It hasn’t been terribly uncommon since the late ’60s for musicians to get behind the camera, whether for a straight concert film, a tour documentary or some kind of silly narrative focused on themselves and their bands. Jerry Garcia co-directed The Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa co-directed 200 Motels, The Beatles collectively co-directed The Magical Mystery Tourand separately John, Paul and Ringo has each taken the helm on a film project, some more artsy (John and Yoko’s cinematic collaborations, like Up Your Legs Forever) or less self-focused (Ringo’s Marc Bolan doc, Born to Boogie) than others.
Now it’s a little more common for musicians to become directors of fictional films that aren’t so reflexive. Many don’t even have anything to do with music at all. And many are so awful that it’s safe to say the filmmaker should stick to music making. This week, IFC releases the directorial debut of Madonna (Filth and Wisdom), and Beastie Boy Adam Yauch has a new basketball documentary (Gunnin’ for That #1 Spot) hitting stores, so we’d like to celebrate by looking at some other musicians who turned filmmaker, for better or worse.
Ten years ago, I attended a book signing for Ray Manzarek’s memoir, Light My Fire: My Life with the Doors, and I asked the author/keyboardist why he doesn’t just make another movie about The Doors. Manzarek had spent most of the event complaining about Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, and he did graduate from film school, so I figured he’d at least thought about the idea. But he responded by saying he had other films he wanted to make, from original scripts he’d written.
I’m pretty sure one of the scripts he mentioned then became his 2000 film Love Her Madly, which has a nice exploitive title. And now according to Billboard, he’s got four more scripts, including one based on either the song or album L.A. Woman (the best driving album of all time, IMHO) and another that sounds suspiciously like the scene from Stone’s film in which the band and friends do drugs in the desert. But apparently he’s still not up to the challenge of writing something that will go against Stone and Randall Jahnson’s script for The Doors.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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