Doors documentary breaks on through

The opening scene of When You’re Strange: A Film About the Doors shows a wrecked car sitting at the bottom of an embankment near an empty desert highway.

Lizard King · When You’re Strange: A Film About the Doors uses archival footage with narration to tell the story of the ’60s rock band. - Photo courtesy of Rhino Media

A bearded Jim Morrison emerges unscathed from the pile of mangled metal and broken glass, stares into the sky and nonchalantly walks toward the two lanes above. Though caked in the dreamy gloss of original 35mm film, the shots look surprisingly modern, crisp and realistic — almost too much so.

Because the infamous Doors front man died nearly 40 years ago and the wandering hitchhiker images are a near-perfect accompaniment to the tortured poet’s tale, the audience is forced to question exactly whose piercing grey-blue eyes and cherubic cheekbones it is looking at.

“When this confusion started happening, we tried to ignore it,” said Tom DiCillo, the documentary’s writer and director, of the obscure Morrison footage. “We considered putting a disclaimer at the beginning, but then decided to just trust that when people see it, they will know they’re seeing the real deal.”

The footage — actually taken from Morrison’s 1969 self-financed experimental film HWY: An American Pastoral — is only a small portion of available-online-but-never-before-compiled images that DiCillo and the three still-living Doors members used for When You’re Strange, the first feature-length documentary to tell the real story of the Doors.

Unlike many of its contemporaries, such as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, the Doors’ filmography is relatively sparse. Immortalized in print through band member and groupie biographies, the story of Los Angeles’ first rockstars — and more specifically that of its erratic lead singer — has only been given the Hollywood treatment once before, in Oliver Stone’s 1991 biopic The Doors.

But while Val Kilmer played Morrison as a self-destructive egomaniac, When You’re Strange tells a more informed tale of a sensitive poet grappling with the temptations of fame and alcohol. It also gives the other band members their well overdue credit and places the Doors’ genre-defining sound within its late ’60s’ social and historical context.

“You get to see the ingredients in the melting pot,” drummer John Densmore said. “And you get to see Jim with a little bit of humor. Val did a great job — he should have won an Oscar — but to see the arc of the young Jim and then the tragedy as in Tom’s film, is more well-rounded.”

The film goes to great lengths to pinpoint moments in Morrison’s transformation, reiterating that he was a poet, not a singer, noting that for the first few shows he performed with his back to the audience as if he were at band practice.

Morrison’s magnetism permeates the film, and seeing him in motion offstage — as opposed to in the iconic stills that are most closely associated with the artist — provides an entirely new view of the singer. Morrison’s mellow demeanor and impish grins give realistic insight to the man who, despite a troubled soul, hypnotized a nation.

By mentioning but not stressing Morrison’s drinking binges, the film also eliminates any question of resentment from the remaining band members.

“Whatever you have to go through to get to the art, that’s the only thing that matters,” organist Ray Manzarek said. “We had a tough time with Jim during the latter part of his short life on the planet, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. He always came through. You just learn to live with the eccentricities of a poet.”

Rejecting the traditional rock-doc template of live footage interspersed with the reminisces of retired talking heads, DiCillo took input from those affiliated with the band and wrote his own informative narrative script.

Read in the final version of the film by unlikely Doors fan Johnny Depp, it floats over rare images and personal clips, telling the story of the Doors from when Morrison and Manzarek met as film students at UCLA through Morrison’s untimely death of heart failure in a Paris apartment.

“Johnny did a great job,“ Manzarek said. “He’s got that subtle understated quality about him that lends itself perfectly to narrating this whole Doors story. It’s not sensational, and it’s very decisive.”

In addition to the scenes from HWY, DiCillo used clips from the band’s 1969 concert film and also delved into the previously unpublished works of Paul Ferrera, Morrison and Manzarek’s old film school friend who spent time with the band on tour.

“We were used to them hanging around,” Densmore said, “and they had cameras, so it worked out. It was better than having something official.”

Ferrera’s footage was crucial to the creation of When You’re Strange because without his backstage perspectives of Morrison and the rest of the Doors, the film might not have been as successful in setting them apart from other bands attempting to use their music to speak to the socio-political issues of the time.

“In all the footage, there is never a shot of anyone — except for Jim once or twice — mugging for the camera,” DiCillo said. “Nobody mugs for the camera, and that gives you a sense of how intimate it was.”

Even though the archival scenes that comprise the documentary have been available since before Morrison’s death, it wasn’t until the band’s manager, Jeff Jampol, made a push to create something more significant that When You’re Strange came together.

“It’s not just about the footage, but it’s also the interpretation,“ Manzarek said. “It’s Dick Wolf and Tom DiCillo putting it all together into a cohesive form telling the story of the Doors.”

Despite the decades between the band’s heyday and the release of its first documentary, today’s uncertain political climate serves as an appropriate backdrop for a Doors resurgence. While its organ-infused borderline-psychedelic rock was a soundtrack to the late ’60s counterculture, our modern image-consumed society could learn a lot from the band’s philosophy.

“I think what the Doors represent is the antithesis of what is going on today,” DiCillo said. “There isn’t any sense of looking within. The entire right-wing agenda is about blindness. The Doors music says, ‘Listen in and open your eyes.’”