick he knows so well'Once again another misrepresentation of Jim Morrison as he took to the writers lifestyle well enough and spent many hours working on his poetry or why else is Room #32 in Alta Cienaga such a sought after room to stay. He was not just staggering around Paris drunk all day long, as has been noted on another thread he went sightseeing to North Africa and parts of France and was working on poetry material as well as taking an interest in film and possibly a trial memoir.
If all he wanted to do was bask in the glow of an audience why then did he do his damnest to alienate that audience.
DiCillo makes no attempt to understand Morrison and simply falls back onto the same old tired clichés that have been a part of the last 30 years.


Then the final indignity ....Jim in the nudie....the final kick in the knackers after a hatchet job and a half on Morrison at the expense of The Doors story.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

3) Lack of allowing the footage to speak for itself

Now it has been noted in many an interview and on the directors blog of his desire to allow The Doors footage to 'speak for itself'.
Sadly DiCillo shows utter hypocrisy in this regard and does nothing of the sort.
For example let's look at The Singer Bowl segment of the film.

Just before we get there we hear that ......
"Jim takes control of his own image He picks out his own clothes from the conch belt to the leather trousers Seemingly designed to accentuate his crotch"cue footage of Jim having his knob felt by a fan whilst sitting in The Doors limo.....

“He understood exactly how to make it all work for him As if to protect himself he made it seem as if it didn’t matter”This is hardly letting the footage speak for itself as how exactly did DiCillo know Jim was protecting himself by making it all seem not to matter?

Then as Jim wanders among the Singer Bowl fans DiCillo tells us.....
‘It’s hard to tell if he is simply mingling with his fans or if he is drawing something crucial from them as if he needs their attention to survive."
How anybody can make such a ridiculous statement from something as inconsequential as standing talking to a bunch of fans is beyond me.
The footage is crying out to say something but it’s not allowed by DiCillo who decides to speak for it.
To me this bit of footage says Morrison was a decent sort who was fine simply chatting to rock fans at a concert. It’s NOT hard to tell at all what is happening here.
There are numerous examples of Jim just talking to people. He used to phone fans at home who had written to the band and left a phone number and chat with them whilst sitting in the Doors office.
He was very friendly with the local artists and poets.
Nothing from any of this indicates he was some shallow inadequate who needed adulation to get through the day.
This of course is in keeping with DiCillo's earlier comment that...
‘Most of the attention goes to Jim’…. ‘Jim relishes the attention. He seems to have been born instantly ready for fame’The vain preening superstar who craved attention and needed the limelight to survive.
Amazing how one can glean this information from someone standing talking to a few people at a concert.
This piece of footage was an opportunity to show Jim Morrison as a decent, humerous young man who was interested enough in those that bought his records that he was happy to wander among them chatting and showing that he was in essence just like they were.
Instead he distorts this rather pleasing image of Jim Morrison by having Johnny Depp twist what we were seeing into Jim 'seeking' attention and 'needing' the adulation of the fans as if he was somehow mentally disturbed, sad and desperately in need of some strangers hand.



4) Made up stuff to look cool to an audience

When we reach LAW at the end of 1970 we learn that

‘The band want LHM to be the first single but Robby resists thinking his own song too commercial for The Doors. His choice is ROTS’.
This is the worst kind of populist nonsense as it’s well documented that the band wanted to release The Changeling as a single and Holzman spent a couple of weeks changing their mind in favour of the radio friendly LHM which he immediately picked out as the stand out hit of the whole album.
DiCillo looking for the audience friendly option rather than actually researching the subject.
ROTS one of the most popular Doors songs so lets weave that into the tale to sound good to the young folks.
Fine for a Hollywood movie but disgraceful for a supposed serious look at one of Ameria's top rock bands.

“Jac listened to the whole album and then said ‘Love Her Madly’ was a Top 5 record and ‘Riders On The Storm’ will get more FM play than any Doors LP cut and song by song he ran down exactly what happened. The Doors said ‘wait a minute we think ‘The Changeling’ is the single. ‘That’s what we want out because that’s the most credible musically’. Jac looked at them as if they were nuts and said ‘it’s not a hit. “Love Her Madly” is a hit’. And they said ‘No’ and the meeting ended without him swaying them at all. It took about two weeks to get them to go with the obvious hit.”
Bill Siddons Doors manager from ‘Follow The Music’.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

2) Misrepresentations of Jim Morrison And The Doors

One of the aspects of this fraudulent film that struck me at first glance then was compounded by subsequent viewings was the way the director seemed set on associating violence with The Doors.
This seemed a recurrent theme throughout the film and he even quotes Morrison on the subject towards the end of the film.

Now I am well aware that some Doors concerts got a bit raucous but that could be said of many many bands from the 60s and 70s.

A lot is made of the Singer Bowl concert The Doors played in August 1968 with The Who and Morrison seems to be blamed squarely for all the problems associated with a concert that was unravelling long before Morrison took to the stage.

Tom recounts that a photographer saw
‘Jim look directly at a young girl and grab his crotch her boyfriend picks up a chair’….according to the photographer Jeff Silverman "it was the FIRST chair to be thrown."

But Silverman does not say that. His account is featured in Follow The Music and he says the guy flung a chair it’s true but mentions nothing about it being the first as how could he know that in a hall that big. Maybe the guy saw chairs being flung and just picked one up and chucked it at Morrison because he was being an asshole to his girlfriend. We don't know exactly where the trouble kicked off or all the reasons behind it.
And neither does DiCillo.

There are numerous reasons that have been well documented about the Singer Bowl upheaval from broken revolving stages to people standing and infuriating those behind them. Morrison did indeed have an interest in crowd manipulation going as far as to read books on the subject and actually has a go at creating mayhem in the Cleveland Auditorium the very next night after Singer Bowl.
The Singer Bowl is considered one of The Doors finest shows whilst Cleveland considered one of their more outrageous.

Concert promoters and venues allegedly exaggerated the Doors riot potential as a way of gaining control over bands such as The Doors and empower them as to who could appear in their venues.
So nothing is as clear cut as it seems and much is open to interpretation.
But seemingly not to DiCillo who simply embellishes Jeff Silverman’s story and ignores most of the background to the Singer Bowl trouble and places it squarely at the doors of Jim Morrison.

This violence theme is embedded throughout the film with civil rights violence, Vietnam violence and violence at concerts all being intertwined with the Doors/Morrison tale.
The Isle Of Wight for instance shows the trouble that erupted due to fans disagreeing with a charge being made alongside The Doors performance.
For DiCillo’s purposes Doors = violence….
It’s a bit like subliminal advertising throughout this film.
The Doors get mentioned…ooh look there’s someone getting the shit beat out of them.

Clumsy and sinister but I would also argue effective as those not as acquainted with the Doors as some could easily leave the film with the impression that Doors concerts were dangerous places to be back in the 60s.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

"The film tells the story of the band using only the real footage of The Doors.
For this offense I accept full responsibility. I felt there was more benefit in letting the images speak for themselves."
Tom DiCillo blog 27 Dec 2008

1) Factual errors & poor research:

The Doors hired 'professional drinkers' to keep Morrison on track?
Bit disrespectful to guys like Bob Neuwirth who was a bit more than some piss head who sold his time to look after alcoholics.

We then move on to WFTS the bands 3rd LP. The band realises that Jim is becoming difficult.
Celebration is canned and the band fill out the album with unused songs from the first album.
No they did not.
They rerecorded two songs from the original demo and the rest was either new stuff or taken from Jim’s many journals.
The unused songs from the debut were Moonlight Drive and Indian Summer neither appears on WFTS.
HILY is suggested by Jac Holzman’s 10 year old son Adam and Jac has to persuade the band to record the song as they think it too old.

The story about how LMF developed as a hit was not quite true either and these little inaccuracies really spoil the film.

The History of the band is ignored or trivialised in favour of highlighting a Morrison drinking binge for example the important early days of 1966 which was the Doors most defining year is reduced to a few remarks about The Fog and The Whisky and the fact Holzman turned up and signed them.

The first royalty cheque is mentioned which although of interest was not as important as some aspects of the story and seems like a sop to Ray manzarek who made a big deal out of it in his book and on his website.

Morrison Hotel barely rates a mention, other than it went Gold in two days, as we are running short of time so we move on to LAW the centre piece of which is some fixation with Mr Mojo Risin being an anagram of something or other.
Why this is such a big deal is never explained.

"As of this date none of their songs has been used in a car commercial"True but they did do one for a tyre


2) Misrepresentations of Jim Morrison

Oliver Stone was heavily criticised by Manzarek and company for including a sequence where he recreates Jim’s student film and intersperses Nazi imagery.
Now I paraphrase here but Ray screamed in his whiny voice that ‘Jim was not a Nazi’ or something of the sort.
DiCillo tells us via Johnny Depp that ‘Jim made one film at UCLA. It earned him a D’.
Then proceeds to show several images to punctuate this statement.
They consist of Lizard, sex and lo and behold Hitler.
Especially when the film did apparently, according to his classmates, have a Nazi element.
But it's not OK for Stone but OK for Tom...I call that hypocrisy….I dunno ‘bout you?

DiCillo’s narrative seems to have a fixation with Jim’s leather pants which as we all know were not that big a deal to The Doors story and with drinking binges which pretty much tells you all you need to know and that the anti Oliver Stone movie seems uncannily similar to the Oliver Stone movie.
For instance as Jim remains behind after The Doors Euro tour and meets up with Mike McClure it's off on a 'drinking binge' instead of using that to explain something about the poet side of Morrison.
I am sure that they did go for drinks and probably ended up drunk but thats what people did. Only they called it drinking rather than drinking binges.

For me Tom seems to delight in the Miami segment and spends nearly an 'eighth' of his movie dwelling on the Miami saga which may be significant in itself.
Considering this is supposed to be a movie on The Doors, Miami should have been accorded a couple of minutes and the rest could have been spent on the band.

"It came out, and, you know, I read Ray's book, John's book, I spoke to Robby, and spoke to a lot of people, and there was this conflict that was in him. And again, I will only say that, I speculated momentarily in the film. I didn't want to go down the road of speculation in this movie, which is why I left his death as simple as it was. Because, listen, it's not a story about Jim Morrison, it's a story about the band."
Tom DiCillo

That's apparent from the finished product
For someone not wanting to go down the road of speculation he sure made quite a number of speculative remarks about Morrison's motives which cannot be backed up with any evidence as the guy is dead. And as far as I could see pretty much the entire film was about Jim.

From an interview with Tom DiCillo
Q. Right, right. You mentioned in the narration that the solitary writing life didn't have the same kick as being onstage.

A. It was an addiction, I mean, and how could it not be? You know, you get that kind of adulation from the world, and his was different, because he wasn’t a teeny-bopper. It was a whole different persona, one that people have emulated to this day.


Once again for someone not wanting to go down the road of speculation he sure is speculating here. How do we know Morrison was addicted to fame? He certainly spent time wandering the writers path and grew bored with being a Door soon enough. Of course the fame would appeal to a young man in the 60s but there is no evidence to suggest Morrison was addicted to it. The evidence I have seen this last 40 years suggests the opposite to me.
A ridiculous comment from a ridiculous man who according to him, Morrison never expected fame nor craved it but was born for it and was addicted to it.
As you said Tom it was a complex idea and a rather speculative one as well.
So it's lucky you did not want to go down the road of speculation isn't it.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

2) Misrepresentations of Jim Morrison

Lets look a bit deeper at the Strange Days section of the film in which DiCillo says ‘the organ features a hint of the carnival both childlike and darkly disturbing . It’s no accident that the 2nd album features circus performers on it’s cover’.

One of the central planks of DiCillos Morrison is that he was a self centred, attention needing, superficial character who survived on an audience.
This theme appears from the off in WYS with Jim's school letter describing him as self centred.
DiCillo says that it was no accident that Strange Days had the cover it had......but it was indeed an accident and there was a very good reason for that accident.

This self centred, attention seeking singer got rather peeved when he saw the debut LP cover and that he dwarfed the other three and as a result argued against his face being on the second album.
Hence his dogs suggestion.....God spelt backwards .....better than having our fucking faces on it!

Now this was a pretty important moment and told Doors fans something about the singers character but would have completely blown DiCillos fatuous needy Jim Morrison into next month if he had told the true reason for SD having circus performers on the cover. Surely if Jim needed the buzz attention brought him having his face on an album cover would have satisfied that need? But it seems he was not that shallow. But of course DiCillo never reveals an irritating fact like that.

The devil is in the detail and looking a bit deeper can sometimes tell a story that is hidden from view.

Morrison would often sit and give an interviewer a fair shot and try to answer the questions then be dismayed to see just another hatchet job appear in magazine and newspaper.
His answers taken out of context and twisted to support the agenda of the writer.

DiCillos film reflects this and for me it's not all about 'what he says' in his film but about 'what he does not say' in his film that provides his slant and presents his Morrison.

For instance ..... look deeper at the Strange Days section and it is an example of the director using the 'not saying of something important' to support his own hypotheses.
Not saying something just as important as actually saying something.

Let me expand on that.
Throughout the film DiCillo presents a Morrison that is different to the one most Doors fans would agree to be the most definitive Morrison. Not in his drinking which was beyond dispute as was his sometimes difficult behaviour in the studio....although in another thread the causes of that behaviour is a matter of debate.

No what I am talking about is DiCillos 'needy' Morrison. A vain inadequate who was desperately in need of a strangers hand or in this case fed off his audience.
We see that Morrison at the beginning of the film ('One teacher sent home a note scolding him as self centred'), at the mid point (standing among fans and feeding from them ‘It’s hard to tell if he is simply mingling with his fans or if he is drawing something crucial from them as if he needs their attention to survive.") and even at the end of the film and Morrison's demise in Paris ('The solitude of the writer offers little of the kick he knows so well').

The seemingly throwaway comment about the Strange Days album cover hiding a deeper truth that is not mentioned as it would blow the needy perspective clean out of the water.

‘the organ features a hint of the carnival both childlike and darkly disturbing . It’s no accident that the 2nd album features circus performers on it’s cover’.

The album cover art rather than a reflection of the music a reflection of the attitude of Morrison to the way the record company was presenting him to an audience. His face dominating the cover of the debut LP. He was annoyed at that and fought against a similar band shot for the follow up LP.
Jokingly saying put some dogs on it and when asked why replied it's God spelt backwards.....better than having our fucking faces on it.
So this episode showed a different Morrison than the one presented in DiCillos film.
A Morrison that far from craving the adulation of his audience went to great lengths to be portrayed as on equal terms with his band mates. The famous incident when a DJ introduced the band as Jim Morrison & The Doors. Morrison went up to the DJ and said go back and introduce us properly.
Also Morrison at a party once pointed out Ray Manzarek to an admirer and said 'see that guy...he's The Doors'.
This not a portrait of a man that craved attention but of an artist who appreciated those who walked the same path he did and gave them due credit.

Not at all what DiCillo was presenting and by omission of certain facts he does as much disservice to the band and it's singer as he does with his ill informed biased made up fantasy narrative.

There is much to criticise about this film and a lot of it revolves around what was not said as what was said.
Seeking and finding a deeper truth sometimes involves looking with a keener eye and listening with a keener ear.
By picking nits it is sometimes possible to uncover and expose a darker agenda behind these things and for me DiCillo has one of those as he strives to paint a portrait of Jim Morrison and pass it off as truth when the evidence that disputes that portrait is ignored completely and twisted and trivialised.

So not only a lack of research and bad narrative but possibly deliberate exclusion or ignoring of evidence that would have contradicted the Morrison on show.

Not everything is black and white about this film and even the most inconsequential elements can bring you to a truth about it that reveals the director as the shallow inadequate rather than the subject.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

2) Misrepresentations of Jim Morrison

"The film tells the story of the band using only the real footage of The Doors.
For this offense I accept full responsibility. I felt there was more benefit in letting the images speak for themselves."
Tom DiCillo blog 27 Dec 2008

But of course this fraudulent fool does nothing of the sort and simply trawls the same avenues that Stone does or Stephen Davis does putting his own spin on what we see or hear.
For example.....


Let's look closer at The Singer Bowl segment of the film.

Just before we get there we hear that ......
"Jim takes control of his own image He picks out his own clothes from the conch belt to the leather trousers Seemingly designed to accentuate his crotch"
cue footage of Jim having his knob felt by a fan whilst sitting in The Doors limo.....

“He understood exactly how to make it all work for him As if to protect himself he made it seem as if it didn’t matter”
This is hardly letting the footage speak for itself as how exactly did DiCillo know Jim was protecting himself by making it all seem not to matter?

As Jim wanders among the Singer Bowl fans DiCillo tells us.....
‘It’s hard to tell if he is simply mingling with his fans or if he is drawing something crucial from them as if he needs their attention to survive."
No it isn’t you fool he is simply mingling with his fans.

But then Tom has a reason for this comment which is part of his Doors = violence theme that pops up from time to time during this whole film.

He expands on his violence and Doors theme by elucidating on the reasons behind the Singer Bowl riot as he explains that ……
‘the Singer Bowl crowd is already worked up….Morrison stokes them further’….'and then 'someone throws a chair’…….
then he recounts that a photographer saw
‘Jim look directly at a young girl and grab his crotch her boyfriend picks up a chair’….according to the photographer Jeff Silverman "it was the FIRST chair to be thrown."

In other words Jim was so needy he needed to provoke a riot at the Singer Bowl to make his evening complete.
Read page 212 of Follow The Music for the complete Silverman tale. Jim is indeed rather insulting to the Hispanic girl and her very large boyfriend did indeed hurl a chair but How Silverman could have known that was the first is not explained and Silverman makes no mention of it being the first chair thrown when he recounts the tale for the Official Elektra History FTM.

Tom omits to mention why the audience was already in a high state of unrest even when the Who were on stage as the rotating stage had failed and a part of the audience could not see the bands and was rather pissed.
Ellen Sander (a soon to be missus of Jac Holzman) reported a good proportion of the audience couldn’t see and they were furious.
This was followed by an hour delay before The Doors get to take the stage due in part because the Who had insisted that none of The Doors equipment be on the stage and obstruct their performance and also due in part to the fact that The Who damaged some of the waiting Doors equipment during their instrument wrecking My Generation finale which resulted in repairs being needed and more delay.

Add to the mix the police presence that was hardly helping the situation with a disgruntled and sweaty audience and as a result there are many ways of looking at the Singer Bowl riot rather than just Jim Morrison started it all.
Yes it's true that Morrison used to read books on the behaviour of crowds and many times did deliberately try to exert a control over his audience. Pushing thier buttons.
But this film seeks to go further and associate The Doors with violence which is as stupid as trying to associate this band with hippies.
There was a dark element to The Doors but by veering off on this violence tangent DiCillo loses sight of the real heart of The Doors which is their art.
He spends too much time looking for the sensational iconic Doors (which of course did exist) and completely misses the point that this band changed the world of music forever.
The same mistake Granada TV made in 1968 and the same mistake Oliver Stone made in 1991.
Of course this would mean a film that could not draw in the gawkers and would only appeal to Doors fans and DiCillo lacked the courage to stand up and make THAT film instead just doing the same as everybody else..

Pete Townshend who leans heavily toward DiCillo argument said he was "fascinated and appalled" by Jim Morrisons behaviour that night and later immortalised the events in his song Sally Simpson which became part of Tommy.
He claimed that Morrison deliberately set out to create a riot but the elements for such a riot were well in advance before Morrison took the stage.
Whilst it’s true Jim did provoke the crowd but the crowd was probably well on the way to a riot anyway.

“As soon as The Doors appeared, they were greeted with a thunderous assault of screaming fans and segments of the crowd began rushing the stage. A column of policemen were stationed at the front of the platform to curtail this onrush of people, while Morrison fiercely jostled his way through them to face the crowd. The chaos escalated continuously during the performance, with fights erupting throughout the Singer Bowl. Morrison sang with a very precise and articulate emphasis on the lyrics, and actually appeared to be substantially more sober than the crowd he was facing.”
Greg Shaw Doors On The Road

"A good portion of the audience still couldn't see and they were furious. Crowds stormed the front of the stage and were turned back by the police. Some were trying to scale the stage and others cheered them on. Morrison spun around and ground the songs out halfheartedly, ad libbing, improvising, doing an ominous dance. Hysteria was building. Morrison shrieked, moaned, gyrated, and minced to the edge of the stage, hovering. Hands reached out and grabbed him and the cops had to pry them away. The camera crew ducked a piece of broken chair which came flying onto the stage. Morrison caught it and heaved it back into the crowd. The Doors were hardly visible from any angle because there were about twenty cops onstage."
Ellen Sander, Trips, New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1973

So that is NOT letting the images speak for themselves at all and DiCillo puts his own spin on events that had several reasons for occurring and could be explicated differently depending on your viewpoint.
But DiCillo was making a point about Violence and The Doors so he could not allow the footage to speak for itself and used the opportunity to expand on one of his themes of the documentary.


Morrison himself once said that 'Music inflames temperament' and this can be analysed in several ways. He may have been saying that music forms character in a person or gives them a personal strength of mind or a sense of spirit.
He may have just been saying it makes you bloody angry.
Music does indeed do all of this as anyone who has ever been to a rock concert will attest. Music did a lot to form the character of many of us here and is still forming that character of many youngsters who call themselves Doors fans.
It's a part of life and why I get annoyed by people like Tom DiCillo who claim one thing and do another when trying to explain music in general and my favourite band in particular.
Yes it's true that with this band it's hard to find complete agreement even between us the fans.
But his fraudulent piece of pseudo psychoanalysis of The Doors masquerading as the near definitive History of possibly the most interesting and intelligent rock band ever one of the worst examples of the phenomena.
The anti Stone movie we are told but it’s nothing of the sort.
Simply someone making a buck from a rather controversial subject and adding his own spin to the huge mix of spin already available.
No worse than many but certainly no better.
Judged harsher by me because of the background to the film rather than the film itself.


We can get an idea ourselves of the cut of Tom DiCillo film maker who wanted to let The Doors speak for themselves from his own blog.

"I read the entire transcript of the Miami trial where Jim was charged with felony for “exposing” himself. The testimony reads like a scene out of Kafka written by the Marx Bros." blog 27 Dec 2008
A pretty useful tool when wishing to tell the real Doors story......sarcasm again.

He claims from the same blog that he
"read every book and magazine article written about The Doors and found only in the rarest circumstances did any two people agree about anything."
Tried to do that myself mate and it's taken more than 30 years to really get near to it and I still find myself discovering new stuff all the time. And EVERY was a bit of a boast wasn't it mate?
Have you read Mike Jahn's book which gives an incredible feel of what The Doors were like in concert in 1968 or Stumbling Into Neon which is one of the few books to examine Jim as an artist rather than an icon....did you read Max Bell's excellent dozen or so page NME tribute to the band in 1981? I could go on.

DiCillo once again in his December 27th blog reveals that during his many meetings about WYS....

"Jeff Jampol, The Doors manager, co-ordinated all of these meetings. Some of this water runs deep with tricky currents; it clearly revealed Jampol’s extreme skill in navigation. He also provided some real insight into the band that helped form the film."
Jeff Jampol could not provide real insight into The Doors if you tied him to a chair and threatened to blow his nuts off with a shotgun.
And this statement for me the most telling of all that somehow the BRAND manager gave the film maker some kind of understanding of my favourite band.
Pretty much sums up WYS and the fraudulent nature of the film maker and his 'I wanted the footage to speak for itself' mantra to the media.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

2) Misrepresentations of Jim Morrison And The Doors

Tom apparently got 1965 mixed up with 1966 in some interview somewhere and someone pointed out quite rightly that dates do get mixed up in The Doors world and we should not get too upset if a date is out by a few days here and there.

Which I agree with as many Doors dates are in dispute non more than the date and month in which Ray and Jim met on the beach.
July is the accepted month but I have even seen June and August thrown in the mix.

We can argue about that kind of thing all day and we still will be none the wiser.
Not that we should not debate these dates as how else is knowledge advanced without debate and argument.

For me the film is not as such a fraudulent exercise because Tom got a few dates wrong, it goes much deeper than that.
It is the way the History of the Doors is disregarded as if it's not that important and the way Morrison is once again misrepresented to augment a point of view.
In this case DiCillo.

Examples of this litter the film but I will pick out a couple that I have touched on here already.

The New Haven incident which was a pretty Historical moment in the early days of The Doors career is well documented and easily accessible as far as research goes but DiCillo treats it with complete disregard for the facts and trivialises the whole event to make a cheap point about Morrison getting arrested on stage as an indication of his unreliability.

‘His FIRST on stage arrest had come early in New Haven’
But of course his second stage arrest is never mentioned, as it never happened.
But with that sentence his insinuates that Morrison was arrested on stage often so was unreliable and prone to upsetting authority…. a loose cannon so to speak.


We as Doors fans know the story well enough and DiCillo goes on to tell us that.

‘ In the middle of the FIRST song he stops and tells the audience what just happened’.
Which is not at all a true representation of what happened. We do not know if Jim intended to make his ‘little blue man’ rap as he walked on stage but we know he was angry at being maced and hassled for something so mundane that could have been dealt with by the police better. Perhaps this anger just festered during the first few songs and came to a head during WTMO and Jim decided to mention it to the audience.
The complete over reaction of the police not as such a response to Morrison but simply a response to young people with long hair who did not ‘respect’ their elders and betters anymore.
A sign of the times that’s all because the times they were indeed a changing and the young were beginning to think a lot more for themselves and authority like the police could not cope with that.
So they lashed out at Morrison.

DiCillo intersperses scenes of violence throughout his film as though in an attempt to link The Doors to violence.
Now I went to many a gig in the 70s and have seen a few scuffles at rock gigs and a few bands such as The Who cause an audience to become rather agitated.
I saw them nearly cause a riot in the Newcastle Odeon on November 5th 1973 when they were miming to the Quadrophenia tracks after not having time to rehearse them. It was the first show of the UK tour and Daltrey was singing but the rest were miming. Shit hit the fan when Moon was doing a drum part with no sticks after throwing them into the audience. We were not at all pleased and we said so. All hell broke loose.
The next night Townsend went on local TV and apologised and The Who mimed no more during that tour. But that incident did not mean The Who provoked violence and neither did The Doors. Were the Stones a violence-causing band? People died at their gigs.
Of course not. Shit happens. Thousands more people have been injured or died at football matches than rock gigs and football matches even today are way more unsafe places to be than a rock gig.

But the perception is there and DiCillo does feed on that. Unfairly in my opinion.

Yes they were a band that provoked emotion from an audience as their music was a bit more cerebral than the norm but to associate them with violence as DiCillo seemed to do was a misrepresentation.
Now I don’t claim it’s all DiCillo’s fault as there was an incident in 1972 which gives credence to the argument that the band were perceived as trouble causers. Much of this was due to venues trying to exert more control over bands at concerts so many Doors 'riot' stories were exaggerated to suit various agendas.

...............During the 1972 E Coast tour Atlanta Municipal Auditorium cancel a Doors show on March 9th. Using the 'International Auditorium and Arena Managers' group communiqué that states The Doors are a 'riot causing act' as an excuse to cancel the gig as The Doors 'provoke trouble'.......Atlanta repeats this on August 25th cancelling the gig at the same venue and even when it is pointed out to the manager that 'Jim Morrison' is in fact dead and that 'trouble' causing element would not be appearing the gig is still struck from the tour roster after the officials refer to Morrison’s legal issues..........

But I do believe he makes this a central theme of his film and overstates this aspects creating this perception that it was happening all the time. The same can be said about those who believe Morrison was constantly stoned or drunk. Yes these things happened but they did not happen all the time.
Morrison even in death was used in the same way when Doors fans were cited in the dispute between factions for control at Pere Lachaise in the last decade being tarnished as rampaging round the cemetery and scrawling graffitti everywhere. Which was a total fabrication in the 21st century.
True it had been done in the past but I have never seen or heard of it over the last 10 years. We were simply used as a way for one faction to gain control over another within the cemetery.
Result. A fence round the grave since 2003 and guards everywhere to prevent unruly fans wrecking the place.


Another example of the way he misrepresents Morrison occurs in the way he adds his own slant to the events on the screen. This from a man who was quoted often in interviews that he wanted to let the footage ‘speak for itself’ but he cannot resist twisting the footage to suit his own agenda.
Which as I have said is exactly what Oliver Stone is still attacked over 20 years later by Doors fans.
An example of this occurs during the Singer Bowl section as Morrison walks among fans chatting and looking at the programme for the evenings performance.
As Jim wanders among the Singer Bowl fans DiCillo tells us.....

‘It’s hard to tell if he is simply mingling with his fans or if he is drawing something crucial from them as if he needs their attention to survive."
How anybody can make such a ridiculous statement from something as inconsequential as standing talking to a bunch of fans is beyond me. The footage is crying out to say something but it’s not allowed by DiCillo who decides to speak for it.
To me this bit of footage says Morrison was a decent sort who was fine simply chatting to rock fans at a concert. It’s NOT hard to tell at all what is happening here.
There are numerous examples of Jim just talking to people. He used to phone fans at home who had written to the band and left a phone number and chat with them whilst sitting in the Doors office. He was very friendly with the local artists and poets. Nothing from any of this indicates he was some shallow inadequate who needed adulation to get through the day.

Then we get the violence again and the insinuation that Jim started the Singer Bowl riot which was simmering long before he took the stage.

Tom recounts that a photographer saw
‘Jim look directly at a young girl and grab his crotch her boyfriend picks up a chair’….according to the photographer Jeff Silverman "it was the FIRST chair to be thrown."

But Silverman does not say that. His account is featured in Follow The Music and he says the guy flung a chair it’s true but mentions nothing about it being the first as how could he know that in a hall that big. Maybe the guy saw chairs being flung and just picked one up and chucked it at Morrison because he was being an asshole to his girlfriend. We don't know exactly where the trouble kicked off or all the reasons behind it.
And neither does DiCillo.

Listen to the Singer Bowl audience recorded bootleg and you will hear the audience in that area getting agitated by people standing during the opening Back Door Man and screaming 'sit down you cunt' and 'sit down before I knock you down'.
Was that all because of Morrison?

Tensions were high because nobody could see for cops on the stage which was broken and did not revolve. people tried to move to a better view and were prevented by the police.
A camera crew had to avoid broken chairs thrown at the stage. Morrison threw one back into the crowd.
By 'The End' the audience is out of control and the band is forced to vacate the stage after the fans start to demolish all the seated areas.
Morrison seems unfazed by all this prompting Pete Townshend to write Sally Simpson about the incident.
But who was to blame. the stage , the Who, the Doors , the cops, the audience?

If anything Morrison tries to calm the audience which is there for all to hear during the Singer Bowl version of The End and in fact there is nothing on the tape to suggest that Morrison provoked the audience at all. Of course there are gaps on this hour long tape but listening to the existing evidence nothing untoward happens from a Morrison/Doors perspective.

The seeds of discontent had been sown long before The Doors got there as the audience was not in the best of moods during the Who set as the revolving stage had broken down.
There is no real evidence to blame Morrison for the trouble starting so why make out that was the case?
He did not help with his behaviour but there is absolutely NO evidence to suggest he was the primary cause of the trouble.
Of course Dicillo wanted to press the case for The Doors association with violence so he distorted the evidence and stated something as fact that was not remotely the case. In this way Myths get born. And Doors fans begin to believe that a distortion is in fact a truth.
The Doors are victims of many of these distortions.
Why then does the man charged with telling the real Doors story feel the need to add to them?
The true story is just as interesting as some made up bullshit. So why did Tom not concentrate on telling that?

This to me is way more important than getting a few dates wrong.
The Doors were no angels but WYS misrepresents that band cruelly and I for one take issue with it over that.
Scenes of political strife, Vietnam and trouble at the IOW festival were nothing whatsoever to do with The Doors but the perception is planted that The Doors equate to violence.

Stone was attacked for presenting his vision of Morrison and DiCillo does no different with his film. The only obvious difference was Stone made a movie and DiCillo a documentary. You don’t need to be a genius to figure out the difference between the two genres.
One deals in truth the other deals in entertainment.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

2) Misrepresentations of Jim Morrison

One of the things about this whole WYS debate that annoys me is the point of view put forward by a selection of Doors fans that this fraudulent film is now somehow aimed at new fans and possible converts.

It’s a view noted in the Official Doors forum and I have seen it cited in several discussions on the film including on DiCillo’s blog.

This film was promoted as the real Doors story from the outset.
Not as an introduction to The Doors of interest mainly to the casual fan.

It seems now that it has been rumbled, as just another Morrison documentary it’s defence is that it was only produced as a way for new fans to get a taster of The Doors.
This argument is as fraudulent as the film itself.
From day one this film was passed off as the anti Oliver Stone documentary.
The answer to all the ills Oliver Stone rakes up in his Hollywood movie.
The true story of The Doors.
You do not tell the real Doors story to people who are new to The Doors you tell it to people who are fans who have the level of interest to actually care.
This was never promoted as an introduction to The Doors.


‘It’s hard to tell if he is simply mingling with his fans or if he is drawing something crucial from them as if he needs their attention to survive." Tom DiCillo When You're Strange.

This was the snippet I want to use as a counter to Dicillo’s nonsense from Frank Lisciandro’s Feast Of Friends book talking to Babe Hill.

'I think he felt frustration that he had been born at the wrong time, that poets like himself….it was a wrong era for it. Like that thing we went to in San Diego….(a symposium of the arts bringing together poets, writers and film makers in the summer of 1969)….with Creeley and Brautigan and all these guys. And he’d look at them and say. ‘These guys aren’t known. I’m better known than these guys and they have more talent than I do. I look up to these people and nobody even knows them.’
Babe Hill making the point that Jim was trapped in a prison of his own device as when he was invited by poetry circles they were inviting him because of his name not because of his poetry. Hardly a description of someone desperate for attention but rather a humble man who knew his limitations and respected and attempted to learn from those who had far greater talent.

Of course Jim plied his trade as a rock singer and rock singers are larger than life but DiCillo’s very unfair assertion that Morrison needed the adulation shows his total lack of understanding regarding Morrison.
Of course he enjoyed the limelight that rock brought him. But he strived to be a poet and writer and was frustrated that the more fame he got the less chance he had of being remembered as a writer.
This is not the needyness that DiCillo portrays but simply the reluctant acceptance that his poetry will always take a back seat to his self imposed Lizard King image.

Another reason perhaps for Miami as it may well be no coincidence that Jim went into Sunset Sound on March 30th 1969 and recorded an hour of his poetry after all The Doors dates were cancelled.

POETRY AND PERSONA
As secretive as Jim was about his past he was even more guarded with his writings, never showing anyone but Pam the contents of his notebooks. And rarely did he read or recite a poem except on stage where his poetic gifts often went unappreciated by audiences waiting and expecting to hear a medley of The Doors greatest hits.
Frank Lisciandro A Feast Of Friends.

For someone in such desperate need for attention it seems odd that they would pile on the pounds, grow a beard and do their damnest to remove that very attention by alienating themselves from the audience they relied on for that attention.
A bit of decent research into the subject would reveal how totally fraudulent DiCillo’s slant on Morrison really was.
Morrison was a lot of things and not all of them deserving of respect but a pathetic inadequate desperately in need of the love of Doors fans was not one of them.

From the outset Morrison strived to be a poet. He never made it really but he tried very hard.
He fought against the LMF set at concerts by introducing poetry into songs and tried to get poetry onto Doors albums. Surely someone simply wanting adulation would have gone on stage in his best leather trousers and sang LMF with gusto.
Morrison did the opposite of what DiCillo insinuates by constantly introducing material into the early Doors sets that confronted his audience rather than pandered to their expectations.
True in the end he seems to have just given up as the concerts of 69/70 show with one or two exceptions.
But the idea Jim Morrison was desperate for attention shows how utterly abject the research Tom DiCillo carried out was.

I am no Morrison groupie but after reading about the bloke for nearly 40 years I have come away with a sense that the guy really was rather modest when it came to his talents and would rather be judged on what he wrote than on who he had become.
He tried hard to dissociate Jim Morrison rock star from his first poetry publication in 1970 and was in negotiation with Jac Holzman to record a proper poetry album which were hardly signs of someone seeking the attention and adulation of an audience.

In one silly sentence for me DiCillo negates any sense that the audience was watching a serious examination of The Doors and transforms his film into just another stupid Jim Morrison film. It’s a shame because the film promised so much and delivered so little. In the hands of a really talented director who could have seen beyond the hype we might well have been treated to a fitting assessment of The Doors for the 21st century and by association Jim Morrison.
Instead, in the hands of this fraudulent fool who spent more time sucking up to The Doors and Doors fans than actually attempting to find the heart of the subject he was making a documentary about and who fell back onto the same old tired clichés, instead of actually choosing the more difficult road of seeking out the real Historical story, we end up with this pile of 'Stone clone' Hollywoodish tripe.
For me the only person associated with this film who needed the attention of an audience to survive was the idiot who made the bloody thing in the first place.
The only pathetic inadequate I see in When You’re Strange is YOU Tom DiCillo.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Some snippets from the June 2010 Venice magazine interview with DiCillo with a couple of points worth further discussion.

There are still rooms unknown at the Morrison Hotel: Talking with Tom DiCillo about WHEN YOU'RE STRANGE - A FILM ABOUT THE DOORS
By Terry Keefe Currently appearing in this month's Venice Magazine.

Q. One reason why people might assume the footage is re-created is that it looks so contemporary, and so clean.

A. It is. You know why? He shot it on 35mm in 1969, and a week and a half before we committed to printing the film, we found access to the original negative. And to this day I don't know how it happened, because we were looking for it for two years. Somebody made a deal. Somebody made a deal is all I can tell you. And so what we used to have was this bleached-out print that we had, you know, it still looked good, but it was bleached-out, it had, you know, cuts in it, and they said, Tom, here's the original negative. And I said, 'Let's just make it look as if he just shot it.' You know, some people said to me, 'Why didn't you screw it up? Why didn't you deteriorate it?' or something. I said, 'No!'

Thats interesting as I thought the families would have had the original copies of HWY and either them or The Doors FOF. The HWY footage was indeed very nice to see in the film.
It would have been nicer to include the full film as an extra for the DVD.

Q. I didn’t know the story about Jim seriously quitting the band, Was that something that came out in conversation with the guys?

A. It came out, and, you know, I read Ray's book, John's book, I spoke to Robby, and spoke to a lot of people, and there was this conflict that was in him. And again, I will only say that, I speculated momentarily in the film. I didn't want to go down the road of speculation in this movie, which is why I left his death as simple as it was. Because, listen, it's not a story about Jim Morrison, it's a story about the band. And I had to make some decisions how to keep it that way, because you could certainly make an entire film just about Jim. But, you know, he did quit. He had a conflict. And what I was saying is that...it's an amazingly complex idea, but let me see if I can explain it simply. I'm not the first one to say this, but, you know, having witnessed, and kind of been interested in the effects of fame on people…..the thing about Morrison was that, I think, he never expected to be famous, or, like, craved it. I just think he was born for it, and it happened to him, and he happened to be perfectly ready for it when it hit him.

For someone not wanting to go down the road of speculation he sure made quite a number of speculative remarks about Morrison's motives which cannot be backed up with any evidence as the guy is dead. And as far as I could see pretty much the entire film was about Jim. Unless i actually wandered into the screening next door which just happened to be the Stone movie. I had been drinking.

Q. Right, right. You mentioned in the narration that the solitary writing life didn't have the same kick as being onstage.

A. It was an addiction, I mean, and how could it not be? You know, you get that kind of adulation from the world, and his was different, because he wasn’t a teeny-bopper. It was a whole different persona, one that people have emulated to this day

Once again for someone not wanting to go down the road of speculation he sure is speculating here. How do we know Morrison was addicted to fame? He certainly spent time wandering the writers path and grew bored with being a Door soon enough. Of course the fame would appeal to a young man in the 60s but there is no evidence to suggest Morrison was addicted to it. The evidence I have seen this last 40 years suggests the opposite to me.
A ridiculous comment from a ridiculous man who according to him, Morrison never expected fame nor craved it but was born for it and was addicted to it.
As you said Tom it was a complex idea and a rather speculative one as well.
So it's lucky you did not want to go down the road of speculation isn't it.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Japanese handbill

[adam]

i can't read this now, i'm quite drunk

but the tag line (from the doc) about unseen footage did amuse me, but to be fair perhaps "footage you've seen already but from a worse camera angle" wouldn't have had the same commercial impact ;-)

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

These comments from Frank Lisciandro during an internet interview add to the debate against this useless documentary.

As for Jim's drinking, Frank said:
"Hey, I don't try to paint a halo on the guy because he did do some crazy things, but he was also a warm and sensitive human being. Jim had a SENSATIONAL sense of humor. The guy was absolutely hilariously funny and he would make himself the butt of jokes. He had such humility that he could do that. That's the one thing that those of us who were his friends remember to this day.
"It's hard to look at the guy standing next to you at a bar, who's just downed his third beer and think of him as some sort of poetic genius. You tend to think of him as just another drunk asshole drinking beer with you [laughs]. And occasionally Jim would get drunk and boisterious in a bar, which would merely result in people saying, 'Shut-up, ya asshole,' because drunk and boisterious people in bars tend to act like assholes and Jim could certainly be like that every once in a while [laughs]. But he was not a violent person by any means. He would never bust up a bar. All those violent scenes in the Oliver Stone movie are total bullshit."

This is the sort of person DiCillo should have been talking to to get a feel for his subject not know nothing idiots like Jeff jampol and utter liars like Ray Manzarek.

2) Misrepresentations of Jim Morrison

During the film DiCillo focuses on violence throughout as if to insinuate that Doors concerts were war zones and Morrison not the kind of person to bump into in a dark alley.
His snarling Jimbo lunging violently towards the camera misrepresenting Jim as a bit of a dangerous character. Of course that was just Jim playfully larking with his mates during the FOF recordings. But to those who did not know that, this simple use of a piece of footage and the introduction of Jimbo at that point would tell a different tale.

NOHGOA has a lot to answer for.
Danny Sugerman takes a lot of stick for that book but the dark figure behind what would become the template for any retelling of the Morrison tale lies with Ray Manzarek who used Danny to big up Ray in the tale and promote Ray's vision of Morrison.
Of course Jim had a shitload of faults but Manzarek's lies 30 years ago have resulted in the archtypal Morrison as an insane drunk who caused chaos wherever he went.
Manzarek invented Jimbo to fill his own coffers and weak willed people like DiCillo did not have the cojones to fight his constant interference.
Because there can be no doubt Ray Manzarek's grubby little paw prints are all over WYS.

[casandra]

Waiting for the... film: my opinion about it (Some questions, few answers).

Two years waiting to see The Doors documentary. The definitive version, a fascinating insight into the band (at least so I thought it before seeing it), with unpublished images. Finally, The Doors documentary, my favorite band since more 25 years. I had read many reviews, positives and negatives. But it is best to judge for one self. I hadn’t wanted to see it on “Megavideo”. DiCillo had said that the documentary had been made for watching in theaters. Manzarek said in an interview that it was anti-Oliver Stone film. Densmore had been promoting it in Paris. Krieger had said that the documentary showed the "real" Jim Morrison...

In Spain it was released at the San Sebastian Festival in September 2009 and a festival of music documentaries named “In-edit” in Barcelona on October 2010. It is too far. Well, I’ll wait the release in Madrid.

I've seen it twice times at the cinema.

December 10, 2010. Opening day. I am going to the cinema after leaving work, I was excited...

The first time, I really want to enjoy the quality of the images. If I have to be aware of what Johny Depp is saying, mentally translating his words or reading subtitles, then I couldn’t notice anything. So this first time I concentrated my eyes on images and music. Johny Depp’s voice sounds like an annoying background hum, rather monotonous and boring.

The movie ends. Some images (few) I hadn’t seen and HWY scenes with good quality. I seem there are many images mixed up together. If DiCillo is trying a breakneck and quick pace I think he gets a feeling of dizziness. Why does DiCillo make an abusive use of cut and paste?

And the soundtrack, the most of the songs are cut. Well, at least one of the longer scenes is The Doors performance “When the music’s over” in Denmark 1968 (my favorite song and my favorite TV performance).

Being a music video there are too many cut scenes and music, but about this, the movie is worth it, but I'm not entirely convinced. I ask myself enough questions. I am going to watch it again, paying attention to the narrative. Perhaps the keys can be there.

December 12, 2010. I'm going to the cinema with a friend. He is also Doors fan, so we can discuss after watching it.

The conclusion after the movie: the story brings nothing new. Monotonous and superficial. Empty rhetoric. The images are serving DiCillo's theories. The film contains a subliminal language that I don’t know if it is the result of ignorance or is absolutely intentional.

This is not an anti-Oliver Stone film; this is the same old ideas about The Doors and Jim, but guiltier, because it took the advantage of the pseudo-objectivity of the documentary format and it's the official version about the band.

A Spanish critic wrote in a newspaper: "The sensual, hot and ever got high Morrison was a torture for those who surrounded him and for himself". I totally agree with him. This is the summary for anyone who hasn’t heard or read about The Doors before, after seeing the documentary. In the idyllic paradise of The Doorsland, a naughty and immature imp named Jim Morrison, spoiled it all. The common place: “Sex, Drugs and Rock’n’Roll”.

Following, I will talk here only about some questions you haven’t commented you up, Thewallssecreamedpoetry. About what you said I have nothing to add, as I agree.

“A frenetic trapeze artist in the circus of rock and roll”. (I think Johnny Depp says something like this). Original and ingenious sentence, but it means nothing.

“For Jim, obedience is suicide”. What does he mean with this? What is the connection between the military obedience and that Jim likes his freedom. His father was a general, but Jim wasn’t in the Army. One thing is saying he was a rebel and other linking obedience and suicide.

“He is a lonely, away from his band mates”. DiCillo doesn’t ask himself the reason. He blames Jim. The others guys were only silent witnesses and innocent victims of a situation that they seemed they were uncapables of understand it.

“Someone can’t burn if he wasn’t in fire” (something like this). What can I say about this?. A poetic and unoriginal sentence for explaining the match scene at the beginning and the end of the film.

Misrepresentations:

Why can we hear a snippet of the concert in Boston 1970 (“Do you want to see my genitals?” or something like this) when Depp is talking about Miami? For DiCillo, Jim was innocent or guilty? I’m not sure.

In the first pictures about Jim in Paris, why can we hear the song "Cars hiss by my window" as background music? It contains the line "A cold girl will kill you in a darkened room”. This may be intentional. Does he try to say anything but he doesn’t dare to say directly?. DiCillo said that he didn’t want to talk about Morrison’s death in the film.

And the last scene, the only piece of Jim's skin hadn’t been sold so far, finally it is exposed. In this scene we get to know one of the "unresolved" and "basic" questions of the film: What happened to Morrison's crotch…

“Which of my selves
Will be remember'd”

DiCillo definitely wants everyone remember Manzarek’s invention: Jimbo, the drunken clown.

My conclusion is: the narrative spoiled the movie. They would have saved much money without a narrator and so the images would really have spoken for themselves.

[casandra]

Only two additional comments to those I said above. I speak as I can remember the film, so I can’t write the exact words:

1. In a scene of the film a boy and a girl are sit down on grass in a field.
The boy says something like this: As I was saying before the cameraman came... She: What? The boy: I don’t know ... I don’t remember ... [laughs]
What does this scene mean? This is superflous.

2. Miami. In one scene of the trial, Depp says (more or less): "…is more than the fear of a jail in The Deep South, Jim realizes that he is not invincible". Did Jim think he was invincible? For DiCillo, he was an egocentric, as we have heard first, in the beginning of the documentary, and now we learn that Jim also thought he was invincible. This is an unfounded assertion, speculative nonsense.

A few minutes before or after (I'm not sure), Depp is speaking about the ruling of the trial, and he is saying: "Jim is who takes it worse” (or somethig like this). “Elementary, Mr. DiCillo” (I would say him). Jim was the convicted person, who would go to the jail. A jail isn’t a fun place (I think) and he was condemned for something he hadn’t made. He was concerned and even he could be angry and sad (as all of us would be like him in the same case). Many months and lawyers, for that issue. His friends and band mates, they could feel empathy, grief, being angry with the ruling, etc. but it wasn’t their problem. They wouldn't go to jail.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

DiCillo made a point to journalists that he would not indulge in speculation but as you say with your 'Jim thought himself invincible' point he speculates all the way through the film.
The portrait he paints is from the worst literature on the subject of Jim and The Doors.
His Jim Morrison more of a clown than the one in the Hollywood movie.
As you ably point out some of his scenes were utterly pointless and simply fillers to try to link The Doors with the hippy culture and the summer of love.
He fails to understand that The Doors were the absolute opposite of that hippy dreaming.
They were more realist than dreamers.
Their vision was dark, and brutal but contained a realism that bands like Airplane or It's A Beautiful Day could never envisage.
I liked West Coast music but it was very naive.
The Doors were frightening and had nothing in common with flower people.
DiCillo fails to grasp that and fails to grasp the complexity of the lead singer. All he does is sees the superficial T Shirt Jim and makes no attempt to look any deeper.
So he is in awe of the leather trousers and the Miami concert.
He did not see that the real Doors were almost non existent by
the time of Miami.
He never explored the band that dragged itself off Venice beach and utterly terrified America........ the once great group that described itself as Erotic Politicians....whatever the hell they were?
The most intersting period of The Doors and Jim Morrison was 1965 and 1966.
After that it was all downhill as the more success they gained the less they became of what The Doors intended themselves to be.

He spent too much time in Miami and not enough time trying to understand what shaped The Doors and their singer.
he went straight to the sensation and missed completely the sensational.
Everybody wants to get to the trials and arrests and drug binges with Morrison.
DiCillo made the silliest Doors documentary I have yet seen.
He never once really saw the man behind the leather trousers.

[casandra]

I agree, the film lacks a thorough examination about The Doors artistic vision (darkness, realism...). The Doors are absolutely differents the hippies and flower power. The Doors are the antithesis of "peace and love".

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Exactly!
The title he chose should have given him a clue but he did not have the brains to notice something so obvious.
He never sees the 'strangeness' of The Doors and simply portrays the greatest band that ever existed as 'just another LA Band' which they were so far from.

[casandra]

I'm not American, and certainly I can’t understand many things about U.S. at that time (or many things are happening now), but I believe, reading Norman Mailer's book "Armies of the Night", for example, anyone can understand a few how America was in 1967, which was Morrison view about that America and which was the place and the role of The Doors hold there, better than the jumble of pictures DiCillo’s film.