by Ray Manzarek
Well, lo and behold, a few months later a Ray Manzarek student film, Induction (and the year before that Evergreen), was to be shown at the Royce Hall Screening. It was certainly an honor for me. I was very pleased with those films. They worked. And I was very proud of my cameramen, John DeBella and Christopher (Kit) Gray, and my actors, Dorothy Fujikawa, Hank Olguin, and Kathy Zeller.
Jim’s movie, unfortunately, didn’t make it into Royce Hall. He was panned by the teachers and panned by many of the students. What a bunch of dolts! They just didn’t get it. However, they did appear to take great delight in raking Jim over the coals. Jim always rubbed a lot of them the wrong way—those people were called squares—hell, he’s still doing that. And they’re still squares.
“Nonlinear, Mr. Morrison.” “Doesn’t make any sense.” “You’ve violated basic rules of screen direction on the shot with the darts, Morrison.” “Male chauvinist! Why’s the girl in her underwear?” “What are you, a stoner or something?” “Fascist!” “This isn’t the way we make movies in America, Morrison. This is like a Communist would think.”
So his film didn’t make it into the screenings…nor did it make it through the projector. He had trouble making splices. Jim’s forte was not splicing two pieces of film together with the tiny little tape and the tiny little 16mm splicer you had to use. But it was an extremely poetic movie.
It doesn’t exist anymore. It was tossed out with three hundred or so other student movies at the end of the semester. The only films that were saved were the ones that had the negative cut and a composite made for the big show in Royce. The other films were like term papers—seen once and tossed. Just too many to save. So Jim’s is gone. Into the dumpster and into the ether.
The two films that I directed, however, still exist. They are on the Doors’ laser disc special edition called The Doors Collection on Universal Home Video. We can look back and see what the UCLA Film School was like in 1963, ’64, and ’65. The early days. The golden years of the film department. In Evergreen you can see the actual Venice Beach apartment we lived in. Ray, Dorothy, and Jim (after we started the band he moved in with us). And you can, today, see me and Jim together on the screen before the Doors were even conceived of. A party is taking place in Induction and Jim and I exchange a conspiratorial moment together. It’s brief, but there we are, young pups together.
There was a lot of controversy about Evergreen, my student directorial debut. A scene in the shower had to be cut before it would be allowed to be screened for the public. It was an innocent scene. It was just two young people fucking in the shower. Or so it appeared. “Hell, what’s wrong with that?” I asked the faculty. “Well, Ray,” came the stentorian reply, “we just can’t have that sort of thing in the Royce Hall Screenings.” Another rumbling voice said, “You’ve just gone too far, young man. We simply can’t allow it. Not in front of the public.” A third voice: “Ray, we love the film, just cut the shower scene, that’s all.”
Here’s the scene. Dorothy’s in the shower with Hank Olguin, who billed himself as Henry Crismonde at the time. (The first time the Doors played together was at Hank’s house; a legendary pink house on the alley behind the Greyhound bus terminal in Santa Monica. Hank was the only guy I knew who had a piano.) They’re in the shower making love. The two of them aren’t naked. Dorothy’s wearing underwear and Hank’s wearing underwear and I’m shooting up high, around their chests, so it looks very sensual but nothing is really going on. The water’s streaming down and it’s a hot, steamy sensual kind of scene. And then…Dorothy’s leg comes up around Hank’s waist!
“Okay, now make it look like…all we need is one leg, honey…bring one leg up around Hank’s waist. The outside leg. That’s it. Good. John, roll camera. OK, Dorothy, one more time. Action!” I yelled.
They’re supposed to be naked, you don’t want to see anybody’s underwear, right? So I was a little bit below the thigh line of the underwear, about mid-leg, angled down. Dorothy brings her leg up and it looks like…well, it looks like they’re doing it in the shower, folks. I mean, it looks like she’s brought both legs up and she’s on top of his tool and they’re doing the dog right there in the shower. It’s a great shot. Then I cut to the most controversial shot of all; the shower head, streaming and steaming and shooting out water. Very symbolic in a very naive student way, basic bottom-line Freud. But nevertheless a very effective shot. And the faculty freaked.
“That’s symbolic of a male orgasm, and you cannot have that in a student movie. We simply can’t allow it.” (It was a surprisingly repressive time, those psychedelic sixties. It was a battle between the pro–status quo Establishment types and the wild, tribal freedom-loving young people. The Establishment called the sixties the “swinging sixties,” but we knew the decade was really “psychedelic.” And therein lies the difference. The status quo moves into the future backward. Always looking at the past. That’s why they used the term swinging. An archaic concept, it connotated a Rat Pack/gangster/Las Vegas aesthetic. They all wanted to be in Frank Sinatra’s rat pack, “swinging” with the “Chairman of the Board” and have a lot of “broads” hanging on them. It was a lounge lizard mentality and it ruled the day—Christ, perhaps it still does! The adventurer, however, moves into the future facing the unknown. Daring to look into the emptiness and create the new world. In love with life, immersed in the energy and trusting in the divine will that guides the destiny of this planet. In other words, trusting in ourselves. Because destiny is ours to control…if we have the courage. Back then we did, and they hated us for it.)
“So if you don’t cut, Mr. Manzarek, your film will not be shown in Royce Hall.” And there it was. Censorship. For the first time in my life I was being censored. It didn’t feel good. It felt very leaden and repressive. It felt like they were trying to take away my energy and enthusiasm. To bring me down to a lower level of consciousness. To place the yoke on my shoulders. The yoke of decent, wholesome, traditional values. Well, my acid-infused eyes had seen the real truth. I had seen the swinger hiding behind the minister’s cloth, the alcoholic behind the senator’s three-piece suit, the lust for death behind the general’s stars, and I was going to fight the bastards. Any way I could. And here was my line in the sand. Of course, here also was my opportunity to have my film shown in the prestigious Royce Hall Screenings. And I wanted that. Wouldn’t you?
I looked the three-member faculty panel dead in the eye, took a deep breath, put on my most obsequious smile, and said, “Okay, I can make some cuts.” And that was it. I was in Royce Hall. Now the question became how to reap the ego rewards while still maintaining any sense of integrity. In other words, how to get Evergreen up on the big screen and still stick it to them.
So I made two cuts—can’t be a total liar—one in and one out. The shower head! Who cares? It’s better with it in but it doesn’t change anything if it’s out. Dorothy’s leg going up around Hank’s waist. Now that’s the shot I would not lose. That’s the shot of the scene. I punctuated it with the opening of the Jazz Crusaders’ “Young Rabbits.” A great POW! And a gliss down by Wilton Felder, Wayne Henderson, and Joe Sample coinciding with the leg lift. The drums and bass kick in at a furious pace and I cut to Hank running through a pedestrian tunnel under Santa Monica Boulevard. Very symbolic. Very student, but very effective. Hell, it got a rise out of the faculty.
I made the cut and delivered the final composite print to Gary Essert (he ran the technical side of the screenings; he was cool, a student, and he could care less about a leg and a shower head and young rabbits) just one day before the first showing. The next night it went up on that big, sparkling, light-reflecting screen. The way I wanted it. The way it was supposed to be. And it worked, man. The audience gave a little collective gasp at the leg lift and then applauded as Hank hightailed it through the female pleasure channel with the Jazz Crusaders smoking. I was so happy.
Afterward, a couple of the teachers were outraged.
“You promised! You said you were going to c
ut that scene.”
“Hey, I made some cuts,” I retorted. “I cut the shower head.”
“But you promised,” they whined.
I smiled. “The audience loved it.”
So when the censors, the nut-butters, come around, and if you can get away with it, you tell them whatever they want to hear—they’re insane, you realize—and then you just go ahead and do whatever you want. But don’t harm anybody, of course. And don’t do evil.
Now UCLA itself, the actual schooling at UCLA, was incredible. Jim and I learned the “art of the cinema” from some truly wise and inspirational men. The prevailing philosophy of the time was “art first, commerce second.” Today, unfortunately, the equation has been reversed. But back in the sixties we were taught to emulate the French New Wave. Directors like Godard and Truffaut and Robert Bresson. Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi from Japan. And Yasujiro Ozu. Satyajit Ray from India. Fellini and Ermano Olini and Pasolini from Italy. Ingmar Bergman from Sweden. The Maysles brothers and Leacock/Pennebaker from America. Artists, filmmakers, poets all. Men of vision, subtlety, and courage. Men who dared to go against the commercial grain and attempted to make a statement about the human condition. Isn’t a probing of the relationship between God, man, and existence more involving than an explosion, gunfire, and a car chase? What kind of film stays with you longer, the popcorn-and-candy movies or an attempt at art? It’s obvious. Art wins.
So our teachers at UCLA wanted us to be artists. To strive for technical perfection, of course, but only at the service of art.
One of the teachers at the film school was none other than the fabled French director Jean Renoir, who had done La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game), the son of Auguste Renoir, the Impressionist painter. Renoir the director brought romance to the school; that great and fecund French romanticism. Unfortunately, I never had a class with him. I was about to take his directing class but he had gone. The summer had gone by.
Summer’s almost gone.
Summer’s almost gone.
Where will we be,
When the summer’s gone?
He was there for only one year and I had signed up for the directing class in the fall, but he was gone by the end of summer. However, they brought in a substitute for Jean Renoir…and it changed my whole life. None other than Josef von Sternberg! I was actually, in the fall of 1964, taught directing by Josef von Sternberg. The man who directed the incredible Marlene Dietrich movies. The man who invented the Marlene Dietrich persona and directed her and lit her and photographed her in The Blue Angel, Shanghai Express, Morocco, Blonde Venus, The Scarlet Empress and The Devil Is a Woman. Classic films and, believe it or not, American films. (How on earth did he get away with it? Such films are not allowed to exist in the American psychological spectrum. Our field of comprehension is much narrower than where von Sternberg would take us. Of course, eventually they did stop him. Like Orson Welles. The studio system has a vested interest in the way things are supposed to be. The American Dream as viewed from the lowest common denominator. That puritanical sense of what is allowed and what is not allowed. And how terribly self-righteous it is.)
So Josef von Sternberg taught our directing class, and it changed my life. He changed my outlook on art. He was the one who took me into that world of dark, brooding film noir, of haunted German Expressionism, and I loved it. He opened my mind to the possibility of making movies that were deeply passionate, mysterious, and psychological. Perhaps even slightly kinky, who knows? I know he had a profound effect on the Doors’ music. A music that was slightly kinky and slightly Germanic. After all, the Doors did do Brecht and Weill’s “Alabama Song,” or “The Whiskey Bar,” as it has come to be known. Not exactly a top-forty ditty.
Oh, show us the way to the next whiskey bar….
I tell you we must die.
—Brecht and Weill
The next semester, Jim Morrison took the very same class. An interesting coincidence; the two guys who would eventually, inevitably create the Doors were worshiping at the feet of the same teacher, the great man himself, Josef von Sternberg. The creator of Marlene Dietrich. And maybe that’s why the Doors are what they are today.
Von Sternberg took us into bungalow 3K7, the screening room where all the films were shown, and said, “Boys and girls. Students. I’m going to show you The Blue Angel. I’m going to show you Morocco. I’m going to show you Shanghai Express. Watch and learn. In particular, watch the lighting. If anything with my films, I’m most pleased with the lighting. I’ll show you how I lit Dietrich when we go to the soundstage. I call it the butterfly light. High up, straight overhead. It casts the shadow of a butterfly under the nose. Of course the cheekbones must be perfect.” And with Dietrich they were. A beautiful woman exquisitely lit. She exuded an aura unlike anything I had ever seen on the screen before. An aura of knowledge, sensuality, wisdom, and vulnerability. She had been hurt by love, wounded by love, but she was still a romantic. A person who believed in the awesome, terrible power of love; the overwhelming force of love. In defense she wore a cynical, jaded facade but you could see she was ready to surrender herself; but only to the right other. Only to a very significant other. Her man would have to be a romantic, like herself. Worldly, but still deeply romantic. In essence, an artist. Regardless of the profession, an artist.
She was most radiant in Shanghai Express, my favorite film. What lighting and what a performance. Shanghai Lily, a “coaster,” as Dr. Harvey calls her. Wouldn’t you like to have bedded that woman? And Anna May Wong. Brilliant. Von Sternberg took a good-girl actress of Chinese-American B-movie-quickie-boilerplate films, and turned her into the sensuous Dragon Lady. So cool, so beautiful, so dangerous. Her look could freeze you to the bone. And her words…slice, you’re bleeding. These were the two sexiest women I had ever seen in my life. And I thought, I want to be married to both of these women. This is what I want. I want the Blonde Venus and the Dragon Lady. The two of them were absolutely gorgeous, sensual, stunning, brilliant women. And if I may say so, Dorothy Fujikawa comes as close to putting those two women together as any woman I’ve ever met. Perhaps that’s why we’re still married, and certainly why she was the star of my student movies.
And what Dietrich did to me she did to Jim in spades. He was in love with her. Mad for her. That’s where Elke, the German blonde in the black négligée on top of the TV set in Jim’s student movie, comes from. An homage to la Dietrich. Jim and I discussed her sultry persona in The Blue Angel in great detail. I sometimes think Jim even adapted a bit of her smolder for his own stage aura.
And of course von Sternberg’s mise en scène was discussed endlessly. We talked about his lighting, his sets, his filling of the negative space in front of the camera, his stories of men as fools for a blonde goddess, his Orientalism, his exoticism, his languid pace fraught with psychological tension. Just like, as I later came to realize, Doors’ songs, Doors’ concerts. We didn’t know it then in our pot-induced musings, but we were preparing for our art form of the future. For the Doors.
Later that year, at semester break, Dorothy and I hitched a ride up to San Francisco with Judy Raphael, a fellow film student. Her father had given her a new car and we had only a Navy-surplus beat-up Chevy and Dorothy’s too-tight-for-an-850-mile-drive Volkswagen. Judy was going to see friends in Berkeley and offered us a spare bedroom in their large Victorian home. We tried to get to San Francisco as often as possible to absorb as much real city culture as we could cram into a brief stay, and this offer of free transport and lodging was too good to let slide. San Francisco had a sophistication and an ambience that Los Angeles still hasn’t attained. Probably never will. Just to walk the streets of that charming, European-style city made us feel like adults. There was a cosmopolitan air to the comings and goings of the people of San Francisco that gave us a feeling of rightness, a feeling that culture mattered, a feeling that art mattered. L.A. was a cowboy town in the middle of the desert. Hot and dry and hicksville. Fascism and racism, however, found the clima
te most hospitable. The jackbooted motorcycle cops were a Nazi costume designer’s wet dream. Midnight blue uniforms, black boots to the knee, helmets and sunglasses, sleek Harley-Davidson between their legs. And virtually all of them Aryan. What a chill they could send up your spinal column. Of course, that shiver of fear is a fascist’s delight. They thrive on such misdirected sexuality. But for us, seeing one of those man-machines approaching in the rearview mirror was a sight of terror. They seemed capable of any atrocity. “Oh, God, please don’t let them stop me.” I held my breath as they came up hard and fast—they always traveled in pairs—and then they passed. And you could breathe and resume normal thought again. The evil was gone, but it would be back. Anytime you hit the freeway there was a chance of confronting the evil, again. The city fathers must have loved the intimidation of the populace. Keep them in line through fear. “Man is basically a beast, a sinner, weak and evil. Give man a chance and he will commit a crime. Man must be policed.” What a philosophy! Christ, relax, you guys. Just take a deep breath and relax. Smoke a joint or something but just relax. Please!