UCLA Film School — Jim Morrison's Acid Locker

Jim Morrison enrolled in the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television in 1964 and graduated in 1965, studying alongside future Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek — also a film school alumnus — in an era when, as Eve Babitz put it, "being a film major in the '60s was hopelessly square." Morrison was already writing poetry and absorbing the French New Wave, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, and whatever else was moving through the intellectual atmosphere of the Westwood campus. His time at UCLA was the last period of structure before the Venice rooftop and the formation of the Doors.

In the basement of the old film school building — reportedly Melnitz Hall — Morrison's locker became a local legend: covered in acid-tab blotter art, it has been pointed out to incoming freshmen during orientation for decades. The story has the quality of campus mythology, embellished in the retelling, but its persistence suggests a genuine connection between the physical space of the film school and the Morrison legacy. UCLA's Theatre Arts department has acknowledged Morrison as one of its most unusual alumni.

The UCLA campus in Westwood is a public university and its buildings are accessible to visitors. Melnitz Hall, which houses the film school, is open during academic hours. The broader Westwood neighbourhood — expensive, leafy, and very far in atmosphere from the Venice Beach rooftop where Morrison lived after leaving — is nonetheless the starting point of the geographical story the Doors' music traces: from the campus, down Wilshire, toward the ocean, and eventually back up to the Strip.