Jim Morrison, the iconoclastic frontman of The Doors, will be the subject of a new documentary that's in production, it was announced last week.
The currently-untitled film will be a co-production between the studio Gunpowder & Sky and Jampol Artist Management, the longtime manager behind Morrison's estate. "Jim Morrison has been known as the leather trousers-clad Dionysian rock star, the Greek god handsome, amazing singer, shaman and performer," Jeff Jampol, JAM CEO, told Billboard. "But Jim was a polymath. Jim was a poet and a writer and a filmmaker long before he ever thought about music. All these decades everybody talked about Jim Morrison the rock star, which he certainly was. But we really felt it was time to even the playing field and talk about these other aspects of Jim, which were either not as known or celebrated or discussed.”
Production is currently searching for a director and targeting a late 2022 or early 2023 release. Material from Morrison's vast archive, parts of which were recently released for the first time in a new book, will be utilized as source material.
READ MORE: Jim Morrison's Writings to Be Collected in June
“They just unearthed all these diaries and notes and that's what's intriguing to me: having footage, writing and information about Jim that's never been exposed," said Van Toffler, Gunpowder & Sky's CEO. "It takes a unique filmmaker to really pull that out. If you do it right, it doesn't really matter what preceded it - sort of like the eighth version of A Star Is Born, it’s new to a generation.”
Morrison has, of course, been portrayed on film before. Val Kilmer starred in a 1991 biopic on The Doors, while recent documentaries on the band and their influence include 2009's When You're Strange and 2014's Feast of Friends, a restoration of a never-completed 1969 documentary on The Doors.
- Log in to post comments
