Dan Ramos

Val Kilmer wanted the role of Jim Morrison so badly he spent thousands of his own dollars on an eight-minute audition tape. In it, he slipped between the different versions of the Lizard King—young and wild, later and heavier—singing and reading poetry until Oliver Stone had no choice but to pay attention. He wasn’t even a big Doors fan at first, beyond the radio hits. So he taught himself roughly fifty songs by heart. Fifteen of them ended up in the movie, and he sang nearly all the vocals himself. When the real band members listened, they sometimes couldn’t tell Kilmer’s voice from Morrison’s. For nearly a year before cameras rolled, he lived it. He studied every scrap of footage, practiced the stage prowl (even getting tips from Paula Abdul), and absorbed endless stories from producer Paul Rothchild. He wore the tight leather pants until they were properly gamey. Special contact lenses dilated his pupils so he always looked a little stoned—and made his balance unsteady, which helped the performance along. Before filming began, more than a hundred people gathered around a campfire on a Malibu beach. They threw herbs into the flames, circled, and retraced Morrison’s steps in a kind of purification ritual. Kilmer, hair already dyed and permed into the right shaggy shape, walked with them. On set he rarely dropped character. The schedule was brutal, Stone wanted the mood, and Kilmer had already decided he was mostly playing a poet who happened to be a rock star. Clothes stayed unwashed. People got called by their character names. When it was over, he needed therapy to climb back out of the role. Years later, fans still sometimes tattooed Kilmer’s face thinking it was Morrison. He took it as the highest compliment. The man who once said the leather pants probably killed Morrison had spent a year breathing in them anyway; and made the rest of us believe, for a couple of hours, that the Lizard King had stepped back into the light 🎶🎤🎸