Relighting the Doors’ fire in film -- and maybe Vegas

This is the end? Not for the Doors, not even close. Jim Morrison died in Paris in summer 1971, but his music not only keeps playing, it’s getting louder. The surviving members of the band -- Ray Manzarek, John Densmore and Robby Krieger -- have been mired in assorted legal disputes in recent years, but now word is coming from their reunifying camp that they believe it’s time to put their band’s legacy (and, ahem, potential profitability) front and center.

Official news came last week that Dick Wolf, the force behind the ubiquitous “Law & Order” franchises, is producing a full-length documentary on the Doors for theatrical release -- with all three surviving Doors on board as co-producers. Also on tap is a project from Stacy Peralta (a principal in the two “Dogtown” films) titled “Six Nights, Six Records, Six Years,” which is described by Daily Variety as a “social history” documentary that plugs into the Doors jukebox.

Next year is the 40th anniversary of the band’s first album, and those films lead a flurry of tie-in projects that include lavish new coffee-table books, albums of poetry and, of course, plenty of music releases that range from the rare to the repackaged.

And talk about strange days, there’s even a plan to take the Doors to Vegas in 2008. Jeff Jampol of Doors Music Co. said the surviving members and Morrison’s estate are negotiating a deal in the “tens of millions of dollars” to build a special theater of 800 to 1,200 seats at a Las Vegas casino and tailor-design a standing show. Although the music of Queen, Bob Dylan and Billy Joel has in recent years been repurposed as stage shows, Jambol said: “We don’t feel a Broadway show or dance piece or circus piece fits what the Doors stand for.”

So how would the Doors handle it? One of the ideas now is a midnight show with no live actors that borrows from both Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion and those old Pink Floyd laser-light shows. The audience would enter the venue single-file through a dark hallway with piped-in Morrison poetry. Inside, the seats would be individually wired for sound and surrounded by an iMax screen, holograms, computer-generated special effects and all manner of weirdness. The story line and characters are a work in progress, but it would be fiction, not the band’s story.

“We’ve got something very special in the works.... We’re creating something, but we’re not sure what it’s called,” Jampol said. “The overarching watch-phrase is we want to do something that speaks about the ethos and vibe and feeling and meaning of the Doors: dark, edgy, dangerous, questioning authority, otherworldly.” If all goes well, the Doors might even keep their eyes on the road. “If it works in Vegas, I’d love to make it transportable.”

*

-- Mike Boehm

and Geoff Boucher