Jim Morrison: Back to the Sixties, Darkly : The storm still swirls around a generation’s ultimate bad boy as Oliver Stone prepares to bring his story to the screen
Nearly 20 years after his death, Jim Morrison–enigmatic lead singer of the Doors–is headed for a theater near you. It hasn’t been an easy resurrection.
Like Morrison himself, the journey of his life story to the screen has been dark, troubled and complicated.
A decade-long quest, it’s been dominated by furious disagreements between the three surviving Doors and members of the Morrison estate. Some of the fighting centered on the controversial Morrison biography, “No One Here Gets Out Alive”–which the estate detests. It wasn’t until legendary rock impresario Bill Graham entered the fray in 1985, acting as a kind of mediator for the Morrison estate, that all the necessary dramatic rights were acquired.
Throughout the battles and beyond, projects were announced and unannounced. There were meetings with a slew of top producers, directors and actors. Several studios were involved.
Ultimately, the project made its way to film maker Oliver Stone, who was a soldier in Vietnam when he first heard the Doors’ music. “It blew me away,” remembered Stone, who maintains that “on the broadest possible level, Jimmy Morrison’s story represents themes of seeking a new consciousness and new levels of freedom.” Stone is now readying the yet-untitled “Doors Project” for a March start date for Carolco Pictures.
It may seem odd that Stone, the industry’s best-known Vietnam veteran, is writing and directing a movie about a group that represented the ‘60s radical movement that embraced everyone from war protesters to draft dodgers. As it turns out, Stone–whose wartime experiences inspired the Academy Award-winning “Platoon” (1986)–sees Morrison as a soldier who traversed the frontiers of the mind, for the sake of art.
“In his own way, he was very much on the front line. He was a warrior,” Stone said. “He was an outlaw rebel pushing at boundaries. A searcher who wrote about sex and death, two things any guy who’d been in Vietnam could relate to.”
The Morrison project garnered a certain cachet when Stone came aboard. It doesn’t hurt that his recently released “Born on the Fourth of July,” about a disabled Vietnam vet’s homecoming, is being touted as one of the front-runners in this year’s Academy Award race.
Still, the Morrison movie remains a filmic mine field, with obstacles including:
* The downbeat grittiness of the subject matter–including Morrison’s drug- and alcohol-induced exploits, his physical deterioration shortly after attaining stardom and his still-mysterious death of a heart attack at age 27 in 1971.