Platoon

Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) was not the first film about the Vietnam War. It was, however, the first one to be made by a man who had served as a foot soldier (with the 25th Infantry Division) in the conflict. Before it was the rah-rah propaganda of The Green Berets (1968). The melancholic drama of The Deer Hunter (1978). The surrealism of Apocalypse Now (1979). Although, in good company with many outstanding films about one of the most combative periods in our country’s history, both stateside and overseas, they lacked the gritty realism of Platoon. Stone’s film not only captured the sights and sounds of what it was to be a soldier in those impenetrable jungles, but also got the little yet crucially important details – their lingo, the tight brotherhood in each squad and the way they carried themselves as well as how they carried their equipment. Through every vein of the film runs an authenticity that only a filmmaker like Stone could give it.

If the aforementioned films had been released too close to the war, Platoon came along at just the right moment when enough time had passed so that the American public was more receptive to revisiting a war that tore this country apart, from decorated officers coming home to college students who had never touched a gun in their lives. It struck a chord with people in a way that previous films had not. Stone’s film was a commercial and critical success, catapulting him and his young cast of up and coming actors into the spotlight while also kickstarting a cottage industry of Vietnam War-themed films (Full Metal Jacket; Hamburger Hill), television shows (China Beach; Tour of Duty), novels (Chickenhawk; Going After Cacciato), and even comic books (The ‘Nam).

Platoon focuses on the 25th Infantry, Bravo Company in September 1967 with new recruit Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) as the audience surrogate and our introduction to this world. We see the war through his eyes, from that first blast of bright light as he walks off the plane with other new recruits and they see a collection of body bags. They are then taunted by a group of battle-hardened veterans heading home. That will be them some day... if they live long enough.

Stone cuts to the jungle with a beautiful establishing shot from a helicopter to show how impenetrable it is before dropping us in the middle of dense foliage that makes it hard to see more than a few feet in front of you. Robert Richardson’s cinematography conveys the dense landscape and how difficult it must’ve been to navigate, especially for a new recruit like Chris whose inexperience is glaringly obvious as he brings too much gear, becomes dehydrated and is eaten alive by red ants.

Stone spends the first ten minutes immersing us in the jungle with the sounds of birds and other exotic animals and the oppressive heat that you can see on the sweaty, tired faces of the soldiers. We observe how they interact with each other adopting lingo that is a mixture of Vietnamese and military jargon before Chris’ voiceover narration kicks in and he gives us initial observations after a week of being there.

The film’s rich atmosphere is evident in the first set piece where the platoon sets up to ambush the enemy in the middle of night during the pouring rain. Stone ratchets up the tension as Chris wakes up after falling asleep to see the man who relieved him on watch now asleep and several silhouetted figures emerging from the shadows. Chris is frozen by fear and indecision – does he go for his rifle or the explosives that were set up for the ambush? Stone shows how hard it is to fight in the jungle with a night-time ambush that goes bad. Everything happens so fast and is so chaotic that it is hard to follow what is going on until it’s all over.

Thirty minutes in and Stone establishes a platoon divided into two factions: the “heads,” dope smoking guys who listen to rock ‘n’ roll music, just want to survive the war and go home, and the “juicers,” beer-drinking lifers that listen to country music and who actually like it there or, at the very least, believe that what they are doing is right. The leaders of these two groups, Sergeant Elias (Willem Dafoe) and Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger), are polar opposites that Chris gravitates towards and must ultimately choose between. Stone makes it pretty clear which side he prefers by having Chris initiated by the heads and bonds with them over Motown music and pot.

Stone shows how the deaths of three of their own angers and frustrates the platoon and they direct their wrath on a nearby village with Barnes focusing their rage through him. It is an ugly sequence as the soldiers kill animals and villagers, in particular, a harrowing scene where Kevin Dillon’s psycho redneck brutally kills a handicapped young man. Things go from bad to worse when Barnes interrogates the village chief and when he doesn’t get the answers he wants kills the man’s wife and then puts a gun to his young daughter’s head until Elias intervenes.

The village sequence is important in that it is the catalyst that causes a serious fracture within the platoon, one that has serious repercussions later on. It also symbolizes America’s might makes right mentality, underlining how out of control things got over there as the line between the enemy and innocent villagers became so blurred that for some there was no difference. This sequence also shows how the frustration and madness of the situation could get out of hand with horrible results.

Stone does a good job of getting the pulse of both sides of the platoon, letting us know where Barnes and Elias are coming from. For the former, he believes Elias is like the politicians in Washington, D.C., “trying to fight this war with one hand tied around their balls,” while the latter admits to Chris that he’s disillusioned with fighting this war, sagely predicting, “What happened today is just the beginning. We’re gonna lose this war. We’ve been kicking other people’s asses for so long I figure it’s time we got ours kicked.” It’s a nice, quiet moment between Chris and Elias that Willem Dafoe handles wonderfully with a world-weary subtlety much as Tom Berenger approaches his scene with a less-is-more attitude. His intense, thoughtful stare says it all and one rightly assumes that these moments are the calm before the storm.

At that point in his career, Willem Dafoe was known for playing bad guy roles in films like Streets of Fire (1984) and To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) and so casting him as a good guy in Platoon must’ve seemed like a gamble. Dafoe is excellent as a dedicated soldier who takes the time to teach Chris a few things in order for him to survive. It’s a very soulful performance as he acts as the platoon’s conscience. Elias cares about his men and wants to see them all go home alive.

In contrast, Tom Berenger had been known for playing lightweight, good guy roles but caught Stone’s eye with his layered performance in The Big Chill (1983). He gives an absolutely ferocious performance as an intense, imposing figure, a malevolent force of nature with a penetrating stare and a twisted scar down one side of his face. Barnes rules his men with an iron fist. He’s a tough man who leads by example, strict and unwavering in his beliefs. He is concerned only with maintaining his functioning war machine and when he spots a spanner in the works, as he does with Elias, he sees it as a malfunctioning part that must be removed and replaced.

Late in Platoon, Berenger delivers a fantastic monologue when Barnes confronts the heads, sharing his worldview with them. He even calls them out, telling them to kill him in almost pleading fashion that is unpredictable, only adding to the tension of the scene. It’s a speech that runs the gamut and the actor works the scene, moving around the space, and interacting with everyone around him in a way that is impressive to watch. Berenger hadn’t really done anything before this film to suggest such intensity and his performance was a revelation and is still his best to date.

Stone assembled an impressive cast of young actors that included Johnny Depp, Keith David, Kevin Dillon, Forest Whitaker, and John C. McGinley who appear with varying amounts of screen time. McGinley, for example, makes the most of his moments as the cocky sycophant O’Neill and Dillon is particularly memorable as a racist murderer while Depp and Whitaker hardly get any time to make an impact.

The battle scenes have a visceral, you-are-there feel to them as Stone wisely opts to eschew a manipulative score for the jarring sounds of battle as orders are barely understood amidst the sounds of explosions and gunfire. Soldiers are killed from inexperience and ineptitude as much as for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now presented very stylized representations of combat in Vietnam while Platoon is much more realistic, presenting it as noisy and chaotic.

Platoon packs in a lot of stuff during its running time: botched ambushes, the destruction of a village, discovery of an underground bunker, and a climactic, large scale battle that probably wouldn’t have all gone down in such a limited time frame, but Stone isn’t interested in making a documentary. His film is a dramatization of a composite of several events that gives the audience some idea of what it was like there and what these guys went through. Chris’ voiceover narration gets a bit pretentious at times but that’s the point as he comes from an educated background of privilege, fancying himself a literary chronicler of his platoon’s exploits. The images of what he experiences are so powerful that they render his sometimes cliché musings ineffectual.

After dropping out of Yale University and a stint with the Merchant Marines, Oliver Stone enlisted the United States Army, arriving in Vietnam on September 15, 1967 as a member of the second platoon of Bravo Company, third battalion, 25th Infantry Division. He was wounded twice and awarded the Bronze Star for combat gallantry and a Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster. He was later transferred to the First Calvary Division and finally returned to the U.S. after more than 15 months in 1968.

By mid-1976, Stone’s marriage had broken up, he was struggling financially and his screenwriting career had yet to take off. Ever since he had returned from Vietnam in November 1968, he had wanted to write about his experiences in the war: “I realized I had forgotten a lot in eight years. I thought, ‘If I don’t do it now, I’m gonna forget.’ It’s part of our history nobody understands—what it was like over there.” Stone decided that he would write about his experiences as truthfully as possible, making only slight adjustments, changing some names and combining a few characters. “It took me eight years to get to that screenplay, because I couldn’t deal with it before. I needed the distance.”

Stone finished the script in a few weeks, finding it challenging in getting the tone right and also the character of Elias, which he envisioned as a “free spirit, a Jim Morrison in the bush.” With only one B-horror movie (Seizure) to his credit, Stone couldn’t find anyone willing to buy his script until Sidney Lumet showed some interest and toyed with the idea of directing with Al Pacino starring. After the scripts for Midnight Express (1978) and Scarface (1983) were made into wildly successful films, filmmaker Michael Cimino, whom Stone co-wrote the script for his film Year of the Dragon (1985), encouraged him to get Platoon going again with him in a producer capacity. In 1984, Stone cast it and went to the Philippines to scout locations. Dino de Laurentiis, who agreed to back it, pulled out. He was willing to cover the $6 million budget but could not find a distributor willing to take a chance on the commercially risky project.

Stone took the project’s collapse hard and felt that his career was over. In addition, De Laurentiis refused to give Stone back his script until he paid for the cost of the Philippines location scout. This experience, and witnessing how his script for 8 Million Ways to Die (1985) was completely rewritten, made Stone wary of making Platoon for a Hollywood studio. In 1985, he successful wrestled the rights for his film away from De Laurentiis and gave the script to producer Gerald Green. He sent it to John Daly over at Hemdale, a small British independent production house. Both Daly and Green loved the script and wanted to make it with Stone as director and Orion Pictures as distributor. Producer Arnold Kopelson, a lawyer turned movie producer, read the script and felt it was a game changer. He contacted Green and told him that he would raise the money for Platoon.

After making Salvador (1986), Stone launched right into Platoon in February 1986, two weeks before the former was released in theaters. The filmmaker was locked into a tight nine-week shooting schedule and used the same crew that worked on his previous film. In addition, he hired retired Marine Corps captain and Vietnam War veteran Dale Dye as technical advisor. It would be the beginning of a long-standing collaboration between the two men over many films.

When it came to casting, Stone saw Tom Berenger in The Big Chill and was impressed by his performance: “I felt like there was a redneck side to Tom, an ugly side that could really be seething, and I used it.” When it came to Willem Dafoe, Stone saw him in films like Streets of Fire and To Live and Die in L.A., “playing ugly roles and I thought there was something spiritually heightened because of the ugliness. So I went the other way.” Dafoe had met Stone when he first tried to make Platoon and then he almost got John Savage’s role in Salvador. Charlie Sheen auditioned for the role of Chris in 1983, but Stone felt he was “gawky and underweight,” according to the actor, and offered the role to his brother Emilio Estevez with Michael Pare cast as Barnes (both Mickey Rourke and Kevin Costner were considered for the part). When the film was restarted, Stone considered Keanu Reeves, Kyle MacLachlan and Johnny Depp for Chris. Sheen had made a couple of films and auditioned again, this time Stone cast him in the part.

The cast was scheduled to arrive in the Philippines in February 1986 shortly after the presidential election, but when it went sour people died and revolution erupted into civil war! President Ferdinand Marcos fled on February 25 and Corazon Aquino took over. Dafoe had flown in early and went to sleep in a Manila hotel only to wake up to the sounds of tanks in the streets. The rest of the cast flew in nine days later. Stone contemplated moving the production to Thailand, but it would have been a logistical nightmare. He held out and made new deals with the new regime, including renting all the military equipment from the government. Stone said, “I remember the helicopters were pretty dangerous because they weren’t maintained well.”

Once the cast assembled in the Philippines, Dye proceeded to put them through a grueling 14-day boot camp in order to get them in the foot soldier mindset: “Oliver said, ‘I want you to take them to the bush, beat them up, make them understand what it was like for you and me in Vietnam.’” Used to staying in hotels and being pampered, the actors underwent culture shock as they were constantly in the bush with no beds, bathrooms, hot showers or any of the creature comforts they were used to. Dye had them dig their own foxholes to sleep in, set ambushes, learn how to use various weapons, and go on ten-mile patrols with full gear and weapons. As Sheen later remarked, “This was a cram course in an infantryman’s life. And it was rough.”

At dusk on the first night, Dye asked the special effects people to stage a mortar “attack” without the exhausted actors knowing what was going on, yelling at them to return fire. Dye said, “It was utter chaos and they were shaking by the time it was dark.” The actors learned military lingo, listened to period music and had to refer to each other by the character’s names. After two weeks of this, they bonded and were ready to start filming. The cast went from training straight into principal photography. Dye remembers, “They were just flat exhausted and that was exactly the look that Oliver wanted.”

The production was not without its problems as the cast and crew endured fights, injuries, a near-fatal viper bite, insects, monsoon rains, and the firing of 4-5 production people. There were also several close calls with the helicopters, including cinematographer Bob Richardson almost getting clipped by the rotor of one. In another incident, Dye, Richardson and Stone were in a helicopter that almost hit a ravine! Stone remembers, “We scraped it by that much. We were so low, and these Filipino pilots are good, but they’re crazy.” With the start of the rainy season looming rapidly and running out of money, Stone compromised the last few shots in order to make the deadline and did it with a day to spare.

Platoon received mostly positive reviews from critics at the time. Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and wrote, “There are no false heroics in this movie, and no standard heroes; the narrator is quickly at the point of physical collapse, bedeviled by long marches, no sleep, ants, snakes, cuts, bruises and constant, gnawing fear.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote of Stone’s direction: “He doesn’t telegraph emotions, nor does he stomp on them. The movie is a succession of found moments. It’s less like a work that’s been written than one that has been discovered … This one is a major piece of work, as full of passion as it is of redeeming, scary irony.”

The Los Angeles Times’ Sheila Benson wrote, “This is movie-making with a zealot’s fervor … [Stone] clearly wants us to understand what fighting in that war was like. He succeeds with an immediacy that is frightening. War movies of the past, even the greatest ones, seem like crane shots by comparison; Platoon is at ground zero.” In her review for the Washington Post, Rita Kempley praised Berenger and Dafoe’s performances: “They are explosive, mythic Titans in a terrible struggle for the soldier’s souls.” Finally, Gene Siskel gave it four out of four stars and wrote, “Platoon is filled with one fine performance after another, and one can only wish that every person who saw the cartoonish war fantasy that was Rambo would buy a ticket to Platoon and bear witness to something closer to the truth.”

Platoon presents the Vietnam War as a moral quagmire, an impossible situation that the United States had no chance of winning because they were so out of their depth. All the average soldier could hope to do was survive. Stone’s film shows what it was like for them to be there with startling detail and authenticity, from the camaraderie to the madness. For Stone and a lot of veterans I imagine the experience of making the film and seeing it was therapeutic. After years of being looked down on by an uncaring public that saw the war as an embarrassment, Platoon was an opportunity for veterans to get some much deserved and long overdue respect.

SOURCES

Nashawaty, Chris. “Oliver Stone Talks Platoon and Charlie Sheen on the Vietnam film’s 25^th Anniversary.” Entertainment Weekly. May 24, 2011.

Norman, Michael. “Platoon Grapples with Vietnam.” The New York Times. December 21, 1986.

Riordan, James. Stone: A Biography of Oliver Stone. Hyperion. 1995.

Willistein, Paul. “Platoon: The Vietnam Odyssey of Oliver Stone.” The Morning Call. February 1, 1987.

The Doors

Anticipation was high when it was announced that Oliver Stone would be filming a biopic about the popular rock band the Doors. With Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), he was gaining a reputation for being the premiere chronicler of America in the 1960s so it made sense that he would tackle that decade’s most famous (and infamous) musical acts. The question remained, what kind of approach would Stone take on the material? Many books had been written by journalists, people that knew him and even by members of the band itself, all with their own perspective and opinion on what the Doors meant to them and to popular culture. The world found out what Stone’s take was on March 1, 1991 when The Doors was released to wildly mixed reviews and strong box office. While many critics felt that Val Kilmer delivered an excellent performance as the band’s lead singer Jim Morrison, they felt that the film dwelled too much on his darker aspects and excesses and that Stone played fast and loose with the facts.


One should look at The Doors much like Stone’s subsequent film JFK (1992), as a mythical take on historical figures and events and not as documentary-like authenticity. I find The Doors to be a big, bloated, fascinating mess of a film that reflects the tumultuous times of the ‘60s. Despite the miscasting of a few roles and the rather one-sided view we get of Morrison, Stone’s film is a beautifully-shot acid trip through the ‘60s with some of the best choreographed live concert sequences every recreated on film. Best of all, it brought the Doors’ music back into the mainstream, reminded everyone what a brilliant band they were, and how much they influenced and reflected their times.

The film starts off with Morrison (Val Kilmer) recording An American Prayer and reciting lines that rather nicely apply to the beginning of this biopic. Then, Stone takes us back to New Mexico, 1949 when the singer was just a boy. As Robert Richardson’s camera floats over desolate, sun-drenched desert, the first atmospheric strains of “Riders on the Storm” plays over the soundtrack. Right from the get-go, Stone establishes the mythical approach he plans to adopt for the film by recreating a popular story told by Morrison that as a young boy his family passed by a car accident involving an elderly Native American Indian. As the story goes, at the moment when he died, his spirit left his body and went into the young Morrison. The story was meant to explain Morrison’s fascination with shamanism and mysticism.

We quickly jump to Venice Beach, 1965 where Morrison is attending film school at UCLA along with Ray Manzarek (Kyle MacLachlan). He also meets Pamela Courson (Meg Ryan), who would go on to become the great love of his life, and they quickly become romantically involved. The appearance of these two people exposes early on one of the film’s flaws – the miscasting of Kyle MacLachlan as Manzarek and Meg Ryan as Pamela. Whereas from his first appearance on-screen, you instantly accept Val Kilmer as Morrison, MacLachlan comes across as too stiff and the dialogue doesn’t sound natural coming out of his mouth. Not to mention, his wig is a distraction. With Ryan, it is her identification with romantic comedies like When Harry Met Sally... (1989) and Joe Versus the Volcano (1990) that makes it so hard to believe her as a free-spirited flower child that eventually transforms into a promiscuous drug user. In scenes where Pamela is supposed to come across as naive, Ryan conveys a clueless vacancy. It’s too bad because she would go on to demonstrate an ability to tap into a darker side with Prelude to a Kiss (1992) and more significantly with the little-seen Flesh and Bone (1993). However, with The Doors, she is clearly out of her comfort zone and it is glaringly obvious.

From there we go to that fateful day when Morrison sang some of the lyrics to “Moonlight Drive” to Manzarek and they proposed starting a band, coming up with the name, the Doors. Stone jumps to the band now with drummer John Densmore (Kevin Dillon) and guitarist Robby Krieger (Frank Whaley) rehearsing “Break on Through (To the Other Side).” This is a really strong scene as it shows the genesis for their biggest song, “Light My Fire” and Stone makes a point of showing that Morrison didn’t write all of their songs. Stone also shows how they all contributed to the song’s evolution that resulted in the classic it became. I also like how we see the Doors starting out, playing a small dive on the Sunset Strip called London Fog. Morrison is still so shy on stage that he can’t face the audience. This is the film at its best, showing the band creating music and in action, performing live.

It goes without saying that The Doors truly comes to life during the concert scenes as all the theatrical stage lighting and dynamic camera movements showcases Richardson’s skill as one of the best cinematographers ever to get behind the camera. The warm colors he uses in the London Fog scenes conveys an intimacy representative of the small venue and symbolizes a band still learning their chops, both musically and how they perform in a live setting. Richardson really gets a chance to cut loose in the sequence where the band go out into the desert and take peyote. He employs all sorts of trippy effects and also creates some stunningly beautiful shots, like that of a blue sky populated by all kinds of fragmented clouds or a pan across a rocky formation with shadows creeping upwards, animated via time lapse photography.

Stone then segues to the Doors playing at the Whisky a Go Go in 1966 – the next step to the big time. We see them perform “The End,” an epic Oedipal nightmare. It’s a hypnotic song that shows how far the band had come. Morrison is no longer shy and commands the stage like no other before him. Kilmer is mesmerizing in this scene and you can see how fully committed he is to the role. It’s not just the ability to recreate Morrison’s signature moves but he has an uncanny knack to immerse himself in the singer’s headspace. In these concert scenes it is incredible to see the actor throw himself completely into them just as Morrison would.

In the spot-on casting department, it was an absolute delight to see Michael Wincott freed from the shackles of playing clichéd heavies and make an appearance as legendary music producer Paul Rothchild who worked on many of the Doors’ albums. He has a fantastic scene later on when he tries to get through to a drunken Morrison during an awful recording session and delivers an impassioned speech even though the singer tunes him out.

Stone’s film starts to lose its mind when the Doors arrive in New York City in 1967 and the way he presents the hysteria of their arrival is like the Second Coming of the Beatles. There are moments of amusing levity as Stone shows the obvious culture clash between the square staff at The Ed Sullivan Show when the producers try to be hip by talking to the band in their own “lingo” using words like “groovy” and “dig it” that sound forced and fabricated. The Doors are told to change a lyric in “Light My Fire” so as to satisfy standards and practices. Stone has a bit of fun with their televised appearance, fudging how Morrison defied the censors.

Stone shows the skyrocketing of Morrison’s ego and how he began to believe his own hype. He also suggests that Morrison really started to lose control when he and his bandmates attended a party at Andy Warhol’s The Factory. All sorts of pretentious weirdoes vie for Morrison’s attention. Manzarek sums it up best when he tells Morrison, “These people are vampires.” However, it’s when the rest of the band departs the party leaving Morrison to fend for himself that Stone suggests the moment when the first schism between them was created. The look of distrust on the singer’s face as his bandmates depart says it all. There is no one to keep his indulgent behavior in check. We are subjected to an unfortunate fey caricature of Warhol thanks to the usually reliable Crispin Glover. Hanging out with Nico and Warhol’s regulars brings out Morrison’s worst excesses which Richardson shoots like some kind of monstrous nightmare, a bad trip that we want desperately to end. This sequence starts Stone’s escalation of depicting Morrison’s self-destructive journey.

And so we get a scene where Morrison does cocaine with a self-professed witch (played by a vampy Kathleen Quinlan) and participates in a silly, over-the-top ceremony whose inclusion stops the narrative cold. Stone is playing with the mythic figure that we know as Jim Morrison. The Doors tries to show both sides: the mythic persona and the real man drowning in fame, drugs and alcohol. Stone hints at this transformation when Morrison does the famous photo shoot that has been immortalized in posters and in the pages of glossy rock magazines like Rolling Stone. Morrison is drunk on alcohol and one might argue his own fame. He begins to believe in his own image and the photographer (Mimi Rogers) only coaxes him on when she says, “Forget the Doors. You’re the one they want. You are the Doors.” It is at this point in the film that Morrison is no longer an artist or a poet, but a commodity to be used up by everyone: the media and the masses. On Morrison’s rise to the top, everyone wants a piece of him, to capture a little bit of the exhilarating ride. Morrison’s mistake was that he obliged and thought that he could handle it.

We see how drugs and alcohol fuel Morrison’s irrational behavior and he becomes verbally and physically abusive towards Pamela. Anything that was good about Morrison depicted in the film is now gone and all we’re treated to is a series of scenes showing what an asshole he had become and how he had been consumed by his own fame. His bad behavior reaches new heights of ridiculousness during a scene where he and Pamela host a dinner party for their friends and hanger-ons. Stoned out of his mind (and probably drunk), Morrison provokes Pamela who starts throwing food around hysterically and then tries to stab him with a carving knife while he taunts her. Stone sledgehammers the point home by playing “Love Me Two Times” on the soundtrack as if to reinforce Morrison repeatedly cheating on Pamela with other women. If there is anything good that comes from this wildly over-the-top scene it is that it shows how estranged Morrison has become from the rest of his bandmates.

Fortunately, the film has amazingly choreographed concert sequences that repeatedly bring it back from the brink of its own excesses. The New Haven ’68 concert depicts Morrison’s run-in with the law when he was maced in the face backstage by a cop. It’s no longer about the music but the abuse of his power as a lead singer with a microphone to air his grievances. The best concert sequence in the film is the San Francisco ’68 one. Bathed in hellish red light, Morrison whips the crowd into a frenzy. His increasingly desperate performance is juxtaposed with his out of control personal life as he almost traps Pamela in their bedroom closet and proceeds to burn it down, gets in a car accident and is involved in a Wiccan marriage ceremony. We see Morrison in a wonderfully hallucinatory moment channel his Native American Indian spirit as he loses himself in the music. The last shot of this powerful sequence shows Morrison drunk on his own power and fame as much as he’s drunk on alcohol. The expression on Kilmer’s face says it all.

Over the years, directors like Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese and William Friedkin flirted with directing a Doors biopic. In 1985, Columbia Pictures acquired the rights from the Doors and the Morrison estate to make a film. Producer Sasha Harari wanted Oliver Stone to write the screenplay but never heard back from the filmmaker’s agent. After two unsatisfactory scripts were produced, Imagine Films replaced Columbia. Harari tried contacting Stone again and the director met with the surviving band members. He told them that he wanted to keep a particularly wild scene from one of the early drafts. The group was offended and exercised their right of approval over the director and rejected Stone. By 1989, Mario Kassar and Andy Vajna, who owned Carolco Pictures, acquired the rights to the project and wanted Stone to direct. The Doors had seen Platoon (1986) and were impressed with what Stone had done.

Stone agreed to make The Doors after his next project, Evita (1996). After spending years on it and courting Madonna and later Meryl Streep to play the lead role, the film fell apart over salary negotiations with Streep. Stone quickly moved on to The Doors and went right into pre-production. Guitarist Robby Krieger had always opposed a Doors film until Stone signed on to direct. Stone first heard the Doors when he was a 21-year-old soldier serving in Vietnam. Historically, keyboardist Ray Manzarek had been the biggest advocate of immortalizing the band on film but opposed Stone’s involvement. According to Krieger, “When the Doors broke up Ray had his idea of how the band should be portrayed and John and I had ours.” Manzarek was not happy with the direction Stone wanted to take and refused to give his approval to the film. According to Kyle MacLachlan, “I know that he and Oliver weren’t speaking. I think it was hard for Ray, he being the keeper of the Doors myth for so long.” Manzarek claims that he was not even asked to consult on the film and if he had his way wanted it to be about four members equally rather than the focus being on Morrison. Stone claims that he repeatedly tried to get the keyboardist involved, but “all he did was rave and shout. He went on for three hours about his point of view ... I didn’t want Ray to be dominant, but Ray thought he knew better than anybody else.”

While researching the film, Stone read through transcripts of interviews with over 100 people. The cast was expected to get educated about 1960s culture and literature. Stone wrote his own script in the summer of 1989. He said, “The Doors script was always problematic. Even when we shot, but the music helped fuse it together.” He picked the songs he wanted to use and then wrote “each piece of the movie as a mood to fit that song.” Before filming, Stone and his producers had to negotiate with the three surviving band members, their label Elektra Records, and the parents of Morrison and Pamela Courson. Morrison’s parents would only allow themselves to be depicted in a dream-like flashback sequence at the beginning of the film. The Coursons wanted there to be no suggestion in any way that their daughter caused Morrison’s death. Stone found her parents to be the most difficult to deal with because they wanted Pamela to be “portrayed as an angel.” The Coursons tried to slow the production down by refusing to allow any of Morrison’s later poetry to be used in the film. After he died, Pamela got the rights to his poetry and when she died, her parents got the rights. Legendary concert promoter Bill Graham, who promoted Doors concerts in San Francisco and New York in the ‘60s, played a key role in negotiations.

When Stone began talking about the project as far back as 1986, he had Kilmer in mind to play Morrison, impressed by his work in the Ron Howard fantasy film Willow (1988). However, during this time actors ranging from John Travolta to Richard Gere to Tom Cruise and the lead singers from INXS and U2 were considered for the part. Stone auditioned nearly 200 actors to play Morrison in 1989. In his favor, Kilmer had the same kind of singing voice as Morrison and to convince Stone that he was right for the role he spent thousands of dollars of his own money to make his own eight-minute video, singing and looking like the Lizard King at various stages of his life. When the Doors heard Kilmer singing they couldn’t tell if it was him or Morrison’s voice. Once he got the part, he lost weight and spent six months rehearsing Doors songs every day. Kilmer learned 50 songs, 15 of which are actively performing in the film. He also spent hundreds of hours with record producer Paul Rothchild who told him, “anecdotes, stories, tragic moments, humorous moments, how Jim thought, what were my interpretation of Jim’s lyrics,” he said. He also took Kilmer into the studio and helped him with “some pronunciations, idiomatic things that Jim would do that made the song sound like Jim.” The actor also met with Krieger and Densmore but Manzarek refused to talk to him.

Stone auditioned approximately 60 actresses for the role of Pamela Courson. The part required nudity and the script featured some wild sex scenes which generated a fair amount of controversy. Casting director Risa Bramon Garcia felt that Patricia Arquette auditioned very well and should have gotten the part. However, Meg Ryan was cast and to prepare for the role, she talked to the Coursons and people that knew Pamela and encountered several conflicting views of her. Before doing the film, Ryan was not at all familiar with Morrison and “liked a few songs.” She had trouble relating to the culture of the ‘60s and said, “I had to reexamine all my beliefs about it in order to do this movie.”

Stone originally hired Paula Abdul to choreograph the film’s concert scenes but dropped out because she did not understand Morrison’s on-stage actions and was not familiar with the time period. She recommended Bill and Jacqui Landrum. They watched hours of concert footage before working with Kilmer. They got him to loosen up his upper body with dance exercises and jumping routines to develop his stamina for the demanding concert scenes. During them, he did the actual singing and Stone used the Doors’ master tapes without Morrison’s lead vocals to avoid lip-synching. Kilmer’s endurance was put to the test during these sequences, with each one often taking several days to film. Stone said, “his voice would start to deteriorate after two or three takes. We had to take that into consideration.” One sequence, filmed inside the Whisky a Go Go was harder than the others due to all the smoke and the sweat, a result of the body heat and intense camera lights. For five days Kilmer performed “The End” and after the 24th take, Stone got what he wanted and the actor was left totally exhausted.

With a budget of $32 million, The Doors was filmed over 13 weeks predominantly in and around Los Angeles. Krieger acted as a technical adviser on the film and this mainly involved showing his cinematic alter ego Frank Whaley where to put his fingers on the fretboard. Densmore also acted as a consultant, tutoring Kevin Dillon who played him in the film. Controversy arose during principal photography when a memo linked to Kilmer circulated to cast and crew members listing rules of how the actor was to be treated for the duration of filming. These included people being forbidden to approach him on the set without good reason, not to address him by his own name while he was in character, and no one could “stare” at him on the set. Understandably upset, Stone contacted Kilmer’s agent and the actor claimed it was all a huge misunderstanding and that the memo was for his own people and not the film crew.

Not surprisingly, The Doors received mixed to negative reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, “The experience of watching The Doors is not always very pleasant. There are the songs, of course, and some electrifying concert moments, but mostly there is the mournful, self-pitying descent of this young man into selfish and boring stupor … The last hour of the film, in particular, is a dirge of wretched excess, of drunken would-be orgies and obnoxious behavior.” In her review for The New York Times, Caryn James wrote, “At its best, the film's haunted Doors music and visceral look creates the sense of being in some hypnotic trance. But by the end, audiences may feel they have been beaten over the head with a stick for two hours.” Time magazine’s Richard Corliss wrote, “His movies make people edgy, and that's a good thing. But this time Stone is a symptom of the disease he would chart … Maybe it was fun to bathe in decadence back then. But this is no time to wallow in that mire.” In his review for the Washington Post, Hal Hinson wrote, “Amid all this trippy incoherence, the performances are almost irrelevant. Kilmer does a noteworthy impersonation of the singer, especially onstage, where he gets Morrison's self-absorption. He gets his coiled explosiveness too, but the element of danger in Morrison is missing.”

The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, “Some of the effects are arresting, and apart from some unfortunate attempts to ‘re-create’ Ed Sullivan, Andy Warhol, and Nico, the movie does a pretty good job with period ambience. But it's a long haul waiting for the hero to keel over.” Famous conservative pundit George Will not only attacked Morrison, calling him, “not particularly interesting” and that he “left some embarrassing poetry and a few mediocre rock albums,” but also the film: “for today’s audiences, Stone’s loving re-creation of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district is just a low-rent Williamsburg, an interesting artifact but no place for a pilgrimage.” However, Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “As Morrison, Val Kilmer gives a star-making performance. Lolling around in his love beads and black-leather pants, his thick dark mane falling over features that are at once baby-sweet and preternaturally dangerous, Kilmer captures, to an astonishing degree, the hooded, pantherish charisma that made Morrison the most erotically charged pop performer since the early days of Elvis.”

So how did the actual Doors feel about the film? Robby Krieger was impressed with Kilmer’s portrayal of Morrison: “It was really weird. I even called him ‘Jim’ a few times without meaning to.” In his memoirs, John Densmore wrote, “For what it is, I do think Oliver Stone’s vision of Jim Morrison has integrity; however, it is a film about the myth of Jim Morrison.” Ray Manzarek said of the film, “The movie misses out – Oliver Stone blew it ... The movie looks good, sure, but the basic heart is stone cold.”

Stone also uses several film techniques like special lighting to create a red hue over everything and a swaying, chaotic camera to create an off-kilter hallucinogenic world that he would later perfect in Natural Born Killers (1994). This effect gives the film the overall effect of a peyote experience without actually taking drugs. The Doors also captures the madness and paranoia of the era with quick edits of the horrors of Vietnam, and the Robert F. Kenney assassination juxtaposed with the belligerent cops at every concert, and the rampant drug use associated with this scene. One band member says during the film that he took drugs to expand his mind not to escape as Morrison did. As the scenes of Morrison’s excessive behavior pile up, a feeling of exhaustion sets in as it begins to be all too much which, I guess, is kind of how Morrison felt towards the end. A feeling of burn out takes over and the end of the film can’t come soon enough. The experience of watching The Doors leaves one drained and you really feel like you’ve been somewhere and experienced something.

The Doors is a potent reminder of the self-destructive power of rock stars that the media manipulates and thrives on. At one point in the film during a press conference, Morrison says, “I believe in excess,” and in doing so underlines the whole thesis of the film. The Doors is a film about excess on many levels: on a individual level with Morrison himself, on a national level with thousands of fans going crazy at the mere sight of the singer, and on a personal level with Stone’s own preoccupations permeating throughout. The Doors also examines the seductive power of the cult of personality, the god-like status to which people like Morrison or someone like Kurt Cobain are elevated to and the inevitable crash that follows when they can’t handle the responsibility. Morrison represents a generation trying to escape the pain of a crazy world. Like Cobain, Morrison wanted to ultimately be seen as an artist, but was treated in life and after his death like a commodity (Morrison was once referred to as the “ultimate Barbie doll.”). Both men were consumed by the very thing that created them: the media. They also ended their own lives, Cobain via suicide and Morrison through alcohol abuse. The Doors is a powerful study of excesses of every kind: sex, drugs, alcohol, and fame on an individual and on a society.

SOURCES

Broeske, P. “Stormy Rider.” Sunday Herald. March 10, 1991.

Green, Tom. “Kilmer’s Uncanny Portrait of Morrison Opens Career Doors.” USA Today. March 4, 1991.

Hall, Carla. “Val Kilmer, Lighting the Fire.” Washington Post. March 3, 1991.

Kilday, Gregg. “Love Me Two Times.” Entertainment Weekly. March 1, 1991.

MacInnis, Craig. “The Myth is Huge, But the Truth is the Lure of the Eternal.” Toronto Star. March 2, 1991.

McDonnell, D. “Legendary Rocker Lives Again On.” Herald Sun. March 2, 1991.

McDonnell, D. “Rider on the Storm.” Courier-Mail. March 16, 191.

Mitchell, Justin. “Opening Up A Closed Door.” St. Petersburg Times. December 28, 1990.

“Oliver Stone and The Doors.” The Economist. March 16, 1991.

Riordan, James. Stone: A Biography of Oliver Stone. Hyperion. 1995.

Thomas, Karen. “Helping Stage The Doors.” USA Today. March 12, 1991.

Thomas, Karen. “Ex-Doors Member Slams Stone, Film.” USA Today. April 4, 1991.