See? Even broke film students can go off and start a little rock band that could eventually be hailed as the greatest in rock history.
Here's a nice little treasure I stumbled upon; from The Smith Tapes archives on Soundcloud.com comes the Doors' legendary frontman on how the iconic group started.
For those of you Doors fans that weren't aware, Jim Morrison attended film classes at UCLA in 1965, eventually producing a student film and graduating with a filmmaking degree. After the college days, he ended up living on the beach, ran into an old chum named Ray Manzarek, and...well, I'm sure you know the rest.
Jim ended up putting his film skills back into use long after he and the Doors became established as a dynamic rock group, when he wrote and directed a short film called HWY: An American Pastoral in 1969. Parts of this rarely-seen film can be viewed in the quintessential Doors documentary, 2009's When You're Strange, as well as what seems to be a minute portion of Jim's UCLA student thesis.
As a film student, music lover and devoted Doors fan myself, I mind myself fascinated by Morrison's life and his interests and character. Even though he made relatively few films in his lifetime, his respect and passion for the cinematic arts was relevant in other manifestations, like his poetry and some of the lyrical content of Doors songs (such as the ironically-named "Twentieth Century Fox" or his poem "The Movie" off the An American Prayer album).
Anyway, that's today's interesting little tidbit.
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