Shortly after we'd met, Jim announced that The Doors were dumping their management and going independent. Back then, everyone assumed that a rock group without professional management did not stand a chance of commercial success. But The Doors were definitely different, and their charismatic lead singer was such a free spirit, top-down corporate control was not an option.
        There were, I was finding as I got to know him, two or more Jim Morrisons. Sober and contemplative, he tended to be the quiet, intense guy in the shadowy corner. After a couple of drinks, another Morrison emerged, and held everyone spellbound with straight-faced clowning and unpredictability. I would soon realize that he had been born with this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde latent alcoholism.
        :At a party we had at my house, he suddenly went missing. I noticed guests were clustering in a certain area of the livingroom and furtively glancing out the front picture window. Jim was out on the deck under a full moon with a girl he'd just met at the party delivering artful fellatio.
        At another point in that same party, while we were playing The Doors' newly released second album, “Strange Days,” Jim suddenly rushed the turntable, threw the vinyl disc to the floor and proceeded to stomp it under his boots. Later, sober, he brought me a replacement.
        When he came to dinner alone and it was just the three of us, we talked art, literature and philosophy into the wee hours, and another aspect of Morrison emerged—this one erudite and full of original ideas. Now and then he would recite a line or two of his poetry, then smile at our reactions and say, “Maybe it will get into a song.”
        During one of those after-dinner discussions, we explored the question, “Who really owns a work of art?” The artist? Naw. He or she is merely a conduit for the work to come through. The buyer of the work? Naw. Art is an abstract essence, not a tangible property that can be bought and sold. The public? Not really because only a small minority really resonate with true art. Jim said this was why he really loved being in music, that music is the most abstract and transcendent form of art. He spoke of wanting The Doors' performances to be as trance inducing as a shaman's ceremony—a concept unheard of back then. And he said he wanted to make films that would be poems in visual form.
        He read my novel The Maniac Responsible and declared he wanted to co-write a screenplay with me, then direct as well as play the lead role. At the time, this novel was optioned to a bigtime producer, but he hadn't been able to get a viable screenplay written and time was running out on the option. The main character in that novel gets broken down into seven different aspects of himself, a spectrum of selves from reasonable and benign to homicidal maniac. Knowing Jim manifested various aspects of himself, I felt it would be “character acting” for him to play the lead.

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