The Auteurs Film & Cast Member Database
After yesterday’s announcement, there are a few films missing their (new) Cannes citations:
In Competition:
In the Fog
The Hunt (for when it eventually gets added)
Un Certain Regard:
7 Days in Havana
Laurence Anyways
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Confessions of a Child of the Century
Out of Competition:
Dracula
Ai to Makoto
an image for orson welles’ fountain of youth. the current image is from an amateur remake of the film on vimeo. this may be as good as it gets for a tv show from 1956
A suggested still for the profile of JIM MORRISON
“People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.”
James Douglas “Jim” Morrison (December 8, 1943 – July 3, 1971) was the lead singer and lyricist of the rock band The Doors, as well as a poet. Following The Doors’ explosive rise to fame in 1967, Morrison developed a severe alcohol and drug dependency that culminated in his death at the age of 27 in Paris. He is presumed to have died from a heroin overdose, but as no autopsy was performed, the events surrounding his death and the exact cause of it continue to be disputed by many to this day. Morrison was well known for often improvising spoken word poetry passages while the band played live. Due to his wild personality and performances, he is regarded by critics and fans as one of the most iconic, charismatic and pioneering frontmen in rock music history. Morrison was ranked number 47 on Rolling Stone’s list of the “100 Greatest Singers of All Time”, and number 22 on Classic Rock Magazine’s “50 Greatest Singers In Rock”.
James Douglas Morrison was born in Melbourne, Florida, to future Rear Admiral George Stephen Morrison and Clara Morrison. Morrison had a sister, Anne Robin, who was born in 1947 in Albuquerque, New Mexico; and a brother, Andrew Lee Morrison, who was born in 1948 in Los Altos, California. He was of Scottish descent. In 1947, Morrison, then four years old, allegedly witnessed a car accident in the desert, in which a family of Native Americans were injured and possibly killed. He referred to this incident in a spoken word performance on the song “Dawn’s Highway” from the album An American Prayer, and again in the songs “Peace Frog” and “Ghost Song.” Morrison believed this incident to be the most formative event of his life, and made repeated references to it in the imagery in his songs, poems, and interviews. His family does not recall this incident happening in the way he told it. According to the Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive, Morrison’s family did drive past a car accident on an Indian reservation when he was a child, and he was very upset by it. The book The Doors, written by the remaining members of The Doors, explains how different Morrison’s account of the incident was from the account of his father. This book quotes his father as saying, “We went by several Indians. It did make an impression on him [the young James]. He always thought about that crying Indian.” This is contrasted sharply with Morrison’s tale of “Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death.” In the same book, his sister is quoted as saying, “He enjoyed telling that story and exaggerating it. He said he saw a dead Indian by the side of the road, and I don’t even know if that’s true.”
With his father in the United States Navy, Morrison’s family moved often. He spent part of his childhood in San Diego. While his father was stationed at NAS Kingsville, he attended Flato Elementary in Kingsville, Texas. In 1958 Morrison attended Alameda High School in Alameda, California. He graduated from George Washington High School (now George Washington Middle School) in Alexandria, Virginia in June 1961. His father was also stationed at Mayport Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida.
Morrison was inspired by the writings of philosophers and poets. He was influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, whose views on aesthetics, morality, and the Apollonian and Dionysian duality would appear in his conversation, poetry and songs. He read Plutarch’s “Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans”. He read the works of the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, whose style would later influence the form of Morrison’s short prose poems. He was influenced by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Charles Baudelaire, Molière and Franz Kafka. Honoré de Balzac and Jean Cocteau, along with most of the French existentialist philosophers. His senior-year English teacher said that, “Jim read as much and probably more than any student in class, but everything he read was so offbeat I had another teacher, who was going to the Library of Congress, check to see if the books Jim was reporting on actually existed. I suspected he was making them up, as they were English books on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century demonology. I’d never heard of them, but they existed, and I’m convinced from the paper he wrote that he read them, and the Library of Congress would’ve been the only source.”
Morrison went to live with his paternal grandparents in Clearwater, Florida, where he attended classes at St. Petersburg College (then known as a junior college). In 1962, he transferred to Florida State University (FSU) in Tallahassee, where he appeared in a school recruitment film. While attending FSU, Morrison was arrested for a prank, following a home football game.nIn January 1964 Morrison moved to Los Angeles to attend the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He enrolled in Jack Hirschman’s class on Antonin Artaud in the Comparative Literature program within the UCLA English Department. Artaud’s brand of surrealist theatre had a profound impact on Morrison’s dark poetic sensibility of cinematic theatricality.
Morrison completed his undergraduate degree at UCLA’s film school within the Theater Arts department of the College of Fine Arts in 1965. He never went to the graduation ceremony, instead having his degree diploma mailed to him. He made several short films while attending UCLA. First Love, the first of these films, made with Morrison’s classmate and roommate Max Schwartz, was released to the public when it appeared in a documentary about the film Obscura. During these years, while living in Venice Beach, he became friends with writers at the Los Angeles Free Press. Morrison was an advocate of the underground newspaper until his death in 1971. He later conducted a lengthy and in-depth interview with Bob Chorush and Andy Kent, both working for the Free Press at the time (January 1971), and was planning on visiting the headquarters of the busy newspaper shortly before leaving for Paris.
In the summer of 1965, after graduating with a degree from the UCLA film school, Morrison led a bohemian lifestyle in Venice Beach. Living on the rooftop of a building inhabited by his old UCLA cinematography friend, Dennis Jakobs, he wrote the lyrics of many of the early songs the Doors would later perform live and record on albums, the most notable being “Moonlight Drive” and “Hello, I Love You”. According to Jakobs, he lived on canned beans and LSD for several months. Morrison and fellow UCLA student, Ray Manzarek, were the first two members of the Doors, forming the group during that same summer of 1965. They had previously met months earlier as fellow cinematography students. The now-legendary story claims that Manzarek was lying on the beach at Venice one day, where he accidentally encountered Morrison. He was impressed with Morrison’s poetic lyrics, claiming that they were “rock group” material. Thereafter, drummer John Densmore and guitarist Robby Krieger joined. Krieger auditioned at Densmore’s recommendation and was then added to the lineup. All three musicians shared a common interest in the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s meditation practices at the time, attending scheduled classes, but Morrison was not involved in this series of classes, claiming later that he “did not meditate”.
The Doors took their name from the title of Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception (a reference to the unlocking of doors of perception through psychedelic drug use). Huxley’s own title was a quotation from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which Blake wrote: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Although Morrison was known as the lyricist of the group, Krieger also made significant lyrical contributions, writing or co-writing some of the group’s biggest hits, including “Light My Fire”, “Love Me Two Times”, “Love Her Madly”, and “Touch Me”. On the other hand, Morrison, who didn’t write songs using an instrument, would come up with vocal melodies for his own lyrics, with the other band members contributing chords and rhythm. He didn’t play any instrument live (except for maracas, tambourine, and harmonica on a few occasions) or in the studio (excluding maracas, tambourine, handclaps, and whistling). However, he did play the grand piano on “Orange County Suite” and a Moog synthesizer on “Strange Days”.
In June 1966, Morrison and the Doors were the opening act at the Whisky a Go Go on the last week of the residency of Van Morrison’s band Them. Van’s influence on Jim’s developing stage performance was later noted by John Densmore in his book Riders On The Storm: “Jim Morrison learned quickly from his near-namesake’s stagecraft, his apparent recklessness, his air of subdued menace, the way he would improvise poetry to a rock beat, even his habit of crouching down by the bass drum during instrumental breaks.” On the final night, the two Morrisons and their two bands jammed together on “Gloria”.
The Doors achieved national recognition after signing with Elektra Records in 1967. The single “Light My Fire” spent three weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in July/August 1967. Later, the Doors appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, a popular Sunday night variety series that had introduced the Beatles and Elvis Presley to the United States. Ed Sullivan requested two songs from the Doors for the show, “People Are Strange” and “Light My Fire”. Sullivan’s censors insisted that the Doors change the lyrics of the song “Light My Fire” from “Girl we couldn’t get much higher” to “Girl we couldn’t get much better” for the television viewers; this was reportedly due to what was perceived as a reference to drugs in the original lyrics. After giving assurances of compliance to Sullivan, Morrison then proceeded to sing the song with the original lyrics anyway. When Morrison was later asked why he defied Sullivan’s instructions to change the lyrics to the song, he flatly said that he simply forgot to make the change. This infuriated Sullivan, and he refused to shake hands with Morrison or any other band member after their performance. He had a show producer tell the band that they will never do The Ed Sullivan Show again. Morrison reportedly said to the producer, in a defiant tone, “Hey man. We just did the Sullivan Show!”
In 1967, Morrison and the Doors produced a promotional film for “Break on Through (To the Other Side)”, which was their first single release. The video featured the four members of the group playing the song on a darkened set with alternating views and close-ups of the performers while Morrison lip-synched the lyrics. Morrison and the Doors continued to make music videos, including “The Unknown Soldier”, “Moonlight Drive”, and “People Are Strange”. By the release of their second album, Strange Days, the Doors had become one of the most popular rock bands in the United States. Their blend of blues and dark rock tinged with psychedelia included a number of original songs and distinctive cover versions, such as their rendition of “Alabama Song”, from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s opera, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. The band also performed a number of extended concept works, including the songs “The End”, “When the Music’s Over”, and “Celebration of the Lizard”.
In 1967, photographer Joel Brodsky took a series of black-and-white photos of Morrison, in a photo shoot known as “The Young Lion” photo session. These photographs are considered among the most iconic images of Jim Morrison and are frequently used as covers for compilation albums, books, and other memorabilia of the Doors and Morrison. In 1968, the Doors released their third studio album, Waiting for the Sun. Their fourth album, The Soft Parade, was released in 1969. It was the first album where the individual band members were given credit on the inner sleeve for the songs they had written. Previously, each song on their albums had been credited simply to “The Doors.”
On September 6 and 7, 1968, the Doors played four performances at The Roundhouse, London, England with Jefferson Airplane which were filmed by Granada for a television documentary “The Doors are Open” directed by John Sheppard. Around this time, Morrison— who had long been a heavy drinker —started showing up for recording sessions visibly inebriated. He was also frequently late for live performances. As a result, the band would play instrumental music or force Manzarek to take on the singing duties to subdue the impatient audience. By 1969, the formerly svelte singer had gained weight, grown a beard and mustache, and had begun dressing more casually—abandoning the leather pants and concho belts for slacks, jeans and T-shirts.
During a March 1, 1969 concert at the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami, Morrison attempted to spark a riot in the audience. He failed, but a warrant for his arrest was issued by the Dade County Police department three days later for indecent exposure. Consequently, many of The Doors’ scheduled concerts were canceled. In 2007 Florida Governor Charlie Crist suggested the possibility of a posthumous pardon for Morrison, which was announced as successful on December 9, 2010. Drummer John Densmore denied Morrison ever exposed himself on stage that night.
Following The Soft Parade, The Doors released Morrison Hotel. After a lengthy break the group reconvened in October 1970 to record what would become their final album with Morrison, entitled L.A. Woman. Shortly after the recording sessions for the album began, producer Paul A. Rothchild— who had overseen all of their previous recordings —left the project. Engineer Bruce Botnick took over as producer.
Morrison began writing in earnest during his adolescence. At UCLA he studied the related fields of theater, film, and cinematography. He self-published two separate volumes of his poetry in 1969, entitled The Lords / Notes on Vision and The New Creatures. The Lords consists primarily of brief descriptions of places, people, events and Morrison’s thoughts on cinema. The New Creatures verses are more poetic in structure, feel and appearance. These two books were later combined into a single volume titled The Lords and The New Creatures. These were the only writings published during Morrison’s lifetime. Morrison befriended Beat poet Michael McClure, who wrote the afterword for Danny Sugerman’s biography of Morrison, No One Here Gets Out Alive. McClure and Morrison reportedly collaborated on a number of unmade film projects, including a film version of McClure’s infamous play The Beard, in which Morrison would have played Billy the Kid.
After his death, a further two volumes of Morrison’s poetry were published. The contents of the books were selected and arranged by Morrison’s friend, photographer Frank Lisciandro, and girlfriend Pamela Courson’s parents, who owned the rights to his poetry. The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison Volume I is entitled Wilderness, and, upon its release in 1988, became an instant New York Times Bestseller. Volume II, The American Night, released in 1990, was also a success. Morrison recorded his own poetry in a professional sound studio on two separate occasions. The first was in March 1969 in Los Angeles and the second was on December 8, 1970. The latter recording session was attended by Morrison’s personal friends and included a variety of sketch pieces. Some of the segments from the 1969 session were issued on the bootleg album The Lost Paris Tapes and were later used as part of the Doors’ An American Prayer album, released in 1978. The album reached No. 54 on the music charts. Some poetry recorded from the December 1970 session remains unreleased to this day and is in the possession of the Courson family.
Morrison’s best-known but seldom seen cinematic endeavor is HWY: An American Pastoral, a project he started in 1969. Morrison financed the venture and formed his own production company in order to maintain complete control of the project. Paul Ferrara, Frank Lisciandro and Babe Hill assisted with the project. Morrison played the main character, a hitchhiker turned killer/car thief. Morrison asked his friend, composer/pianist Fred Myrow, to select the soundtrack for the film.
Morrison’s early life was a nomadic existence typical of military families. Jerry Hopkins recorded Morrison’s brother, Andy, explaining that his parents had determined never to use corporal punishment on their children. They instead instilled discipline and levied punishment by the military tradition known as dressing down. This consisted of yelling at and berating the children until they were reduced to tears and acknowledged their failings. Once Morrison graduated from UCLA, he broke off most contact with his family. By the time Morrison’s music ascended to the top of the charts (in 1967) he had not been in communication with his family for more than a year and falsely claimed that his parents and siblings were dead (or claiming, as it has been widely misreported, that he was an only child). This misinformation was published as part of the materials distributed with The Doors’ self-titled debut album.
George Morrison was not supportive of his son’s career choice in music. One day, an acquaintance brought over a record thought to have Jim on the cover. The record was the Doors self-titled debut. The young man played the record for Morrison’s father and family. Upon hearing the record, Morrison’s father wrote him a letter telling him “to give up any idea of singing or any connection with a music group because of what I consider to be a complete lack of talent in this direction.” In a letter to the Florida Probation and Parole Commission District Office dated October 2, 1970, Morrison’s father acknowledged the breakdown in family communications as the result of an argument over his assessment of his son’s musical talents. He said he could not blame his son for being reluctant to initiate contact and that he was proud of him nonetheless.
Morrison met his long-term companion, Pamela Courson, well before he gained any fame or fortune, and she encouraged him to develop his poetry. At times, Courson used the surname “Morrison” with his apparent consent or at least lack of concern. After Courson’s death on April 25, 1974, the probate court in California decided that she and Morrison had what qualified as a common-law marriage. Morrison’s and Courson’s relationship was a stormy one, with frequent loud arguments and periods of separation. Biographer Danny Sugerman surmised that part of their difficulties may have stemmed from a conflict between their respective commitments to an open relationship and the consequences of living in such a relationship. In 1970, Morrison participated in a Celtic Pagan handfasting ceremony with rock critic and science fiction/fantasy author Patricia Kennealy. Before witnesses, one of them a Presbyterian minister, the couple signed a document declaring themselves wed, but none of the necessary paperwork for a legal marriage was filed with the state. Kennealy discussed her experiences with Morrison in her autobiography Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison in an interview reported in the book Rock Wives.
Morrison also reportedly regularly had sex with fans (“groupies”) and had numerous short flings with female celebrities, including Nico, the singer associated with The Velvet Underground, a one night stand with singer Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane, an on-again-off-again relationship with 16 Magazine’s Gloria Stavers as well as an alleged alcohol-fueled encounter with Janis Joplin. However rock musician and rock star expert, Alice Cooper, declared on his syndicated radio show that Jim was scrupulously true to Pamela on tour, eschewing all sexual encounters. Linda Ashcroft, in her book, Wild Child: My Life With Jim Morrison details her life with Morrison as well. Judy Huddleston also recalls her relationship with Morrison in This is The End…My Only Friend: Living and Dying with Jim Morrison. At the time of his death there were as many as twenty paternity actions pending against him, although no claims were made against his estate by any of the putative paternity claimants.
Morrison flew with Pam to Paris in March 1971. They took up residence in the city in a rented apartment on the rue Beautreillis (on the Right Bank), and went for long walks throughout the city, admiring the city’s architecture. During this time, Morrison shaved his beard and lost some of the weight he had gained in the previous months. His last studio recording was with two American street musicians—a session dismissed by Manzarek as “drunken gibberish”. The session included a version of a song-in-progress, “Orange County Suite”, which can be heard on the bootleg The Lost Paris Tapes.
Morrison died on July 3, 1971 at age 27. In the official account of his death, he was found in a Paris apartment bathtub (at 17-19 rue Beautreillis, 4th “arrondissement”) by Courson. Pursuant to French law, no autopsy was performed because the medical examiner stated that there was no evidence of foul play. The absence of an official autopsy has left many questions regarding Morrison’s cause of death. In Wonderland Avenue, Danny Sugerman discussed his encounter with Courson after she returned to the United States. According to Sugerman’s account, Courson stated that Morrison had died of a heroin overdose, having insufflated what he believed to be cocaine. Sugerman added that Courson had given him numerous contradictory versions of Morrison’s death, saying at times that she had killed Morrison, or that his death was her fault. Courson’s story of Morrison’s unintentional ingestion of heroin, followed by his accidental overdose, is supported by the confession of Alain Ronay, who has written that Morrison died of a hemorrhage after snorting Courson’s heroin, and that Courson nodded off instead of phoning for medical help, leaving Morrison bleeding to death.
Ronay confessed in an article in Paris that he then helped cover up the circumstances of Morrison’s death. In the epilogue of No One Here Gets Out Alive, Hopkins and Sugerman write that Ronay and Agnès Varda say Courson lied to the police who responded to the death scene, and later in her deposition, telling them Morrison never took drugs. In the epilogue to No One Here Gets Out Alive, Hopkins says that 20 years after Morrison’s death, Ronay and Varda broke silence and gave this account: They arrived at the house shortly after Morrison’s death and Courson said that she and Morrison had taken heroin after a night of drinking. Morrison had been coughing badly, had gone to take a bath, and vomited blood. Courson said that he appeared to recover and that she then went to sleep. When she awoke sometime later Morrison was unresponsive, and so she called for medical assistance. Courson died of a heroin overdose three years later. Like Morrison, she was also 27 years old at the time of her death. Contrary to initial reports circulating in 1974, she was not buried with Morrison, but rather her cremated ashes were interred in a wall at Fairhaven Memorial Park in Santa Ana, California, with the plaque bearing the name “Pamela Susan Morrison”.
In the epilogue of No One Here Gets Out Alive, Hopkins and Sugerman also claim that Morrison had asthma and was suffering from a respiratory condition involving a chronic cough and vomiting blood on the night of his death. This theory is partially supported in The Doors (written by the remaining members of the band) in which they claim Morrison had been coughing up blood for nearly two months in Paris, but it should be noted that none of the members of The Doors were in Paris with Morrison in the months prior to his death.
According to an outside individual who alleges that she witnessed Morrison’s funeral at Père Lachaise Cemetery (a woman by the name of Madame Colinette who was at the cemetery that day mourning the recent loss of her husband) the ceremony was “pitiful”, with several of the attendants muttering a few words, throwing flowers over the casket, then leaving quickly and hastily within minutes as if their lives depended upon it. Those who attended included Alain Ronay, Agnes Varda, Bill Siddons (manager), Courson, and Robin Wertle (Morrison’s Canadian private secretary at the time for a few months).
In the first version of No One Here Gets Out Alive published in 1980, Sugerman and Hopkins gave some credence to the rumor that Morrison may not have died at all, calling the fake death theory “not as far-fetched as it might seem”. This theory led to considerable distress for Morrison’s loved ones over the years, notably when fans would stalk them, searching for evidence of Morrison’s whereabouts. In 1995 a new epilogue was added to Sugerman’s and Hopkins’s book, giving new facts about Morrison’s death and discounting the fake death theory, saying “As time passed, some of Jim and Pamela [Courson]‘s friends began to talk about what they knew, and although everything they said pointed irrefutably to Jim’s demise, there remained and probably always will be those who refuse to believe that Jim is dead and those who will not allow him to rest in peace.”
In a July 2007 newspaper interview, a self-described close friend of Morrison’s, Sam Bernett, resurrected an old rumor and announced that Morrison actually died of a heroin overdose in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus nightclub, on the Left Bank in Paris. Bernett claims that Morrison came to the club to buy heroin for Courson then did some himself and died in the bathroom. Bernett alleges that Morrison was then moved back to his rue Beautreillis apartment and dumped in the bathtub by the same two drug dealers from whom Morrison had purchased the heroin. Bernett says those who saw Morrison that night were sworn to secrecy in order to prevent a scandal for the famous club, and that some of the witnesses immediately left the country. There have been many other conspiracy theories surrounding Morrison’s death, but are less supported by witnesses than are the accounts of Ronay and Courson.
Morrison is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, one of the city’s most visited tourist attractions. The grave had no official marker until French officials placed a shield over it, which was stolen in 1973. The site previous to the 1973 theft (pictured, right) was covered with shells and letters. In 1981, Croatian sculptor Mladen Mikulin placed a bust of Morrison and a new gravestone with Morrison’s name at the grave to commemorate the 10th anniversary of his death; the bust was defaced through the years by cemetery vandals and later stolen in 1988. In the 1990s Morrison’s father, George Stephen Morrison, placed a flat stone on the grave. The stone bears the Greek inscription: ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ, literally meaning “according to his own daemon” and usually interpreted as “true to his own spirit”. Mikulin later made two more Morrison portraits in bronze but is awaiting the license to place a new sculpture on the tomb.
Biographers have consistently pointed to a number of writers and philosophers who influenced Morrison’s thinking and, perhaps, his behavior. While still in his teens Morrison discovered the work of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. He was also drawn to the poetry of William Blake, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. Beat Generation writers such as Jack Kerouac also had a strong influence on Morrison’s outlook and manner of expression; Morrison was eager to experience the life described in Kerouac’s On the Road. He was similarly drawn to the work of French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Céline’s book, Voyage au Bout de la Nuit (Journey to the End of the Night) and Blake’s Auguries of Innocence both echo through one of Morrison’s early songs, “End of the Night”. Morrison later met and befriended Michael McClure, a well known beat poet. McClure had enjoyed Morrison’s lyrics but was even more impressed by his poetry and encouraged him to further develop his craft.
Morrison’s vision of performance was colored by the works of 20th century French playwright Antonin Artaud (author of Theater and its Double) and by Julian Beck’s Living Theater. Other works relating to religion, mysticism, ancient myth and symbolism were of lasting interest, particularly Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. James Frazer’s The Golden Bough also became a source of inspiration and is reflected in the title and lyrics of the song “Not to Touch the Earth”.
Morrison was particularly attracted to the myths and religions of Native American cultures. While he was still in school, his family moved to New Mexico where he got to see some of the places and artifacts important to the American Southwest indigenous cultures. These interests appear to be the source of many references to creatures and places such as lizards, snakes, deserts and “ancient lakes” that appear in his songs and poetry. His interpretation of the practices of a Native American “shaman” were worked into parts of Morrison’s stage routine, notably in his interpretation of the Ghost Dance, and a song on his later poetry album, The Ghost Song.
Jim Morrison’s vocal influences included Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, which is evident in his own baritone crooning style used in several of The Doors songs. It is mentioned within the pages of “No One Here Gets Out Alive” by Danny Sugerman, that Morrison as a teenager was such a fan of Presley’s music that he demanded people be quiet when Elvis was on the radio. The Frank Sinatra influence is mentioned in the pages of “The Doors, The Illustrated History” also by Sugerman, where Frank Sinatra is listed on Morrison’s Band Bio as being his favorite singer. Reference to this can also be found in a Rolling Stone article about Jim Morrison, regarding the Top 100 rock singers of all time.
Morrison was, and continues to be, one of the most popular and influential singer-songwriters in rock history.
—WikipediaHere’s a picture, a quote and a bio for Gilles Groulx’ profile :
“A filmmaker is a journalist: he must inform and comment. For me, what counts in a film is the moral, what the author has to say. Mere technique is meaningless. The story, too, is meaningless; it’s the pretext for the film; it’s like the model for an impressionist painter.”
Gilles Groulx grew up in a working-class family with 14 children. After studying business in school, he went to work in an office but found the white-collar environment too stultifying. Deciding that the only way out was to become an intellectual, he attended the “École du meuble” for a time and was a supporter of Borduas’ automatiste movement. He also made 8mm amateur films, which landed him a job as picture editor in the news department of the CBC. After three short personal films that confirmed his talent, he was hired by the NFB at the beginning of the Candid Eye movement in 1956.
His first film with the NFB was Les Raquetteurs (1958). Co-directed with Michel Brault, it employed the candid eye approach and was a landmark film. With Golden Gloves in 1961, Groulx’s focus shifted from the crowd to the individual, but still showing the individual in his environment.
Voir Miami (1962) revealed Groulx’s poetic side. Although it presents an indictment of contemporary America, it does so in a poetic, almost lyrical style.
In 1964, Groulx turned to a highly social and political type of filmmaking, which would be characteristic of his work to the very end. Le Chat dans le sac / The Cat in the Bag, his first feature-length drama, is about coming of age: for the protagonists as they face difficult political choices, and possibly for the Quebec people as well. Not only did Groulx write and direct the film, he also did his own editing (as he would for all subsequent films). In his dramas, Groulx liked to film non-professionals who were the real characters in the story or who were very similar to them and could improvise within a given situation.
Before undertaking another feature, Groulx made the documentary short Un jeu si simple (1965), a dramatic look at Quebec’s national sport of hockey.
This was followed in 1967 by the film Où êtes-vous donc?, a complex collage of images reflecting the daily lives of Quebecers. Groulx questions their choice of lifestyle through an unconventional filmic language giving unprecedented importance to sound. Barraging the spectators with a disturbing mix of chanting voices, songs, quotations and advertisements from the mass media, the film is a protest against the consumer society, a denunciation of the dehumanizing mechanisms created and used by man against man.
Continuing in this pamphleteering vein, Groulx made 24 heures ou plus, a veritable call to revolution, which was censored by the NFB. Shot at the end of 1971, the film was not officially released until 1977, although a bootleg video version of it was seen by thousands of people.
In 1977, he directed the feature-length documentary Première question sur le bonheur, a Mexico-Canada co-production in which Groulx again questions the exploitation of man by man, but this time in the context of rural Mexico.
In 1980, Groulx was involved in a serious automobile accident that put an end to his career, although he did manage to come back in 1982 and complete the feature film he had been working on. Au Pays de Zom is a scathingly funny satire on the businessman ethos in the unexpected form of a musical, in which Joseph Rouleau, an opera singer greatly admired by Groulx, plays the role not of a romantic hero but of a financier.
Groulx’s films are the work of a worried man perpetually questioning life and the world around him. Through them, he explored different aspects of Quebec society, always varying his style to suit the subject. He was one of the first Quebec filmmakers to make auteur films, both documentary and drama. Overall, it could be said that his films convey a Marxist philosophy with a Brechtian aesthetic.
In 1985, the Government of Quebec presented Groulx with the Albert Tessier Award for lifetime achievement. —National Film Board of Canada
Here’s a picture, a quote and a bio for Denis Héroux’s profile :
“(on Jusqu’au cou) Let us say immediately that the film’s budget did not allow me to use professional actors. I had to find students whose personality would correspond to that of the characters which I thought of. But gradually as the filming progressed, they evolved, they changed, or simply didn’t react as I had expected. We had to redirect the scenario in order to adapt to them, because it was them, in short, who were important. Their own truth…”
Director, Producer
(b. July 15, 1941 Montreal, Quebec)
First as a director and later as a producer, Denis Héroux extablished himself as a key figure in the evolution of Quebec’s film industry. While studying history at the University of Montreal, Héroux collaborated with Denys Arcand and Stéphane Venne on the first modern Quebec feature, and one of the first statements about Quebec’s changing society and moral outlook – a film about student life called Seul ou avec d’autres (1962).
From 1962 to 1968, Héroux taught history and wrote two history books while also directing films. Jusqu’au cou (1964) and Pas de vacances pour les idoles (1965) are both refreshing and free expressions of life in Quebec. By the late sixties, this commercially shrewd Montrealer had become one of Quebec’s first successful private industry filmmakers with the erotic hits Valérie (1968) and L’Initiation (1970), two films that initiated the cycle of “maple syrup porno.”
In 1975, riding the success of several other popular features he directed, such as the swashbuckler Quelques arpents de neige (1973), he became involved in co-production projects and big-budget Quebec features. He went on to pioneer international co-productions with films such as Atlantic City (1980) and Quest for Fire (1981), and was a co-founder of Alliance Entertainment, a company he left in the late eighties.
Héroux, the older brother of prolific Quebec film and television producer Claude Héroux, is a recipient of the Order of Canada. His other honours include two Genie Awards for Best Motion Picture: Les Plouffe (1981) and The Bay Boy (1985). He also received an Academy Award® nomination for Best Picture for Atlantic City (1980). —Canadian Film Encyclopedia
Better quality profile photo for Jean Pierre Lefebvre :
Profile picture for Nadia El Fani (http://mubi.com/cast_members/268069)
Picture and bio for François Delisle : http://mubi.com/cast_members/105299
François Delisle, born March 22, 1967 in Montreal (Quebec), is a writer, producer and director in Canada.
Before beginning his studies in film, he made several experimental shorts in super-8mm. During and after his studies, he directed two short films, La Mer who cares! From the gun and knife. In 1991, Delisle was noticed by the critics with his medium-length-Beebe Plain when he was named best young actor at the Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois. In 1994, Ruth, his first feature film, raises the critical acclaim and is presented in Quebec, Canada, Germany, Belgium and France. In 2002 the company founded Delisle Movies 53/12 to direct and produce her second feature film, Happiness is a Sad Song (2004). The film gained international recognition by being featured in over twenty film festivals and film events. In 2007, You (movie, 2007) triggers the passions in the audience and critics. Fragile and uncompromising film, Toi’s career has unfolded at a national and international level.
Movies 53/12 is a space where Delisle stubbornly defends, through its involvement in both the creation as in film production, independent cinema and staff.
Duplicate entries:
http://mubi.com/cast_members/346410
and
http://mubi.com/cast_members/40404
Tiger Killer (http://mubi.com/films/tiger-killer)
Please change the still to the film INVASIÓN(1969) by Hugo Santiago to this one:
Noite Vazia (I’ll insist on this picture! Hehe)
Alone on the Pacific (please delete this duplicate page)
How to Live in the German Federal Republic
Cast List Correction
This Larry Kent was never in Her Wild Oat… it was produced 10 years before he was born.
There needs to be a second page for the Larry Kent who was in that film.
Picture for the movie : Un pays sans bon sens! : http://mubi.com/films/un-pays-sans-bon-sens
Change of Still for Lisandro Alonso’s “LIVERPOOL” (2008)
Still for Vexille (http://mubi.com/films/vexille), as it currently does not have one.
Still suggestion for The Color of Iris
Profile picture for Jalal Moghadam: http://mubi.com/cast_members/89446
Edoardo Gabriellini of Figli delle Stelle and Edoardo Gabriellini of Ovosodo don’t exist. The correct name of both is Edoardo Gabbriellini (2 b in the surname).
Cecilia Dazi of La Famiglia is a mistake. The correct name is Cecilia Dazzi
The director of Il Posto dell’Anima is Riccardo Milani (and not Riccardo Mialni)
The quote in Maria Felix profile should read:
““I divorced when I was seventeen, but my husband kept my son. I wanted him with me, but to get him back, I had to work to make money, to have some power, to be able to tell the judge that I could feed my son all by myself. Cinema does not interest me particularly. But when we have something that motivates us, that works as a career. Cinema paid me the most, and I wanted money. That is why I did cinema.””
A bio and a picture for Anne Émond : http://mubi.com/cast_members/63664
Anne Émond is a Montreal-based screenwriter and filmmaker. In 2005, she earned a Bachelor Degree in Film production from Université du Québec à Montréal. In the last five years, she has written and directed seven short flms. At the 2009 Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois, she was awarded the Best Direction Coop Vidéo Award for her short film L’ordre des choses. The short film was also nominated for the Jutra award. Naissances was selected for Canada Top Ten 2009 Palmares, and won the prize for Best narrative short film at the last edition of Brooklyn International Film Festival. Her first feature film, Nuit # 1, was released in 2011.
(forgot the “u”)
Change stills for “THE TRAVELLERS” (1992) 
“THE QUINCE TREE SUN” (1992)
Ninni Bruschetta and Antonino Bruschetta are the same person. Please chose one name. I suggest Ninni Bruschetta
Profile Pic and quote for Sonny Carl Davis
These fucking youngsters today, it’s like, “How much money do you need? Why not just go shoot the son of a bitch?” “We need a location.” Fuck the location! If they run you off, just pack up and move! On “Hell Of A Note,” we took the hood off the truck so Eagle could shoot through the windshield.
AV Club Interview
Profile pic and quote for Lou Perryman
[On why he quit acting] My political beliefs. My spiritual beliefs. It’s all trash. And Chuck Norris, I’d flush that cocksucker down the toilet[….]I regret being in any of that goddamn Walker, Texas Ranger shit. Motherfucker couldn’t act his way out of a rubber. Jesus, he’s fucking terrible.
Av Club Interview
The Eagle Pennell quote doesn’t make much sense as it is.
“Being forced out … They’re loners, like the old heroes used to be, but they’re not kids’ role models anymore.”
It might make more sense to have the entire quote from the interview, with the unquoted part in brackets:
[His characters, as he put it in a 1980 interview in Framework, are people] “being forced out . . . They’re loners, like the old heroes used to be, but they’re not kids’ role models anymore.”
fake beard
Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan (Ai Nu) is directed by Chor Yuen