The Great Lost Doors Movie Reveals ‘How Jim Really Was’
In 1968, the Doors decided to chronicle their life on the road and commissioned a crew to document their in-progress tour. The band would produce the project itself; singer Jim Morrison and keyboardist Ray Manzarek had met at UCLA’s film school, so they reached out to some of their old campus cohorts. “We had some of our film-school buddies follow us around and shoot,” says Doors guitarist Robby Krieger. “The idea was to make a documentary, a cinema verite kind of thing. [Jim and Ray] were all hot on the new kinds of movies that were coming out in the Sixties.” According to Krieger, Morrison wanted the project to be a free-form, anything-goes look at the group, onstage and off. “He would say, ‘The film is making itself.'”
Unfortunately, the film didn’t actually make itself — titled Feast of Friends, the project was abandoned, overbudget and, in the wake of Morrison’s 1969 arrest for indecent exposure in Miami, left unfinished. After a few festival screenings, the movie was shelved. It’s been bootlegged among Doors fans for years, and the band has used its footage as raw material for music videos and other projects. But it’s never seen a wide release — until now. A new DVD edition features footage dramatically cleaned up from its 16-mm source, and its 39 minutes have been augmented with 34 minutes of outtakes (plus a British documentary on the band from 1968). “It’s a document of a time,” says Doors drummer John Densmore.
The disc features the Doors doing an epic version of “The End,” with Morrison improvising part of his monologue based on a grasshopper he spots on the ground; the singer trying to fight his way through a wall of white-shirted security onstage in Cleveland so he can interact with the audience; the group recording “Wild Child” in the studio with producer Paul Rothchild; Krieger and Morrison improvising songs while hanging around backstage; the whole band doing ordinary activities like riding the monorail to the Space Needle in Seattle. “I hope that people who have seen the Oliver Stone movie see this one,” Krieger says, “so they’ll see how Jim really was.”