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1962dude420-blog · 3 years

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Today we remember the passing of Ray Manzarek who Died: May 20, 2013 in Rosenheim, Germany

Raymond Daniel Manzarek Jr. was an American musician, singer, producer, film director, and author, best known as a member of The Doors from 1965 to 1973, which he co-founded with singer and lyricist Jim Morrison.

Manzarek was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993 as a member of the Doors. He was a co-founding member of Nite City from 1977 to 1978, and of Manzarek–Krieger from 2001 until his death in 2013. USA Today defined him as "one of the best keyboardists ever".

Raymond Daniel Manczarek Jr. was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois. He was born to Helena (1918–2012) and Raymond Manczarek Sr. (1914–1987), and was of Polish descent.

In 1956, he matriculated at DePaul University, where he played piano in his fraternity's jazz band (the Beta Pi Mu Combo), participated in intramural football, served as treasurer of the Speech Club, and organized a charity concert with Sonny Rollins and Dave Brubeck. He graduated from the University's College of Commerce with a degree in economics in 1960.

In the fall of 1961, Manzarek briefly enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. Unable to acclimatize to the curriculum, he transferred to the Department of Motion Pictures, Television and Radio as a graduate student before dropping out altogether after breaking up with a girlfriend. Although he attempted to enlist in the Army Signal Corps as a camera operator, he was instead assigned to the highly selective Army Security Agency as a prospective intelligence analyst.

Following his return to the U.S., he re-enrolled in UCLA's graduate film program in 1962, where he received a M.F.A. in cinematography in 1965. During this period, he met future wife Dorothy Fujikawa and undergraduate film student Jim Morrison. At the time, Manzarek was in a band called Rick & the Ravens with his brothers Rick and Jim. Forty days after finishing film school, thinking they had gone their separate ways, Manzarek and Morrison met by chance on Venice Beach in California. Morrison said he had written some songs, and Manzarek expressed an interest in hearing them, whereupon Morrison sang rough versions of "Moonlight Drive", "My Eyes Have Seen You" and "Summer's Almost Gone". During this period, Manzarek met teenage guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore at a Transcendental Meditation lecture and recruited them for the incipient band. Densmore said, "There wouldn't be any Doors without Maharishi."

In January 1966, the Doors became the house band at the London Fog on the Sunset Strip. According to Manzarek, "Nobody ever came in the place ... an occasional sailor or two on leave, a few drunks. All in all it was a very depressing experience, but it gave us time to really get the music together." When the Doors were fired from the London Fog, they were hired to be the house band at the Whisky a Go Go. The Doors' first recording contract was with Columbia Records. After a few months of inactivity, they learned they were on Columbia's drop list. At that point, they asked to be released from their contract. Following a few months of live gigs, Jac Holzman "rediscovered" the Doors and signed them to Elektra Records.

The Doors lacked a bass guitarist (except during recording sessions), so for live performances Manzarek played the bass parts on a Fender Rhodes piano keyboard bass. His signature sound was that of the Vox Continental combo organ, an instrument used by many other psychedelic rock bands of the era. He also used a Gibson G-101 Kalamazoo combo organ (which looks like a Farfisa) for the band's later albums.

During the Morrison era, Manzarek was the group's regular backing vocalist. He occasionally sang lead, as exemplified by covers of Muddy Waters's "Close to You" (released on 1970s Absolutely Live) and "You Need Meat (Don't Go No Further)" (recorded during the L.A. Woman sessions and initially released as the B-side of "Love Her Madly"). He went on to share lead vocals with Krieger on the albums (Other Voices and Full Circle) released after Morrison's death.

Manzarek married fellow UCLA alumna Dorothy Aiko Fujikawa in Los Angeles on December 21, 1967, with Jim Morrison and his longtime companion, Pamela Courson, as witnesses. Manzarek and Fujikawa remained married until his death. They had a son, Pablo born on August 31, 1973, and three grandchildren. In the early 1970s, the Manzareks divided their time between an apartment in West Hollywood, California, and a small penthouse on New York City's Upper West Side. They subsequently resided in Beverly Hills, California (including ten years in a house on Rodeo Drive) for several decades. For the last decade of his life, Manzarek and his wife lived in a refurbished farmhouse near Vichy Springs, California in the Napa Valley.

In March 2013, Manzarek was diagnosed with a rare cancer called cholangiocarcinoma (bile duct cancer) and traveled to Germany for special treatment. During that time he reconciled with Densmore, and he spoke to Krieger before his death. He also performed a private concert for his doctors and nurses. Manzarek was "feeling better" until it took a turn for the worse according to his manager. On May 20, 2013, Manzarek died at a hospital in Rosenheim, Germany, at the age of 74. His body was cremated. Krieger said upon hearing the news of his death, "I was deeply saddened to hear about the passing of my friend and bandmate Ray Manzarek today. I'm just glad to have been able to have played Doors songs with him for the last decade. Ray was a huge part of my life and I will always miss him." Densmore said, "There was no keyboard player on the planet more appropriate to support Jim Morrison's words. Ray, I felt totally in sync with you musically. It was like we were of one mind, holding down the foundation for Robby and Jim to float on top of. I will miss my musical brother."

Greg Harris, president and CEO of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, said in reaction to Manzarek's death that "The world of rock 'n' roll lost one of its greats with the passing of Ray Manzarek." Harris also said that "he was instrumental in shaping one of the most influential, controversial and revolutionary groups of the '60s. Such memorable tracks as 'Light My Fire', 'People Are Strange' and 'Hello, I Love You' – to name but a few – owe much to Manzarek's innovative playing."

On February 12, 2016, at the Fonda Theatre in Hollywood, Densmore and Krieger reunited for the first time in 15 years to perform in tribute to Manzarek and benefit Stand Up to Cancer. That day would have been Manzarek's 77th birthday. The night featured Exene Cervenka and John Doe of the band X, Rami Jaffee of the Foo Fighters, Stone Temple Pilots' Robert DeLeo, Jane's Addiction's Stephen Perkins, Emily Armstrong of Dead Sara and Andrew Watt, among others.

In April 2018, the film Break On Thru: A Celebration of Ray Manzarek and the Doors premiered at the 2018 Asbury Park Music & Film Festival. The film highlights the 2016 concert in honor of what would have been Manzarek's 77th birthday, and new footage and interviews. The film won the APMFF Best Film Feature Award at the festival.

#May 20 #2013 #R.I.P.#Ray Manzarek #The Doors

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mrmichaelchadler · 5 years

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Ebertfest 2019 Reveals Full Line-Up Honoring Scott Wilson, Richard Roeper and Jonathan Demme

I AM SO PROUD TO PRESENT THE SLATE FOR OUR 21st Annual Roger Ebert’s Film Festival—Ebertfest! The festival is presented in cooperation with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and will run from Wednesday, April 10th, through Saturday, April 13th. As we approach this sixth year of Roger's death, Festival Director Nate Kohn and I are honoring Roger with movies from his Four Star reviews list. We couldn't be happier than to welcome three of his favorite actresses, Virginia Madsen, Gina Gershon, and Jennifer Tilly, to this year’s festival. Additionally, we are so pleased to present the Ebert Humanitarian Award to Morgan Neville and his film, "Won't You Be My Neighbor," a film about the television show, "Mister Rogers Neighborhood" and its creator, Fred Rogers, who preached and practiced radical kindness. This film goes hand-in-hand with Roger's message about empathy.

We are dedicating this year's Ebertfest to a friend and frequent festival guest, the late actor Scott Wilson, and you can read about it below. We are also celebrating Roger's television partner, Richard Roeper, and their career together. The films we are showing with those tributes are listed below.

Roger was very much a techie and would have loved the fact that we are bringing a V-R demonstration to Ebertfest that will give our audience a chance to experience ‘empathy’ through the lens of technology. The Virtual Reality Lab and Innovation Studio at the University of Illinois will set up equipment to allow us to put ourselves in the life situation of another. The Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning will host these V-R demonstrations on the plaza outside of the Virginia Theatre in between films on Friday, April 12th, consisting of a series of short films that allows one's senses to “experience" border crossings, natural disasters or joyous occasions in other countries.

And, now I'm proud to present the full slate of films scheduled to screen at Ebertfest...

1. OPENING NIGHT

Rather than conclude this year’s Ebertfest with a music-themed movie as we usually do, we are opening it on a glorious, gospel-infused high note, thanks to Alan Elliott and Sydney Pollack’s recently restored 1972 documentary, “Amazing Grace.” It chronicles the two days in which the legendary Aretha Franklin returned to the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts, Los Angeles and recorded the most successful gospel album in history. The footage sat in a Warner Bros. vault for 35 years before Elliott made it his mission to ensure the film’s release, a journey that took just over a decade. After its premiere in New York City last November, we are thrilled to be presenting the film at Ebertfest as it finally receives a theatrical release through NEON in the U.S. And we eagerly anticipate welcoming the Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Community Choir onstage at the Virginia Theater after the film. How glorious.

“This film is a powerful love letter to the Black Church, offering a soul-shaking introduction for the unfamiliar and a grandmotherly yank of the arm for those who know—it drags you from the theater straight into the pews,” wrote our critic Odie Henderson in his four-star review. “It is profoundly moving and extraordinarily soothing. Nowadays we could use a good salve. To paraphrase another gospel standard, if we ever needed this film before, we sure do need it now.”

Special guests: director Alan Elliott and producer Tirrell D. Whittley; the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Community Choir will perform live on stage at the Virginia Theatre.

2. DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF SCOTT WILSON

To honor the memory of Scott Wilson, one of our favorite frequent guests at Ebertfest, we are showcasing one of his best performances in Krzysztof Zanussi’s 1984 romance, “A Year of the Quiet Sun,” commemorating its 35th anniversary this year. Wilson plays Norman, an American soldier who falls for a Polish refugee, Emilia (Maja Komorowska), in the aftermath of WWII. Roger praised Slavomir Idziak’s cinematography for its masterful use of light and color, as well as its love of “the actors' faces, which instruct us how to feel.”

“One of the remarkable qualities of tho film is the way it tells its love story without resorting to the devices of cheap romance,” wrote Roger in his 2003 Great Movies essay on the film. “These are two middle-aged people of dignity, who have been through unspeakably painful experiences; at one point, Emilia asks her priest, ‘Does a person have a right to happiness?’ One answer, which the priest does not think to provide, is that a person must be willing to be happy.”

Special guests: Heavenly Wilson, Maja Komorowska and Jerzy Tyszkiewicz.

3. CELEBRATING RICHARD ROEPER

This year we are thrilled to be celebrating Richard Roeper, Roger’s seven-year co-host of “Ebert & Roeper,” by screening two of their favorite films at Ebertfest. The first is Cameron Crowe’s “Almost Famous,” the 70s-set comedy selected by Roger as his favorite film of 2000. In his euphoric four-star review, Roger confessed that he was “almost hugging” himself as he watched a story unfold onscreen that was not unlike his own—that of 15-year-old William (Patrick Fugit), a plucky kid assigned by Rolling Stone magazine to follow the rising band Stillwater on a concert tour.

“‘Almost Famous’ is about the world of rock, but it's not a rock film, it's a coming-of-age film, about an idealistic kid who sees the real world, witnesses its cruelties and heartbreaks, and yet finds much room for hope,” wrote Roger. “Kate Hudson has one scene so well-acted, it takes her character to another level. William tells her, ‘He sold you to Humble Pie for 50 bucks and a case of beer.’ Watch the silence, the brave smile, the tear and the precise spin she puts on the words, ‘What kind of beer?’ It's not an easy laugh. It's a whole world of insight.”

Special Introduction by Director Cameron Crowe

The second selection, personally chosen by Richard, is Alexander Payne’s 2004 Oscar-winner, “Sideways,” a film hailed by Roger as “the best human comedy of the year.” Paul Giamatti delivers one of his most beloved performances as Miles Raymond, an “oenophile” who joins his friend (Thomas Hayden Church), on a week-long trip through California wine country, where they cross paths with two intriguing women (Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh).

In his four-star review, Roger wrote, “The characters are played not by the first actors you would think of casting, but by actors who will prevent you from ever being able to imagine anyone else in their roles. […] Miles is not perfect, but the way Paul Giamatti plays him, we forgive him his trespasses, because he trespasses most of all against himself.”

He also praised the film for making each of its four central characters necessary. “The women are not plot conveniences, but elements in a complex romantic and even therapeutic process,” he wrote. “Giamatti and Madsen have a scene that involves some of the gentlest and most heartbreaking dialogue I've heard in a long time. […] Women can actually love us for ourselves, bless their hearts, even when we can't love ourselves. She waits until he is finished, and then responds with words so simple and true they will win her an Oscar nomination, if there is justice in the world.” And win one she did.

Virginia Madsen will be our special guest for this closing night screening.

4. AND THE EBERT HUMANITARIAN AWARD GOES TO…

…Morgan Neville’s enchanting film about the life of television trailblazer Fred Rogers, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” His genial declaration of, “I have always wanted to have a neighbor just like you,” voiced a sentiment that wasn’t shared by many Americans in the still-segregated era when his iconic children’s program, "Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood" premiered on television. As noted in his rave review, our critic Odie Henderson affirmed that Rogers’ true genius was in how he “showed by example.”

“Mr. Rogers made you feel like someone gave a damn about you...and that you had value,” wrote Henderson.

Director Morgan Neville will be our special guest for this screening.

5. RESTORATION AND PRESERVATION

In addition to “Amazing Grace,” we are also screening another long-lost treasure of cinema, Horace Jenkins’ first and only full narrative feature, “Cane River,” which vanished soon after its 1982 premiere in New Orleans, Louisiana. Featuring an all-African-American cast and crew, the film traces the burgeoning romance between two young lovers caught within a complex web of family ties and Creole history. The Academy Film Archive struck a new 35mm print of the film from a 90-minute negative, and with the assistance of the Roger & Chaz Ebert Foundation, Sandra Schulberg of IndieCollect mastered a 4K digital copy that premiered last October at the New Orleans Film Festival.

“Jenkins’ debut feature itself remains a rare beast: an independent drama about black romance that openly contends with intraracial strife,” wrote our contributor Vikram Murthi in his coverage of MOMA’s To Save and Project festival. “The [lovers’] debates about colorism and the weighty shadows of their respective families provide ‘Cane River’ with a powerful historical foundation, one that offers a compelling racial twist on a ‘Romeo and Juliet’-style romance. Jenkins’ film also works beautifully as a travelogue of Louisiana. Most importantly, the film is a fantastic artifact of early-’80s American independent/low-budget cinema.”

Special guests: Sandra Schulberg, Dominique Jenkins, Tommye Myrick & Sacha Jenkins.

For the Alloy Orchestra’s latest performance, in which they will provide live orchestral accompaniment to a silent classic, they have selected Jean Epstein’s 1923 romantic drama, “Coeur fidèle” (“The Faithful Heart”), starring Gina Manès as a woman who dreams of leaving her job and lover for a dockworker (Gina Manès). According to Adrian Danks at Senses of Cinema, the pictures emerges as “a model of Epstein’s connected and, at times, visionary but singular approach to the cinema.”

“‘Coeur fidèle’ exists as the jagged and transformed scar of a conventional melodramatic story, where things are often only ever surreptitiously expressed, where time stutters through ellipses and expansions, and where the audience are never properly introduced to situations or characters,” wrote Danks. “One revels in the vision of an experimental cinema attempting to prise apart the syntax of an already established visual and narrative system, a ‘new’ cinema that pulses with emotion and which attempts to replace established systems with the prismatic orgasm of the kaleidoscope.”

Special guests: Alloy Orchestra, Michael Phillips

6. WONDER WOMEN

All of our selections this year center on powerful and fascinating women, whether they be characters played by Virginia Madsen, Gina Gershon or Jennifer Tilly, or real icons such as Aretha Franklin and Maya Angelou, the subject of first-time filmmaker Rita Coburn Whack's acclaimed documentary, “Maya Angelou and Still I Rise.” The Guardian’s Lanre Bakare wrote that the film “shows the varied, creative and often brutal back story that created one of America’s finest writers.”

“What Coburn Whack [does] so well is capture Angelou’s power and elegance, which seems to have increased as she got older,” said Bakare. “An important figure throughout the 60s, in the 70s and 80s she developed into a maternal figure for black America, ushering in the period of Oprah and black female empowerment. It’s that longevity and creative drive that the film celebrates. No hagiography, it paints a portrait of a life lived to the full and dedicated to being true to oneself.”

Special guest: Director Rita Coburn Whack

We listened to you request for more comedies and are bringing you a doozy. David Mirkin’s irresistible 1997 gem, “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,” centers on the friendship between two longtime friends pushing thirty (played by Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow) who attend their high school reunion. Roger hailed the film as “one of the brightest and goofiest comedies in a while, a film that has a share of truth, but isn't afraid to cut loose with the weirdest choreography I have seen outside a 1960s revival.”

“Sorvino and Kudrow work easily and wickedly together, playing conspirators who are maybe just a little too dense to realize how desperate they are, or maybe just a little too bright to admit it,” wrote Roger in his review.

Special Guest: David Mirkin

The Wachowskis’ 1996 directorial debut, “Bound,” is an edge-of-your-seat thriller that is also anchored in the relationship between two women—an ex-con (Gina Gershon) and her neighbor (Jennifer Tilly)—who conspire to steal money from the mob while throwing some crooked men under the bus.

“‘Bound’ is one of those movies that works you up, wrings you out and leaves you gasping,” wrote Roger in his four-star review. “It's pure cinema, spread over several genres. It's a caper movie, a gangster movie, a sex movie and a slapstick comedy. It's not often you think of ‘The Last Seduction’ and the Marx Brothers during the same film, but I did during this one--and I also thought about ‘Blood Simple’ and Woody Allen. It's amazing to discover all this virtuosity and confidence in two first-time filmmakers, self-described college dropouts, still in their 20s, from Chicago.”

Special Guests: Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly

One of the best performances of 2018 was delivered by Joanna Kulig in Paweł Pawlikowski's sumptuous black-and-white romance, "Cold War," the director's follow-up to his 2014 Oscar-winner, "Ida," which previously screened at Ebertfest. Lensed in glorious black-and-white by Lukasz Zal, the film is comprised of vignettes centering on the relationship between music director Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and Zula (Kulig), who first meet in post-WWII Poland. Serving as a fitting yet stylistically disparate companion piece to "A Year of the Quiet Sun," it is both a richly etched love story and a haunting ode to the hardships of living in exile. Kulig, who had a small role as singer in "Ida," belts out her own vocals here as well, and her performance is simply mesmerizing. Pawlikowski says this film is a semi-biographical story of his parents.

“Paweł Pawlikowski’s film concurrently swells your heart and breaks it, just like the sore memory of a lover that drifted away from your life, or an intensely craved kiss that never was,” wrote our critic Tomris Laffly in her four-star review. “The tragic yearning in the impossibly sexy ‘Cold War’ is so palpable that it makes you feel thankful to be alive with human feelings, heartbreaks of the past be damned.”

7. SPECIAL SHORT FILM

Just as we previously screened an excellent short film from one of our longtime writers, Sheila O'Malley's "July and Half of August," in 2017, we are showing a three-minute triumph this year marking the filmmaking debut of Sam Fragoso, a friend of the festival who has been attending since he was in high school. His short film, "Sebastian," is based on letters sent by and to his immigrant grandfather in the middle part of the last century. Fragoso is the creator of the Talk Easy podcast, featuring long-form conversations with such trailblazing talents as "All in the Family" creator and previous Ebertfest guest, Norman Lear.

RogerEbert.com Editor at Large Matt Zoller Seitz enthusiastically praised the film, writing that it "somehow manages to be assured and ambitious but also self-effacing and seemingly without ego—combinations of qualities you rarely encounter even in the work of veteran directors. [He] is "comparatively new at directing, but he already seems to know how best to showcase gifted acting, photography, music and editing, letting the work seem offhanded rather than studied, putting moments across by letting them speak and not talking over them."

Special Guest: Sam Fragoso

8. SALUTE TO JONATHAN DEMME

Last but certainly not least, Ebertfest will host a glorious celebration complete with wedding bells courtesy of “Rachel Getting Married,” the 2008 masterpiece directed by Jonathan Demme and written by Jenny Lumet. Referring to the film as “theme music for an evolving age,” Roger said it was one of those rare pictures that absorbs you into the experiences of its characters, slipping “you out of your mind and into theirs.” Anne Hathaway earned her first Oscar nomination for playing Kym, a troubled young woman who leaves rehab to attend the wedding of her sister, Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt).

This film is so personal to me because Roger and I loved it and discussed it over and over. We wondered whether this was Demme's ode to what utopia on earth can look like when we empathize with other's shortcomings and accept them and love them for who they are, part of the human family. Demme confirmed this when I asked him about it later. This film also exhibits the values espoused by the Champaign County Alliance for Acceptance, Inclusion and Respect, and we have asked them to join us on a panel to discuss them.

“I believe the film's deep subject is the marriage itself: How it unfolds, who attends, the nature of the ceremony, what it has to observe about how the concept of ‘family’ embraces others, and how our multicultural society is growing comfortable with itself,” observed Roger in his four-star review. “When Robert Altman is thanked in the end credits, I imagine it is not only because he was Demme's friend, but because his instinct for ensemble stories was an example. Demme demonstrates something he shares with Altman: He likes to be surrounded by his own extended family.”

Special guests: Stephen Apkon, Jenny Lumet and Sony Pictures Classics executive Michael Barker.

In addition to Barker, Fragoso, Phillips and Roeper, the film experts scheduled to attend the festival this year include Nick Allen, Matt Fagerholm, Chuck Koplinski, Scott Mantz, Jennifer Merin, Nell Minow, Pamela Powell, Todd Rendleman, Whitney Spencer, Brian Tallerico and Matt Zoller Seitz. Various Ebertfest guests such as Eric Pierson will also participate in panel discussions held at the Hyatt Place in Champaign and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Passes are now available for purchase and cost $150, plus processing. Four passes purchased together are $510 instead of $600, or 15 percent off. Also available are a small number of U. of I. student passes priced at $100 each. They can be purchased through the festival website, the theater website or the theater box office, 203 W. Park Ave., Champaign, 217-356-9063. Updates will be posted on the festival website. Tickets for individual movies will be available April 1.

Those interested in being a festival sponsor should contact Andy Hall, the festival's project coordinator, at [email protected].

For additional information, please visit http://www.ebertfest.com.

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