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'The
‘London Fog’ club: The Viper Room,
Sunset Boulevard, West Hollywood |
The bar, where bad boy Morrison takes a pee against
the counter, is
Barney's
Beanery, 8447 Santa Monica Boulevard, a
West
Hollywood drinking hole since 1927, when
it served up beans to travellers on the old Route
66 into the city. It’s alleged that Jean Harlow
used to pick up men here, and it’s where Janis
Joplin spent her last evening. It’s enjoyably
raucous, and where else but in Hollywood is the karaoke
evening likely to end with a movie star turn? Barney’s
is also featured in
Brian
de Palma’s
Body
Double, and the 1986 thriller
Out
of Bounds, with Anthony Michael Hall.
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Badboy
Morrison at Barney’s Beanery, Santa Monica
Boulevard, West Hollywood |
After his breakdown, Morrison enjoys a drink on the
window ledge above the traffic at the venerable
Chateau
Marmont, 8221 Sunset Boulevard, built in 1929
and long a residential hotel for the likes of Boris
Karloff, Greta Garbo, Errol Flynn and Harlow again.
But most famously, it was here in 1982 that another
personality programmed to auto-destruct,
John
Belushi, ODd on coke and heroin. The legendary
hotel is seen also in the fabulous car wreck of a
movie,
Myra Breckinridge,
provided the hotel exterior of (and the inspiration
for) the ‘Mon Signor Hotel’ in the disastrous
Four Rooms, and
was seen in the
Mark
Wahlberg heavy metal vehicle
Rock
Star.
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|
Morrison
relaxes above Hollywood: Chateau Marmont, Sunset
Boulevard, West Hollywood |
The ‘New Haven’ concert, brought to a halt
when Morrison is arrested for abusing the cops, filmed
in the beautiful
Orpheum
Theater, 842 South Broadway, downtown
LA
(seen also in
Kenneth
Branagh’s
Dead Again). More footage
was filmed at the disused, now demolished,
Ambassador Hotel, 3400 Wilshire Boulevard,
midtown
LA.
The desert scenes were shot in
Providence
Mountains State Park, a 5,900 acre recreation
area on a mountain slope overlooking a vast expanse
of desert. Way out in the middle of nowhere, take
I-40 about 100 miles east of Barstow, then turn northwest
on the Essex Road. There was trouble for the movie
company when the fake Native American pictographs
painted for the movie proved more difficult to remove
than had been promised.
The final scene was filmed at Morrison’s grave
in Paris’ largest cemetery, the
Père
Lachaise, 65 boulevard de Menilmontant
in the 20th arrondissement. The much-graffitied grave
is in the 16th section. From the main entrance, take
the Avenue Principale to the Avenue de Puits, turn
right and follow the Avenue Casimir-Perier. Other
celeb graves seen in the movie include Oscar Wilde
(Jacob Epstein’s sphinx), Bizet, Marcel Proust,
Sarah Bernhardt, Balzac and Rossini.
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|
Jim
Morrison’s grave, Père Lachaise
Cemetery, Paris |
You can also find the tomb of lovers Abelard and Heloise,
and the graves of Simone Signoret, Edith Piaf, Gericault,
Chopin, Colette, Isadora Duncan, director Max Ophuls,
Marie Walewska (Bonaparte’s mistress, played
on screen by Garbo in
Conquest)
and cinema pioneer Georges Méliès.
