The Super Direct is the ultimate, as skiers say, and something Morrison has dreamed of since she was a teenager.Photography: Jimmy Chin
writing ideas Introduction to Jim Morrison From Jim Morrison. That’s not usually how it works, and that’s not how it usually works for me. In mid-September, Morrison called me out of the blue. With a new film about him, “Everest: The Other Side,” from directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, due to be released in six weeks, he feels there’s more to his story than a documentary can tell. As it happens, I kept blaming myself for not taking action against him when the events in the movie happened.
After writing this article I met Chin and Vasarhelyi talk of the town about them2015. I met Morrison in 2018 and briefly mentioned him in a story I wrote About climbers and grief. However, I somehow missed the entire Everest project before it was completed. My last contact with Morrison was via email in 2022, when I expressed my condolences on the death of his partner Hilaree Nelson. He replied from Kathmandu, where he was attending to her cremation.
After talking with him in September, I watched the film and then headed to Lake Tahoe to spend the weekend with him at one of his houses on the West Shore. In his company, I found that many elements in the film gave me different feelings. Maybe it was to see this man taking a break – in his hometown, hanging out with friends – in some kind of contentment, in a brief hiatus from promoting the film (of course, it was also promotion that he had me there). There was a coiled calm about him. He has experienced a lot and figured out some things. He had a special way of seeming almost aloof or absorbed and then veering into extreme candor and earnest contemplation that counteracted my natural cynicism.
I heard he was very close to Oprah Winfrey and he told the story of this new friendship in detail. It’s an unlikely partnership in many ways, but I can see how they might have the same emotional tone. I asked him if he thought Winfrey would talk to me, and he said he was “99 percent” sure she wouldn’t. I tried it anyway, and a few weeks later Winfrey and I were on a half-hour Zoom call. When we finished, she told me, “I said to Jim, ‘I’m going to talk to Nick for twenty-five minutes, and I’m going to get two lines in the story. That’s how it goes.'” “Oprah, here’s another one.
Source photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty
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