On This Day in 1991: The Doors: The Movie

26 years ago today, Oliver Stone’s cinematic depiction of the formation, success, and dissolution of The Doors arrived on the big screen.

With a filmography that included the Academy Award-winning films Platoon, Wall Street, and Born on the Fourth of July, Stone seemed to be a solid choice to helm the story of Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger, and John Densmore, and at the very least, there’s no argument that he managed to raise the profile of The Doors higher than it had been since their initial heyday. Unfortunately, the end result of Stone’s efforts was one which left many less than pleased, most notably among them the aforementioned Mr. Manzarek.

“Oliver Stone has assassinated Jim Morrison,” Manzarek told the L.A. Times in the March 17, 1991 edition of the paper. “The film portrays Jim as a violent, drunken fool. That wasn’t Jim. When I walked out of the movie, I thought, ‘Geez, who was that jerk?’”

Mind you, Manzarek did find muted praise for Val Kilmer’s performance as Morrison (“adequate—a nice attempt”) and for the recreations of The Doors’ concerts (“brilliantly filmed, although over-amped and sensationalistic”), but he was ultimately frustrated by the film’s failure to capture the band’s artistic vision and their message.

“All you see is Jim as a drunken hedonist,” said Manzarek. “The tragedy is that fame consumed him. But that wasn’t Jim’s message. He was intelligent. He was loving. He was a good man who believed in freedom and in questioning authority. But you’d never know that from seeing this film.”

Krieger wasn’t nearly as dispirited by the film as his bandmate, although he hadn’t been all that enthused about the idea of it originally.

“It’s funny, because I was always the one who was against the idea of the movie,” Krieger told Classic Bands in 1994. “For years I fought any movie idea, until finally we got Oliver Stone interested. I said obviously somebody's gonna make this movie whether we like it or not, and who better than Oliver Stone? I thought that it turned out pretty good, as far as a rock 'n roll movie, which is really hard to make. The Buddy Holly Story was pretty good. I didn't like the Jerry Lee Lewis movie [Great Balls of Fire] that much. I thought Val Kilmer was great. They left a lot of stuff out. Some of the stuff was overblown, but a lot of the stuff was very well done, I thought.”

As recently as 2015, Densmore was of the same mindset as Krieger in regards to Stone’s efforts.

“When Oliver got on board, we knew the ship was going to fly,” he told Forbes. “Oliver’s aggressive. He has said, ‘If you don’t like my foot on your chest, don’t go to my movies.’ I love him for the subjects he chooses. He’s just really provocative, interesting and political. Oliver focused quite a bit on [the darker side of Jim], but I love him for giving it a go. I think Val Kilmer should have been nominated for an Oscar. He gave me the creeps on the set - he was so close to Jim. Actors, they’re weird. They transform their bodies. My only regret is that it wasn’t more about the times, the sixties. Oliver chose the tortured artist, a valid storyline probably not dissimilar to stuff jangling around in Mr. Stone’s head.”