"There's No Way We Can Do This" - The Doors Movie That Never Was

Reconstruction by FMF© Art Department Of Art Dept.

 

The Strip was a movie that never made it into the camera, leave alone the movie houses. Chris Kelso was a student at the UCLA Film School at the same time (a year above) Ray Manzarek. I found out about Chris and his Doors project through contacts I made at UCLA when working on the go-nowhere movie of my novel Helium. After an exchange of emails we spoke on Skype, Chris from his home in Spokane.

You were friends with Ray Manzarek?

We weren't what you'd call friends exactly. I never warmed to Jim, and he kinda went with the package. But Ray had the ideas, he was an interesting guy. Krieger I knew, he dated my sister a couple times. I can't remember ever meeting the other guy ...

John Densmore?

But I guess he was around. It was a very ... fluid situation back then.

So how did you get the idea for the movie?

We all had these student projects, these little movies we worked on like we were big time movie directors. They were mostly terrible, pretentious home movies, and we sat in director chairs at screenings and bulshitted. They've appointed an archivist to locate and restore these movies, can you believe it? Ray gave them my first draft, the later movie that never got made, and they got in touch. Crazy waste of time. But anyway, my little auteur masterpiece was called The Strip, and it was just cutups, found footage, footage I shot walking the streets, random crap. Based around Sunset Strip, on the Strip.

So it didn't feature The Doors in any sense.

It didn't feature anybody. A lot of blurred faces and artistic angles. Oh - I set fire to a trash can. That was the big statement.

But you resurrected the idea later, after they got big.

I thought I could leverage some of their record money, yeah. I wasn't a rock star. So I worked up a treatment and called Ray and said I got this movie about the Doors, The Strip. And we met and I did a pitch, just like back in school, we were kind of playacting. Stoned, too. He liked the story - such as it was.

So what was it?

The story? Morrison gets busted, banned from performing, thrown in jail, you know, creatively crucified by a brutal society, and the other three try to get him out, with the help of all these characters on the Strip. I didn't go into too much detail, I didn't have that much detail, but I remember the soundtrack album idea was attractive to him for some reason. He liked that better than the movie, I think. It would feature the Doors without Morrison, who'd be on the cover symbolically silenced by a Band-Aid over his mouth, like an X, you know, censorship. Ray reckoned not using the Doors name would let him bypass the Elektra contract, soundtracks weren't covered in his contract. A kind of side hustle without his label or agent skimming the take. We had a few more meetings when I'd worked up the first draft, and he gave me a tape of the soundtrack he'd been working on, which came as a surprise. He asked me to retitle the numbers - Morrison had been entirely stripped out of The Strip, it was all instrumental, base them on scenes in the movie, so I did that and we met again and by then I was pretty hyped, it looked like it was taking shape, but actually during this meeting, at the Brown Derby for some reason, a really square place. Red Skelton was at the next table, this big painting of a clown propped up in the chair next to him. Strange town. Anyway, a waiter brings Ray a table phone and he takes a call and looks pissed. He's not talking much, the occasional uh huh, and he puts the phone down and looks at me, shaking his head. That was Jac. There's no way we can do this, it's a mess, and Jim's changed his mind. And he got up and left. I had to pick up the check. Just another Hollywood story. It gave me a good reason to get out of town, anyway. And I met my wife on the bus, and that wouldn't have happened unless the movie didn't. I'm on my own now.

..........

Listening to the soundtrack album today, I'm struck first of all by how well it stands up with no vocals. There's always something interesting happening. And I'm struck by how perfect a soundtrack it would have made for one of those cheesy hippie-sploitation movies, real Sunset Strip go-go music. The difference in mood that Morrison makes is incredible, a real alchemy. Without him, the Doors were just another club band on the Strip, pretty good. With him, they were dark and dramatic and sexy and poetic and dangerous. The Doors.

 

This post made possible through the co-operation of Chris Kelso, and Rosa Gaiarsa at UCLA. My thanks to both. Soundtrack album to the movie that wasn't, available in the usual place.