“It was ridiculous”: The Doors project Ray Manzarek was ashamed of
Capturing the spirit of a legend is a hard task.
Even for people who actually knew them, it can be difficult to separate the real person from the towering reputation that surrounds them. That may be why there has arguably never been a truly accurate retelling of the story of The Doors.
To highlight that point, let’s turn to two literary icons: Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. Sitting on the opposite side of the spectrum when it comes to their writing style, Didion was a journalist first, while Babitz was essentially a diarist, writing deeply personal stories from her days embedded in the Los Angeles scene.
In the late 1960s, the pair were both invited to the same recording session to watch the band finish their album. Didion wrote of the scene as panicked yet also somehow boring. “There was a sense that no one was going to leave the room, ever. It would be some weeks before The Doors finished recording this album. I did not see it through,” she said, abandoning post as she found the band tired, like caricatures of rock and roll.
Babitz, on the other hand, wrote about Jim Morrison as a figure of depth and fascination, seeing his childhood as a fat kid as the key to everything that came after. Babitz wrote of him with tenderness, Didion wrote of him with curiosity yet a little disdain – both accounts of the same day are wildly different.
Is there ever such a thing as accuracy in art, though? When a real story is put in the hands of someone else to present through their art, does it cease to be real under their interpretation?
Ray Manzarek likely would have said yes after seeing The Doors, Oliver Stone’s biopic about the band. “I didn’t like it,” he told Steve Newton plainly in 2005. To him, and to the other surviving members of the band, the movie felt like a mockery, but in particular, it felt like a cruel mockery of Morrison.
“He should be ashamed of himself. Too sensationalistic. Too jivey. Jim with a bottle all the time. It was ridiculous,” Manzarek said to Gary James, not holding back when it came to his thoughts on the film. In his eyes, Stone hadn’t captured the artist at all. Instead, he’d made a movie about an insufferable drunk and an annoying addict, stripping away the reality of Morrison as a full and complex person to instead focus only on one struggle.
To Newton, he explained further, stating, “it was not an accurate depiction of the band or of Jim Morrison. Decidedly over the top, and made Morrison seem like kind of a drunken weirdo.”
That wasn’t the reality of his bandmate and friend as the keyboardist said, “He was much more intelligent, much more sensitive, much more spiritual than that drunken lout in the movie.”
Despite often being held up as the definitive Doors movie, the band themselves would point you in a different direction. “If you want to see a movie about a drunk go see The Doors movie,” he said, brushing off and disowning that project before adding, “If you want to see the real Jim Morrison and The Doors, you gotta see The Soft Parade”, prompting fans to simply return to their live performances, concluding, “That’s what it’s all about.”
