It's twenty years since Oliver Stone's The Doors played fast and loose with the facts surrounding Jim Morrison's life and death. Since then Tom De Cillo's excellent documentary When You're Strange has put the record reasonably straight, but we're heading back to "print the legend" territory with Robert Saitzyk's The Last Beat.
The film sounds like it's very much in the tradition of Gus Van Sant's not-Cobain film The Last Days. The Morrison character will be "Jay Douglas", an American rock star in Paris in the early seventies, negotiating complicated relationships with his "California soulmate, Valerie Eason" (read Pamela Courson) and "glamorous French countess, Clemence".
The real Jim Morrison took up residence in Paris in March 1971, made some disastrous recordings with street musicians, and was dead by July in still not quite explained circumstances. He's buried in a famously scruffy grave in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
Indie director Saitzyk wrote the script and will be behind the camera. Shawn Andrews, who was in Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused (not to mention Saitzyk's 2001 pic After the Flood) is currently attached to star as Jay / Jim.
Shooting starts in Paris in October.