Hi,

I'm indifferent about all this, as I was about a film or two, since everyone wants to make a deity out of a stone, or a lizard! The same thing happened on the films about Janis.

In the old days, of Guy Guden on the air in Santa Barbara, more than once on Jim's birthday, he would do a "retrospective" that often went nearly an hour and a half or more, and by the time you heard it all, you really did not need to know anymore. I still have a couple of those shows, now on mp3 and they can not be shared, sadly enough, for various reasons. But they really tell a story that most folks are not able to, and on top of that, done on a #1 commercial radio station in the area ... when was the first and last time you ever heard that? Oh yeah, some piddly show on the net did 10 minutes of Jim M. Folks today, I don't think, really know and can understand what it was all about ... and worse ... no one cares! 

I have 3 of the books, but I have had his own poetry books, and even "American Prayer", and I have always been a proponent of the great visionary work and poetry that he wrote. Some thing it is just psychedelia, but I don't think so. It is really a FILM ... and something that we as rock fans do not want to accept because that makes the music be a lot more than just a song with lyrics. Jim M did not exactly do a lot of stuff just because it was a song, and many of them were a huge finger to something or other at the time. And a lot of it was "censored" because it was too risky and all kinds of crap in those days. 

I don't know that many film makers, can put something together that "makes sense" of everything. There is too much, and if one takes the rock song idea, a lot of his lyrics fall apart and many folks hate them for that. If we take the visual/film approach, many folks don't like it because they are weird ... and folks are really afraid to discuss things like whip the horse's eye and other images that could be considered "savage", and in many ways were on par with a film that also showed a lot of these different things ... EL TOPO. 

I'm almost positive, that none of these things will ever discuss film and their school interests ... it's like they grew up, started a rock band, and one day, it fell apart, and Jim died! End of story ... a tragedy! But a third of it, that inspired the whole thing, was forgotten and left behind. Nothing like leaving a human's hands or legs behind! 

Hi,

I look at it as more of an understanding of what made them create the music and work that they did. The visual nature of it all, is the biggest clue of all, and something that most rock singers and writers are afraid to do, thinking that the lyrics won't speak to their audience. Jim's delivery is one of the best VISUAL films EVER made, and it really makes things like Kubrick come off like some kind of show off and its meaning diluted. With Jim, you knew how he felt and the lyrics were not condescending and telling you how to think and believe. You knew this was HIS MOVIE, and the band members knew from being at school (UCLA I think it was, a very exclusive school btw, where only the best students can get in!!!!), that they were not dummies and uneducated rock musicians, and this was the part that has been ignored and left behind. The literacy of Jim's work is highly personal, but it stands up with the best literature of the time! 

I actually consider it better than Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Kesey and many of the well known writers at the time, for example. Not to mention film makers from Europe which were making fun of Hollywood in some ways, while also appreciating some of its moments, like film noir.

In a way, The Doors' albums are a sort of "film noir" ... they have an identity all their own, that is not quite understood or appreciated. People still don't get it ... when the music is over, turn out the lights ... and how prophetic and beautifully poetic that is. 

The folks doing this documentary would do themselves well to ask Guy Guden to get involved. No one that I have ever heard understood and played The Doors in such an intelligent, literary and artistic style, because most of the folks only treat their work as "songs" and fail to see the depth within it.