They were genuine 60s icons, musical visionaries and a whole lot more, but while everyone knows the myth, few know the real story of The Doors. At last, however, that story is being told in When You're Strange, the first, feature length documentary looking at one of America's most "dark and brooding” bands. In the lead up to its DVD and Blu-ray release in the UK on August 30, Juanita Appleby spent some time with founding member Ray Manzarek to talk about the film and also how The Doors’ music lives on.

Offering up only original footage – both unreleased and rarely seen as well as classic footage of the band in action at their peak – When You're Strange is directed by Tom DiCillo and narrated by Johnny Depp. The project also brought the remaining Doors together.

Ray Manzarek commented on his and remaining members’ involvement by saying, “All three Doors were supervisors and worked closely with the director on putting the film together. Making sure that it was good. You know, making sure it conformed to our high standards because we never compromise.”

Using footage shot between 1966 and 1971, When You’re Strange presents the band and 1960s America in a captivating way. The film opens a window into the band’s world of fame, drugs and alcohol but always returns to their fierce commitment to their music. Though Jim Morrison’s struggles and excesses shape the film, this is the story of Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore; musicians whose insistence on artistic freedom and refusal to compromise inspired generations.

For the casual and die-hard fan alike, Manzarek says “I think he will take away the understanding of The Doors as human beings… as artists… as poets. And not drunkards.

“Die-hard fans will take away the same thing. He will see The Doors as… behind the scenes! Never before seen behind the scenes! Back stage… in the dressing room… in the recording studio… things you’ve never seen before. Doors at play. Doors at work. Doors having sex. That’s the best part. Jim Morrison just having sex.”

Whilst that last bit might be a slight exaggeration, the film is already inspiring many to go out, buy instruments and make music. This is part and parcel of the sympathetic and fly-on-the-wall clips of The Doors during the creative process.

And that creative process survives through the continuing efforts of Manzarek and Krieger. Both founding members have admitted to “carrying on the legacy of the music”. In fact, they just finished up a US and European tour on July 20 with Michael Matijevic formally of Steelheart.

“Michael is doing a great job. He’s dark, brooding and mysterious. Cut from the same cloth as Jim Morrison. He’s doing a marvellous, bang up job of singing Doors songs,” says Manzarek.

This fascinating film offers a glimpse into one of the most acclaimed rock bands, captures their rock and roll lives to brilliant effect and will rock the UK on DVD and Blu-ray on 30 August 2010.

Source: RokPool.com

Fact is the music is strange. It is music for the different, the uninvited; it carries the listener into the shadowy world of dreaming.

—When You’re Strange: A Film About The Doors

With a rising sun illuminating the sky red and charcoal clouds floating to the sound of an ethereal hum, When You’re Strange, the latest cinematic glimpse into the world of The Doors, opens like a hazy morning dream.

As the camera comes into focus, viewers see a totaled vintage cruiser with the windows busted out. The car is on its side and coated with sand — Jim Morrison climbs out of the wreckage, gazing around at the desert highway surrounding him.

With a fur-collared jacket flung over his shoulder and his tousled long hair blowing in the desert wind, Morrison hitches a ride. However, moments later — as if in a dream — Morrison becomes the driver; the viewer, his passenger in a 1967 Shelby GT Mustang; “Love Man” by Otis Redding plays eerily on the radio.

Suddenly, there is a news report and Morrison turns up the volume, “We interrupt this broadcast to bring you a special bulletin. Rock music fans all over the world are in mourning today. Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, was found dead in his Paris apartment this morning.” The screen flashes with a montage of footage yet to come in When You’re Strange, except everything is in a quick rewind mode, and the viewer realizes they are now at the beginning of a very surreal ride.

As the highway footage of Morrison intertwines with the story of the counterculture rock band, the desert road the viewer drives along as his passenger becomes a cinematic metaphor for the journey of The Doors, with Morrison a ghostlike escort into their rock ’n’ roll past.

The suitably trippy effect is achieved through some pretty brilliant filmmaking by the rock-doc’s writer and director, Tom DiCillo. The opening and various desert highway scenes weaved within the film make the viewer feel as if they are watching something otherworldly, because it really is a youthful Morrison taking the audience on the ride (with all of the footage coming from his 1969 poetic filmmaking endeavor HWY: An American Pastoral).

Basically, DiCillio and Co. took the vintage recording, used modern technology to clean off the dust and spruce up the audio/visual quality, and then dubbed in the radio broadcast from the morning of Morrison’s death. Because of this filmmaking trickery, Morrison witnesses the announcement of his own demise while listening to the radio in the Shelby, thus resulting in an eerie, dreamlike perspective present throughout the film.

It is because of the remastered HWY footage, and the way it is used to move the rockumentary along and capture the essence of The Doors, that When You’re Strange is a must see for any fan of The Lizard King and his trio of multidimensional musicians. In addition to the HWY scenes, the entire rock-music tale is told through historic and never before seen footage captured on film during 1965 (when the band began to break on through musical barriers) and 1971 (when the music was over due to Morrison’s death); it features intimate moments caught during studio sessions, backstage gatherings, legendary onstage performances and random interviews from the ‘60s.

There are no “in hindsight” type of interviews with the still-living members of The Doors — Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore — or present-day interviews of any kind included in the film. Everything is told through the past and, after watching, you cannot help feeling as though you have just time traveled to the era of peace, love and bell bottoms — when anyone over 30 was the enemy and everyone questioned authority while wearing a flower in their hair.

However, while the film focuses a fair amount on the counterculture and the musical chemistry of the band as a whole, When You’re Strange is ultimately an in-depth study of one of America’s first and most iconic rock ’n’ roll stars.

Viewers meet the young Morrison who read Nietzsche and William Blake as a child, and follow him as he grows into a film student and poet attending UCLA, where he is introduced to Manzarek and eventually becomes the vocalist for The Doors. We watch him transform from a self-conscious singer, unable to face his audience during their first performance at the Whisky A Go-Go, to the attention hungry, charismatic front-man who would gyrate and flail in musical outbursts with the intensity of a television priest saving people with the holy ghost. “To Ray, he is like an ancient shaman leading his followers into worlds they’d never dare enter alone,” Johnny Depp, the narrator of the rock-doc, says as footage of Morrison’s drug possessed stage antics plays on the screen and is accompanied by a live sound recording of the song “Love Me Two Times” in the background.

“Morrison is both innocent and profane. He’s a rock ’n’ roll poet. Dangerous and highly intelligent—no one has had this exact combination before,” Depp tells the viewer.

As we see Morrison go from psychedelic-enlightened front-man to the debaucheries of drugs, which leads to his infamous problems with alcohol, there are definitely moments where the lackluster scriptwriting, in combination with Depp’s deadpan delivery, comes off almost worse than anything found in a VH1 Behind the Music special. However, there are insightful moments sprinkled throughout where the prose becomes metaphorical and inspired and, in my opinion, Depp delivers this material eloquently.

One example where DiCillo’s writing was compelling, is when he described the general vibe of the band by writing, “The organ carries a hint of the carnival; both childlike and darkly disturbing… it’s no accident their second album, Strange Days, features circus performers on the cover… but if the band has a surreal, fairground air, it is Morrison who is the frenzied trapeze artist.”

Ultimately, the film takes the viewer on a time-traveling journey and places them smack-in-the-middle of a late 1960s Doors’ show with thousands of wild fans, then it throws in a backstage pass, giving viewers access to the other side with intimate information about the band. When You’re Strange celebrates the music and the historical time period it mirrors while peering inside the consciousness of one artist before he slipped into forever unconsciousness.

When You're Strange features an amazing soundtrack with various live versions of songs from the band's catalog, sound bites from members of The Doors and some of Morrison's poetry. Also, the DVD has a special feature that includes an interview with Morrison's father, Admiral George C. Morrison, who until this film had never publicly discussed his son's life.

Uploaded by RhinoEntertainment on Feb 28, 2010

Source: Creative Loafing

The Doors, photographed in 1968.

A year or so ago, I grabbed a dog-eared copy of Danny Sugarman's No One Here Gets Out Alive that someone had left on a subway seat (apparently on purpose). For someone who had largely bypassed the Doors in my immersion in '60s rock as a teen, it was something of a revelation. Here, it seems, was a book praising an arrogant jerk for being an arrogant jerk, written by some dude in thrall of his arrogant jerk hero.

After years of hearing the Doors referred to as the most overrated band in rock and roll (and watching as Jimmy Guterman and Owen O'Donnell beat them up as often as possible in the pages of The Worst Rock N' Roll Records Of All Time), it was the final nail in their coffin for me. It convinced me that I wasn't missing anything by not caring one bit about the Doors. When I was done, I returned it to the subway from whence it came.

So that's where I was coming from when I watched When You're Strange: A Film About The Doors. It didn't change my opinion of them as a band, but it certainly gave me a better appreciation of the story, which is interesting, because director Tom DiCillo paints with a much broader brush than Sugarman.

Certainly, the inclusion of both audio and video footage of the band helps. But the movie's success may, ironically, stem from the fact that it doesn't get into more detail. The Doors' story is, in rough terms, a pretty compelling one: navy brat becomes bohemian artiste becomes countercultural pop pinup, freaks out establishment thanks to both intentional provocation and societal skittishness, sells buckets of records while simultaneously bumming its fans out and whipping them into a sexual frenzy, tweaks off even his closest mates with his pretentious egotism, dies young.

Where Sugarman goes wrong is in breathlessly filling in the blanks, all of them, every single one. He's trying to build a house, but he spends his time praising every brick. DiCillo, on the other hand, understands that pulling in too tight only reveals cracks that are invisible from a distance. It's a history that works better when told as an outline than as a full report.

Not that DiCillo (and Johnny Depp, on hand as the narrator) isn't interested in a little hero worship himself. He's just less effusive about it. That's not clear at the start, when we're treated to beyond-clichéd reenactment footage of a Morrison impersonator, bearded (of course) and driving through the desert (of course).

Only it's not a reenactment, despite how clear and modern the picture looks; it's footage from a film Morrison made called HWY: An American Pastoral, and that's really Morrison, doing all the things that would make him easy to parody in later years. (The audio, where a radio announcer intones news of Morrison's death, seems to have been dubbed in by DiCillo.) But it's him, anyway, which at least provides it with a degree of conceptual purity that counteracted my own initial cynicism. In its sneaky way, it set me up to better appreciate the film by knocking me down a peg or two first.

It also helps that DiCillo remembers that there were three other guys in the band who weren't just passengers in the Lizard King's wild ride. Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and (with an ever-changing array of unfortunate facial hair) John Densmore are all featured in period interviews, offering their own perspectives on the music they were making and the response that faced them when they'd try to make it. The fact that they explain what they do with less needling gusto than Morrison—though not, as is probably expected from members of the Doors, none at all—is certainly welcome.

Again, When You're Strange isn't an exhaustively researched movie. There are no modern-day interviews except in the DVD bonus features, and those only from Morrison's family. The most lauded has been the interview with Morrison's father, the late Admiral George S. Morrison, who had never spoken publicly about his son before. It's frankly a disappointment; four decades later, he doesn't have much to say beyond the fact that he didn't really understand the thing that Jim did, but he's impressed that he reached so many people with it.

There's nothing wrong with that, of course, except for the fact that the only present-day perspectives come from outside observers, rather than anybody who was actually involved. It's probably just as well, because DiCillo is ultimately more interested in explaining why the Doors mattered (and still matter) to folks like him than in what made them tick. It's still myth-making, to be sure, but on a much more human scale. 

Source: NPR (blog)

A documentary film charting the rise and fall of The Doors, one of the most controversial American rock bands of the 1960s, begins a short run at Shrewsbury’s Cinema in the Square today.

When You’re Strange tells the band’s story using archive footage, some of which has never been seen before.

It covers their origins in Los Angeles in the early 1960s to the death of lead singer Jim Morrison in Paris in 1971. 

Source: shropshirestar.com