Love Her Madly

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Any of you seen it and what are your views........

Is Ray the new Hitchcock or just the new Ed Wood!?



Ray Manzarek
Love Her Madly
based on a story by Jim Morrison

"Love Her Madly is the feature film debut by legendary Doors co-founder and keyboardist, Ray Manzarek. Love Her Madly is set on and around the campus of the exclusive California College of the Arts. Directed by Ray Manzarek and scored to a soundtrack by The Doors and their descendants, Love Her Madly includes appearances by Ray Manzarek and essayist Michael McClure. At the film’s outset, an unidentified body draped by a blood-splattered sheet lays center stage in the school’s Greek Amphitheatre. The story unfolds in the days leading up to the murder. The five characters at the heart of this thriller/mystery are all artists: a dean of the college with a pedigree in all phases of the arts; a drama professor and former winner of the Pulitzer Prize; his two young protégés – a sculptor and a video artist; and the untamable actress who casts her hold upon all three men, but is held by none. The intrigue of tangled relationships offers ample reason for any of these characters to be suspected as either the perpetrator or the victim. It’s a whodunit in the finest film noir tradition."
from Eagle Vision Website

Like Ray's book PIE I was really looking forward to LHM....bought the DVD a packet of cashew nuts and sat down to watch it with a nice glass of coke.....
I have been watching movies for over 40 years and in that time I do not think I have ever see a WORSE example of the movie makers art......
a worthless excercise in induldgence...'Oh look at me I made a movie'... Your average ameoba could have done a better job......'direction'...useless...'script'...there was none...'acting ability'...what fucking acting ability!...
I could have hired a camera and found half a dozen cider drinkers from the back of MFI in Stockton and in 8 hours come up with a better movie.....
The DVD extras are cool so made it worthwhile and if you watch the load of toss with the commentary on it is very enjoyable as you don't have to listen to the crap dialogue nor follow the pathetic 'non-plot'....the surprise ending was nicked from Sidney Lumet who is a director of outstanding talent unlike Ray who has as much idea about making a 'film' as my left knacker

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Truly, 'Madly,' Deeply
Ray Manzarek pays tribute to Jim Morrison and realizes his own filmmaking dreams with 'Love Her Madly'

Somewhere in a parallel universe, Ray Manzarek is a lawyer instead of a rock icon. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone in this dimension who thinks we got the short end of the stick.

"Even my own mother and father told me, 'Raymond, we're glad you didn't become a lawyer,' which coming from my parents was like, holy cow!" says Manzarek.

Instead, he dropped out of law school at age 24 to enroll in UCLA's film school, where he met Jim Morrison. The pair recorded eight platinum albums and three platinum singles, but they never made a movie together in the seven years between that meeting and Morrison's death at age 27, leaving yet another of Manzarek's alternate-reality ambitions unfulfilled.

This one, however, has finally been realized with Love Her Madly, the film he directed that was selected for this year's Santa Cruz Film Fest. Manzarek will make an appearance with his film noir when it screens at the Rio on Friday, the festival's closing night.

In fact, Love Her Madly brings together Manzarek's musical and movie dreams. It's somewhat of a Morrison tribute, given that it's based on one of his short stories and offers new insight into the meaning of the Doors' hit by the same title.

"'Love Her Madly' is a love song, a hard-rocking love song about a femme fatale, who, 'Don't you love her as she's walking out the door/ all your love is gone,'" says Manzarek, breaking into the song's famously catchy words, as he speaks by phone from his home in Sebastapol. "It was always intended to be a part of a movie about my femme fatale, but I just didn't know it. It was always waiting there to be brought to life."

"Waiting to be brought to life" is how the three men in Love Her Madly view Hadley (Jennifer Lothrop), an exquisite femme fatale. after whom they all lust. Indeed, Hadley's boyfriend Gram (Richard Danielson), her videomaker friend Dills (T. J. Thyne) and her professor Gabriel (Madison Mason) all try to interpret her through their art, but only as they want her to be. Meanwhile, the equally artistic Hadley has other ideas of her own--a clash of wills that turns out to have fatal consequences.

Set on the campus of the California College of the Arts, Love Her Madly opens with the discovery of an unidentified corpse in the school's Greek amphitheater, then cuts back to cover the events of the previous 24 hours, revealing a web of intrigue that gives us plenty of reasons to believe that any one of the protagonists could have been the killer or the one to get killed.

"Men all try to shape women--and disaster befalls us," says Manzarek, who credits director Joseph von Sternberg (Blue Angel, Shanghai Express) for influencing him stylistically.

"I had a class with Joseph von Sternberg at UCLA, which changed my life, if not my attitude towards women, which has always been lustfully wonderfully beautiful, but in terms of style," he says.

Wonderful is also how Manzarek describes Lothrop, who he says was "huge fun to work with," despite the prima donna role that she had to portray.

"What's great about working with unknown actors is they don't bring any star ego trip to production," he says. "They simply love to work."

Work in Lothrop's case also included having to stand and be plastered as various molds and castings of her body were made-- a necessary step given that Hadley's boyfriend Gram supposedly has a studio filled with life-size sculptures, not to mention photos and drawings, of Hadley, who he has chosen as the only subject of his life's work.

Strange as literally getting actors plastered may sound, the weirdest part of the film for Manzarek was appearing as himself playing keyboard alongside Beat poet Michael McClure.

"For us to be performing at a club, as we have in real life, but while filming for a movie, left me wondering, 'Am I playing at a club with Michael or am I directing this movie?'" he says.

The hardest part, on the other hand, was the "much too short" 17-day shooting schedule.

"The upside was that the actors had the luxury of doing lots of takes since we were shooting digital, which only costs $20 an hour," says Manzarek, recalling that such luxuries were not possible back when he was in film school and using what he describes as " virtually indestructible 16 mm cameras, the same as were used in World War II."

"You could kill someone with one of those little cameras, consequently we were using them all the way up to 1960s," he jokes. Then suddenly that gets him thinking about how said cameras would make a great murder weapon in a film noir about film noir students making a film noir.

"I have a thousand ideas for movies in my head, plus novels and stories," says Manzarek. "And God, the music I still want to make would alone leave me with no time to tend to my garden and check out my tomatoes. But that's the wonderful thing about taking LSD. You find out that life is more than a series of events, failures and successes. You realize that the sun is out, and you've done what you've done."

Manzarek thinks Jim Morrison would be very disappointed with the state of America in 2004 and with the current war in Iraq. He himself has been booed onstage since 9/11 by people who don't like entertainers using their shows to tell Americans what they could or should do.

"Not that that's gonna stop me," he says. "Our direction should be love, peace, hope, beauty and tending the garden of America. Last week, I was onstage in New York playing "The Unknown Soldier" just like the Doors did in New York in '68, '69 and '70. It's ridiculous how similar the situation is. And then we have senators saying, 'They're more savage then we are, ergo, let's kill the motherfuckers!' So, it doesn't matter who Kerry is, because who the fuck wants Bush?"

By Sarah Phelan

Ray Manzarek performed at the Santa Cruz Film Festival's closing night after the 8:30pm, May 21,2004 screening of Love Her Madly at the Rio Theatre.


Ray with his adoring fans at Santa Cruz Film Festival


Ray and Dorothy


Ray as his usual shy withdrawn self




Crowd gathers outdside theatre betcha afterwards they wished they had been kidnapped by aliens and anally probed......

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Really odd that Ray has been surprisingly quiet about his film making since getting in the Z list limelight with his dork pals. Once again an attempt to cash in on Jim Morrison turns to shit like all the other get rich quick schemes His R$ayness comes up with....does this mean that we will be spared 'Riders On The Storm'..."a tale of a group of young college students who go into the desert and rip off Oliver Stones Doors movie"......
He tried being Keith Emerson and failed, he tried being Ernest Hemingway and failed and he tried being Alfred Hitchcock and it was a disaster. Now he's decided to become Jim Morrison and speak for the X-Box Generation with his pathetic nostalgia circus......as long as he leeches off The Doors he's OK but what the world will make of Cops Talk when it replaces The WASP .......I await with interest.
But looks like this marks the end of R$ay's foray into the world of cinema noir.......Tommy Cooper could have done a better job......

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

This was my review of the movie that appeared in Scorpywag shortly after its release. Michael White helpfully sent it to Ray himself but I never heard what His R$ayness thought....

‘Love Her Madly’ a film by Ray Manzarek.
With the rallying cry of ‘Lets make a movie’ Ray Manzarek led his cast and crew into an intense seventeen days of 20 hour shoots and using a backdrop of his beloved LA set out on digital camera a vision he envisaged from a bygone era of Venice Beach and his long gone friend Jim Morrison.
It’s just a pity all the actors in LA must have been of on their holidays. The movie starts by introducing the characters with a Ray Manzarek voice over which is so cheesy in the extreme its hard to watch the next 80 minutes.
The ‘plot’ revolves around three morons who think they are the epitome of artistic cool but actually are incredibly boring twats. The most useless being the professor who gets pissed a lot and talks bollocks around a bar table with the sculptor and the video geek. All three are obsessed with Hadley a so called ‘actress’ who spends most of the film with her tits out, probably to detract from the fact she could not act for toffee. Our three heroes all have their own sordid little tales to tell and all have their own reasons for ‘murder’.
For years many Doors fans have been debating whether Ray Manzarek could have done a better job than Oliver Stone on the Morrison Bio-Pic ‘The Doors’….now they have their 90 minute answer….No Way Jose!
You could argue that Ray has a masters degree in film and I failed CSE woodwork but this paltry effort is so lame that after an hour and a half your argument would be as useless as my attempts to make a lamp stand in 1971.
Ray uses every little movie trick he learned at school to astound us with his brilliance from jerky camera work, slo-mo, weird angles, moving from Black and White footage to colour, gloomy night shots, close ups and lots off shots of people walking past cool buildings and fountains along with some ducks who are probably among the films best actors.
The human ‘actors’ fill the screen with the full gamut of emotions from world weary to angst ridden but fail to portray anything more than how truly boring this film is. Supposedly based on an idea from some guy Ray met on a beach called Jim Morrison this tale of passion and revenge trundles along with lots of dramatic shouting and breaking things but is about as exciting and interesting to watch as the Xmas afternoon Queens Speech .
From listening to the commentary and the behind the scenes footage which are really rather interesting it seems like all involved had a lot of fun making this so-called film but quite honestly why they wasted 17 days of their lives is frankly beyond me. From time to time various extras (probably investors that wanted a line in the movie….as in an Ed Wood production) popped up to deliver pointless sentences that added nothing to the narrative but probably helped fill ninety minutes of film stock. Ed himself would have been proud of this movie which is so bad ‘Alan Smithee’ would have nothing to do with it and would probably insist it was credited to ‘Ray Manzarek’!!
Some scenes are of minor interest….Rays missus Dorothy appears in cameo as a member of the faculty voting to sack the piss head in a non speaking role and there are some unintentionally funny scenes with video geek and sleazy porno guy. Bits of this are nicked from several much better movies including one crucial part of the plot swiped from the excellent Sidney Lumet film Death Trap which had some real actors in it but sadly no ducks!.
The best sequence in the whole film has to be where Ray and Michael McClure appear as themselves performing at sculpy boys party in his bar/studio The Golden Bough (you can tell these people are artistes as they do not call their pub The Dog and Duck!) to promote his art….tickets were only $20.
During this little episode Michael gets the movies only decent line…. as after the show Hadley and video geek proceed to shout a lot and run around in the bedroom breaking things then notice sitting in the studio below, with the woman dean who has just sacked piss head…..yes it is that complicated!, Ray and Mike having an after show drink. Cue some more shouting then after they leave ….for some reason sculpy boy runs in all angst ridden and up the staircase.
Michael deadpan as you come and oblivious to all the intensity going on around him shouts up the stair to sculpy boy the eternal mantra of the artist…...
‘Hey man! When are we gonna get paid!!’ Priceless …..!!
Ray describes this as a whodunnit in the finest tradition of film noir but this idle boast is as empty as the script-writers talent. It starts with a murder and as we see a blood stained sheet covering the ‘mystery corpse’ we begin the truly dull 90 minute journey which ends with us not really giving a fuck who is under the sheet…...as long as it was not one of the ducks!!
All we wanna see is the end credits and hear Jim sing ‘Love Her Madly’.
To say this movie is ‘bad’ is pretty much understating it as it lurches from one truly dull set piece to the next. The tedious plot would have trouble holding the attention of a goldfish and the acting which includes a nasty bank manager cameo from the guy who played the older Private Ryan in Spielberg's WW2 romp is pretty abysmal. Madison Mason who plays the drunk Dennis Hopper look-alike is actually a respected TV/Movie and Stage actor and, apart from being the same age as Jim would have been today, has appeared in movies as diverse as last years ‘Red Dragon’, Kevin Costner’s ‘Thirteen Days’, ‘Dreamscape’ and ‘The Day After’ with Jason Robards. I doubt this on his CV will be of a great deal of help in getting him his next part! The rest are pretty much up-and-coming and unheard of and I doubt any of them will be making a big splash in 2003….. So is the movie truly that bad or am I just having a bad day as I type….no! Truly this must rank as one of the new centuries biggest stinkers and it’s hard to imagine many films over the next 97 years beating it. But hopefully the ducks will get more work as they stole the show and deserve another ‘gig’!……………..

[darkstar]

Friday, May 21, 2004
Metro Active Movies
Dr. Web's Domain

"Love Her Madly"

Truly, 'Madly,' Deeply
Ray Manzarek pays tribute to Jim Morrison and realizes his own filmmaking dreams with 'Love Her Madly'
By Sarah Phelan

Somewhere in a parallel universe, Ray Manzarek is a lawyer instead of a rock icon. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone in this dimension who thinks we got the short end of the stick.

"Even my own mother and father told me, 'Raymond, we're glad you didn't become a lawyer,' which coming from my parents was like, holy cow!" says Manzarek.

Instead, he dropped out of law school at age 24 to enroll in UCLA's film school, where he met Jim Morrison. The pair recorded eight platinum albums and three platinum singles, but they never made a movie together in the seven years between that meeting and Morrison's death at age 27, leaving yet another of Manzarek's alternate-reality ambitions unfulfilled.

This one, however, has finally been realized with Love Her Madly, the film he directed that was selected for this year's Santa Cruz Film Fest. Manzarek will make an appearance with his film noir when it screens at the Rio on Friday, the festival's closing night.

drweb.typepad.com/dwdomain/2004/05/metroactive_mov.html

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

go to
www.doorsinnercircle.net/
and look in the Video file for the Ray tour of Venice Beach and the McClure Manzarek bit......awesome stuff....

[ensenada]

well stu lent me the dvd recently and i watched it last night. i watched the tour of venice first as stu said it was pretty good..and i agree it is a good dvd extra. you get to see the various doorsey locations...such as where they met on the beach and where ray, dorothy and jim used to live for a brief period.
ray makes me fuckin laugh though...he is so corny....he always has to get them fuckin lines in...when talking about a bar in venice he comes out with the usual "a bar were you can plan a murder or start a religion"

the film itself is crap to be fair....the camera work looks amateurish and of shite quality and the script is lame...i have a lot of fondess for ray cos he makes me laugh (at him not with ) but he couldnt direct his way out of a paper bag. maybe he could have achieved a better "looking" film with a higher budget. but still the plot is predictable and hardly gets you excited.

i figured it was the professor after a short period...he was the only one who had the motive to kill anyone...especially when the dean finds he is a fraud and has the evidence.....everything else just seemed superflous.

my rating....

Bag o Shite....thanks for letting me borrow it stu!

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Bag O Shite is up there with the better reviews mate......

here is what I posted on the IMDb movie site which is the biggest movie info site there is on the net.....

atrocious attempt at a movie!, 20 November 2005

Author: alex (doorsscorpywag) from United Kingdom


Ray Manzarek is a legend of the keyboards and has a Masters degree in film from UCLA but its interesting to note that he is still more famous for Light My Fire than Love Her Madly..... Truly the worst movie I have sat and watched in 45 years of watching film..... it makes Plan 9 from Outer space seem like an interesting movie....... a waste of 90 minutes of the life of anyone watching..... so utterly abysmal that it has to be seen to be believed that a group of people would spend 17 days of their lives and turn out such utter dross.... the acting is dismal, script total drivel with the end bit nicked from Sidney Lumets DeathTrap and worst of all.....it was actually shown in a cinema.... ....and I am believe it or not a huge Doors fan!

If anyone has not seen it yet it is a must as only after watching it will you then know what a load of bollocks the argument that Ray Manzarek could have made a better flick of The Doors than Olly Stone.......He would have trouble doing a better job than a blind chimp that had fallen into a coma on the opening day of the shoot!!

[ensenada]

[stuart]

ensenada said:

well stu lent me the dvd recently and i watched it last night. i watched the tour of venice first as stu said it was pretty good..and i agree it is a good dvd extra. you get to see the various doorsey locations...such as where they met on the beach and where ray, dorothy and jim used to live for a brief period.
ray makes me fuckin laugh though...he is so corny....he always has to get them fuckin lines in...when talking about a bar in venice he comes out with the usual "a bar were you can plan a murder or start a religion"

the film itself is crap to be fair....the camera work looks amateurish and of shite quality and the script is lame...i have a lot of fondess for ray cos he makes me laugh (at him not with ) but he couldnt direct his way out of a paper bag. maybe he could have achieved a better "looking" film with a higher budget. but still the plot is predictable and hardly gets you excited.

i figured it was the professor after a short period...he was the only one who had the motive to kill anyone...especially when the dean finds he is a fraud and has the evidence.....everything else just seemed superflous.

my rating....

Bag o Shite....thanks for letting me borrow it stu!

No Problem Mate

[darkstar]

The Internet Movie Database lists the names of the producers for "Love Her Madly." One interesting name who is listed as a "co-producer" is Alan S. Goldman. Mr Goldman has no other movie credits other than "Love Her Madly" listed on the IMDB.

Most interesting is the fact that Alan S. Goldman, C.P.A. testified on behalf of defendants, Manzarek and Krieger in Los Angeles Superior Court on September 16, 2005. Alan S. Goldman is also responsible for a Declaration of Manzarek and Kriegers accounting figures to the court on August 12 2005.

One question comes to mind as co-producer one would assume that it was Mr Goldman's money that helped finance the "Love Her Madly" project but then again Mr Goldman is Ray Manzareks' accountant so I wonder whos money really co-produced this film?

Source: www.imdb.com/title/tt0215941/fullcredits#writers

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

darkstar said:

The Internet Movie Database lists the names of the producers for "Love Her Madly." One interesting name who is listed as a "co-producer" is Alan S. Goldman. Mr Goldman has no other movie credits other than "Love Her Madly" listed on the IMDB.

Most interesting is the fact that Alan S. Goldman, C.P.A. testified on behalf of defendants, Manzarek and Krieger in Los Angeles Superior Court on September 16, 2005. Alan S. Goldman is also responsible for a Declaration of Manzarek and Kriegers accounting figures to the court on August 12 2005.

One question comes to mind as co-producer one would assume that it was Mr Goldman's money that helped finance the "Love Her Madly" project but then again Mr Goldman is Ray Manzareks' accountant so I wonder whos money really co-produced this film?

Source: www.imdb.com/title/tt0215941/fullcredits#writers

Anyone who sank one cent into this sorry ass excuse for a film would surely be regretting it which is why we saw a recent admission by his webamster that Riders On the Storm (his follow up film) will not be making an appearance.....bit of a shock that as I was looking 4wd to that one...
Maybe his follow up book Snake Moon (written by another producer of LHM but being touted under Rays name) will have a similar fate......

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Love Her Madly
A review of the NYC film premiere as part of the
New York Independent Film & Video Festival
Clearview Cinemas, 239 East 59th Street, NYC
September 27, 2002

Love Her Madly made its NYC premiere as part of the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival which was a big second fiddle to the New York Film Festival that just so happened to take place during the same week. I’m not too sure if this was coincidental or not.

Before the film began, Ray was introduced by the show's producers and gave an intro to what Love Her Madly was about. He stressed that it was a film noir and that the basis of it, three friends in pursuit of the same woman on a college campus, was actually suggested by Jim Morrison way back when. He also based the character of the sculptor on Morrison as well.

The film opened up to some cheesy organ sounds that were distinctly Manzarek and coalesced into a trance-like hypnotic jumbled glob of sounds and beats. It worked well unto the films' opening scene of a TV reporter at the scene of a bloody crime on the 6 o’clock news. The rest of the film worked itself backwards in time to the three gents and their relationship with the blond bombshell.

The aspiring actress’s relationship with the sculpture, a college professor and a video artist forms the basis of the film. How they all manipulate each other gives us the tension in this very tangled web.

The sculptor who is also a coffee shop owner is madly possessive of the woman. The college professor is a cocaine snorting, washed up, womanizing lout who is in jeopardy of losing his tenured position and being exposed for plagiarizing a work he received a Pulitzer prize for by his former lover and administrator at the college.

The videographer needs to raise some fast cash to pay back a loan after his bank discovers that he obtained the monies under a fake identity. He decides to do so by filming the woman in suggestive poses, and selling the images on the web without her consent to a horny fat guy.

The film’s subplots entangle and entwine off other at the sculptor’s opening art show where Ray Manzarek and Michael McClure are doing their spoken word/piano duo. The girl doesn’t show, the professor doesn’t show and the profits from the evening’s entertainment are pilfered by the videographer. The three men meet on a street corner, two giving chase on foot in suburban L.A. with one on a motorcycle holding an old fashioned barbers razor blade for the grand finale. Wheels slide, bodies crash, heads rumble, a gun bounds across the pavement and the blade ends up in someone’s hand.

The ending is unexpected and brings cheesy film noir to another level. It’s peppered with fluffy prose that is distinctly Ray, dramatic and corny at times but ironically cheeky too. The characters play off each other like stereotypical baboons. The cocaine guzzling professor on one hand, the dire, romantic sculptor and the preppy videographer give us a good cross section of generational stereotypes to poke fun at.

At the end of the film "Love Her Madly" played over the screen credits and the crowd clapped.

After the film Ray took on questions from the audience in a well mannered, affable, funny and humorous way with the screenplay writer that highlighted the following:

-the film cost $300,000 to make

-Ray financed the film

-it took 17 days to film

-it was filmed digitally

-it will be coming out on DVD in November with outtakes and a tour of Venice Beach with Ray detailing Doors sites

-a film based on "Riders on the Storm" is currently being worked on

-the entire cast is made of SAG actors and they were all paid well for their efforts

Someone asked how it felt when filming was completed and Ray chimed with a smile "Like a good fuck". Ray and Dorothy hung afterwards and talked to all.

Like a good fuck this film left you wanting more. Thanks Ray !!!!
by Glyn Emmerson, NYC