HWY An American Pastoral

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HWY An American Pastoral 1969

Jim Morrison's HWY Film is an exercise in ego for someone who once burned bright but was now pretty much yesterday's news.

Jim, as did Ray, suffered from the delusion that he was in any way capable of making a film.
HWY puts that to bed for all time.
Without doubt a terminally boring wankfest for Jim Morrison who had recently overseen a documentary of his band that had bled money until the rest of the band put an end to it.

Of course for a Doors fan it is a fascinating window into the mind of the bands lead singer.
But even they have limits.
I remember the first time I viewed a pretty poor copy that even that fandom could not drag me to the finish line and I had to really struggle to get to the end.
Better quality copies appeared over the years but still they were hard to watch for nearly an hour.

So is it any good?
No it is pretty abysmal if you remove Jim from the equation.
Endless scenes of him hitchhiking, driving a car, swimming, walking, looking at things, smoking in a gas station and finally in LA telling Mike McClure he had killed someone.
True it has some lovely scenery and is well photographed but it is a dull ride that gets duller by the minute until you are overwhelmed in dullness and no longer care who the hitchhiker is or what he did to get there.


Jim once said to Babe Hill at a San Francisco poetry awards that he was only there because he was a Door.
The same can be said about this.

Anyhow lets have a look at Jim Morrison's film rendition of his Hitchhiker Screenplay.



Jim forms HWY Productions in March of 1969 specifically to produce the film and enlists the Feast Of Friends crew Paul Ferrara, Frank Lisciandro & Babe Hill.
The film is shot in and across the LA area as 35mm colour footage and based on the short Hitchhiker screenplay.
The idea was to help Jim develop directing and acting skills but in reality went nowhere and was more a vanity project and like FOF unwatchable if you were not a Doors fan.
The soundtrack was composed by Paul and Georgia Ferrara who were a lot less talented than they thought and it is mediocre at best..
Obviously he did not want to use his own compositions as a soundtrack but such a thing may have livened it up a tad or so



One interesting aspect is we get to see the famous 'Blue Lady' Morrison's Mustang which is one of the few plusses attached to this mess.



Outside of a few film festivals, who were more interested in the star than the actual film, it was pretty well anonymous and only an idiot would have contemplated giving it a run in a cinema.
Even today one would have to be mental to release this as a stand alone DVD/BluRay as even Doors fans would baulk at paying even a tenner for 50 minutes of tedious boredom.
Yes it has Jim in it but....that's it really.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Back in 2002 when I first got to see this I did have a slightly better view of HWY than I do today after watching it probably 4 times with
better quality each time.
Nowadays there is a pretty decent pirate DVD doing the rounds but the high quality version the families control has been seen by fans only a handful of times at events like
the Paris 2001 bash

An old Doors4Scorpywag review of mine from 2002.


HWY or Hiway began life as Jim's Hitchhiker screenplay

The Hitchhiker: Look, I don't know how to tell you this, but... I killed a guy.


‘HWY’ an American Pastoral.

At long last I was able to check out Jim Morrison’s only surviving attempt at film-making for myself and rather intrigued I was!
No truly sane person can describe Jim’s movie as brilliant because it isn’t anything of the sort but to a Doors fan it is an invaluable glimpse into the mind of James Douglas Morrison poet/filmmaker/artist extraordinaire.
Beginning enigmatically with Jim taking a swim in some desert rock-pool to the strains of some weird
Indian/Beatnik soundtrack nothing much happens for quite a while as our hero just wanders about seemingly aimlessly taking in the atmosphere and putting some clothes on then he decides to hitch a lift...without a lot of success it seems...
It’s certainly no big surprise that nobody seems to want to pick the guy up as with his beard and unkempt look he seems the epitome of every Hollywood movie ever made with a scary hitchhiker.

“The Hitchhiker
Stood by the side of the road
And levelled his thumb
In the calm calculus of reason.”

It’s nearly ten minutes before we get any dialogue but when it comes it is worth waiting for. Jim expands on the ‘Indians lying bleeding by the side of the road’ we are all so familiar with….. “I had the feeling when that happened, like I didn't want to look back, like a child, like a flower whose head is just floating in the breeze man. But the reaction I get now thinking back... is that, possibly, the soul of one of these Indians, maybe several of them, just ran over and just jumped into my fucking brain.”
..One of the more interesting things the movie gives us a glimpse of is how natural Jim was in front of a camera. His matador routine in and out of the cars that pass by and ignore this celebrity hitcher just one of the numerous excellent moments of Morrison ad-lib...wonder if any of the drivers ever found out how close they came to meeting Jim Morrison?

“And all of a sudden I just realised that...ah...they were just little, screaming creeps in the face of reality. And that they didn't know what was happening anymore than I did. That was the first time I tasted fear.”

Eventually someone is insane enough to pick up the hitcher (even if it is one of his mates!) and this is when the movie takes a left turn into ‘Twilight Zone’ territory.
Suddenly Jim is driving leaving us to ask what the hell happened to the original driver?
Very spooky!!

As we trundle along on our journey to ‘who knows where’ we stop for a while at a gas station where our ‘hero’ checks out the paperbacks and has a fag on the forecourt which is pretty dumb! Then continuing his journey, screaming insanely as he drives along, stops to check out an injured dog lying on the side of the road and taking a break chats and dances with some kids.
Rather bizarre sequence of events and without a narrative it is not possible to glean much of what actually is happening which is what Morrison probably intended leaving the actual story to the imagination of whoever was watching his movie.

The movie is similar in feel to the South African horror road movie ‘Dust Devil’ and one has to wonder whether the director had seen HWY? Jim’s character does become rather creepy as the film rolls along and as we enter the outskirts of the city it’s hard to know what to make of him until the final few moments tell their own chilling story.

One interesting image that is featured as we enter the city is of Clara’s Café and one wonders whether this was deliberate or a mere coincidence. (Jim’s mom was Clara) Was he missing his mom? We get some cool images of the ‘City of Night’ including famous Doors haunt The Phone Booth and Room 32 at The Alta Cienaga Hotel with Jim taking a piss.
Wanting to confess, our ‘hero’ then finds a darkly lit phone in a gloomy alley and confronts some poor soul with the tale of his misdeeds (actually poet Mike McClure who really thought Jim had killed someone)

“Hi. How ya doin’? I just got back into town. LA.
I was out in the desert for awhile.
Hey listen man. I really got a problem.
When I was out on the desert, ya know. I don’t know how to tell you, but, ah, I killed somebody!”

Jim delivers his spiel so matter of factly and deadpan it is little wonder Michael was so taken in. Luckily Jim and his friends called him back to explain they were only making a movie or Lord knows what might have been the consequences.
Morrison arrested for murder and police combing the desert for a non existent body!! Very surreal!

So finally we learn just who the hitchhiker really is. For a while he gives an almost Jesus like impression only for us to find out he is in fact Satan. Cool! Then the killer wanders off into the darkness of the LA night to annoy the ‘straight’ folks and the film fades out with what else but a storm...

So is the movie any good? Not really it’s too fragmented and for most of the time goes nowhere of interest. But is the movie a worthwhile exercise for a Doors fan? Hell yes. It’s a brilliant look into Morrison's mind to a neat bluesy soundtrack with a sprinkling of Airplane/Sinatra. Check it out.


Scorpywag Doors fanzine September 2002 AP.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

10 Weird Films Directed By Famous Musicians

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[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

"It was more of an exercise for me and a warm-up for something bigger. It’s more poetic." - Jim Morrison on his film HWY
In April of 1969, filming for Jim Morrison’s film HWY: AN AMERICAN PASTORAL began in the Mojave Desert.



Howard Smith for Village Voice November 1970

JM: Oh, I did do one thing. I, I just completed a short feature movie, 35 mm, in color, called HWY, H - W - Y, with a few friends of mine and we got the first (inaudible) print the day before yesterday and it should be, should be ready next week. I think it's quite good too. It's about 60 minutes long.

HS: What's it about?

JM: Essentially, there's no plot, no story in the traditional sense; a person, played by me, comes down out of the mountains and hitchhikes his way through the desert into a modern city, which happened to be L.A., and that's where it ends. It's a very beautiful film.

HS: Mmm. You were just in it, or were you ... What else did you do with it, anything?

JM: There were four guys who made it, me and three other guys and we all just kind of made it together. It started out, I had an idea for a film about a hitchhiker who becomes a mass murderer, you know, the kind of thing that happens every year or so. Kind of like this zodiac character, you know, except, you know, Stark Weather and Billy Cook, in, it happens every couple of years and so, we went out in the desert to start shooting it - while we were out there, the film took over and just went in it's own direction and became something a little different, and the only thing that was ... you know, that was left from the original idea was the idea of a hitchhiker.

HS: Do you like appearing in films?

JM: The only reason I did it, to tell you the truth, is because I couldn't think of anyone else to do it, you know, and it was just as easy for me to do it. I might do some films. I don't know. I'm not that crazy about being an actor, I'd rather be a director or a writer, something like that, but you know, if I had a chance, I'd probably do a few films. Why not? Shakespeare was an actor, when he first came to London, you know...

HS: Are you gonna be writing films though? You have anything in the works?

JM: Mmm, yeah, probably the ... If I do anything in films, it will probably be this script called Saint Nicholas, that Michael McClure and I wrote, based on his novel The Adept, which hasn't been published yet. It's a contemporary story about a couple of dope dealers that go to the desert to make a score and if I, if I do anything, that'll probably be the first project.

HS: Are you gonna appear in it also?

JM: Mm hmm, probably...

HS: It sort of sounds like the beginning of Easy Rider...

JM: Yeah, I know, but there's nothing I can do about it. This, this story was written before Easy Rider was made, you know, and it's just superficial similarities. It's ... I know people are gonna, you know, call attention to that, you know, but I don't know what to do about it, you know. It's, it's very similar to Easy Rider, you know, in its superficial aspects. Do you know, I read in Daily Variety yesterday, you know, Easy Rider was made for about $385,000 dollars and the estimated gross, so far ... '50 to 60 million dollars', he said, in a religious, hushed tone... '50 to 60 million dollars, that's quite a profit margin, m'dear...'