I wonder if Colonel would slip in to his 'natural' accent when talking intimmately with Elvis or select others. Doubt we'll ever know but (very) circumstantially I've met/know people who turn their accents on/off depending on who they're speaking with. Either way it's not much of a concern to me as it's at least not a stretch due to where he was from.
That’s reasonable. Too many in this thread expect a 2.5 hr film from Baz to be a historically accurate telling of Presley’s entire life. How in the heck is that logical??? This is pure entertainment. If you want facts read Guralnick’s books.
From this ageing punk's perspective, it looks embarrassing. Picks up where the Great Rock n Roll Swindle left off. The Filth and the Fury is the benchmark film on the Pistols saga. Manager Malcolm McLaren definitely took a leaf out of Colonel Parker's self-promotion playbook.
Since he didn't want Elvis (or anyone) to know he was an immigrant, I doubt he did that to any great extent. And we have Priscilla's statement that he didn't have an accent. Seems pretty safe to assume he did not ever sound like Tom Hanks does on those trailers. Hanks' accent seems to be an artistic choice and/or a bit of over-acting, depending upon how charitably you want to view it.
Parker did not even move into the United States until he was 20 years old and fully an adult. You can bet that he probably sounded a lot like Tom Hanks character at one time. In fact, I agree with @Shawn's thesis entirely that he probably tried to mask his accent at times depending on the situation. We just don't really have enough of Parker on record to really resolve this issue, but you can be sure that Parker had a dutch accent at one time that probably reared its head at least occasionally. As I said before, my father was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He moved to San Diego when he was a 27 years and he never went back, Lol. He still said "necked" instead of "naked" and numerous other southern pronunciations. until his death in 2000, despite having graduated from a college in San Diego and spending the rest of his life in Southern California. My Aunt, who was only slightly older when she moved to Southern California, did the exact same thing. I was not born until the family moved to La Jolla and I never lived in the south, but somehow I adopted some of my parents accent, despite spending my whole childhood and young adulthood in Southern California. There is just no way to logically conclude that Parker did not have a bit of a dutch accent from time to time, especially early in Elvis's career.
I'm not an accent expert, but listening to those two interviews with Parker I do hear pronunciations that have nothing to do with any southern accent I've ever heard. At points, he actually sounds a little bit like the character Goldmember from the third Austin Powers film. Nigel Powers : "There are only two things I can't stand in this world: People who are intolerant of other people's cultures, and the Dutch."
Yeah, I should not have said he never sounded like Hanks' accent. You're right that he probably did in 1929 when he first came to the States, and for a little while afterwards. But by the time he met Elvis it's clear he didn't sound anything like that. And I agree it's possible bits of accent slipped out sometimes in the years after he'd mostly gotten rid of it. But the fact that Colonel may have demonstrated a slight trace of accent occasionally isn't an adequate defense for Hanks' choice to play him with a strong, prominent accent all the time. What Hanks is doing is not historically accurate. I don't want to belabor this point, but I guess we have (hey, there's only so much to discuss until we see the actual movie). Like I said, it's an inaccuracy that bothers me a bit, but it's not a big deal unless they make a plot point of the fact that Elvis didn't know the Colonel was an undocumented immigrant. If they do focus on that, it will make Elvis look a little foolish to have been deceived by a guy with such a notable, strong accent. So I hope they don't even bring up the issue.
I think it's possible to do a big-budget documentary that tells the truth. But often, too many cooks get in the kitchen, and you wind up with something like the Beatles Anthology, where it's a cleaned-up "version" of the truth. I love that 10+-hour-long show, but there's a lot that was left out. As I've mentioned many times, I worked on the Motown 40 documentary for six months with the producers. I brought up the terrible controversies and conflicts at the label (drug problems, deaths, shootings, lawsuits, affairs, etc.), and the producer I worked with shook her head and said, "those stories are never gonna be told as long as Berry Gordy and Diana Ross are alive." That was only a 4-hour show; you could easily fill 10 hours with the stories of the major Motown artists in the 1960s and early 1970s. As for a dramatization like the Baz Luhrmann Elvis biopic: I'll wait until I see it before judging it. But I think the trailer is exciting and intense, and I hope at least it'll inspire younger people to check out Elvis' music.
Parker really had a weird speaking voice and I think his accent was a rather strange mix of his original dutch accent and spending some significant time in the south. I think Mr. Hanks was wise to go with the dutch accent rather than just try to imitate him like an impersonator might try to do. Mr. Hanks is an actor and not Danny Ganns or Rich Little, Lol.
Tom Hanks had a pretty interesting discussion with his costar regarding both their insecurities about stepping into such iconic characters in the upcoming Elvis bio. Mr. Hanks realized quite correctly that most all the pressure would be on Austin Butler to get his Elvis's voice accurate. Here is the direct quote from that fine New York Times article: “I said to him, ‘Hey, are you as petrified as I am?’” Mr. Hanks, 65, recalled. “We had two actors going, actually, ‘I don’t know how we’re going to pull this off.’” As Mr. Butler recounted, his screen idol then warned him, “Not many people know what Colonel Parker sounds like, but everybody knows what Elvis sounds like and you’re going to have people attacking you from every which way.”
I think this hits the nail on the head. I mentioned earlier in the thread that my former in-laws are Dutch and watching the videos posted of Parker, there are small giveaways present. Their 'th' sounds like an 's' for instance; and 'ou' sounds completely different to a typical English pronounciation - whether North America, UK, or the Antipodes. I imagine that he'd probably have sounded more Dutch when under pressure. He looks very calm in all these interviews.
I agree with your comments. I hope it makes young people look for the real story. My fear is that they won’t and if the film is sensationalized that sensationalism will be taken for granted as fact. Time will tell.
There also seems to be a sort of whistling to sibilant sounds, made with the tongue at the roof of the mouth.
Here's the thing - Elvis was a sensation, an era defining one. For the life of me, I can't think of a director who is more suited for telling this story.
I hope you are right. It’s a daunting task, a story with so many facets to it. I wish the guy playing Elvis looked more like him. That’s the way I felt about the recent Billie Holiday film. Same with Cheadle playing Miles Davis.
I really wish everyone would read that New York Times article. I realize it's very long, but it really makes you realize just how devoted Baz has been to telling this story honestly and thoroughly. They had been shooting the movie when covid happened, and Tom Hanks got sick, and then Baz relocated to an office literally at Graceland, and spoke to everybody he could find who knew Elvis and the Colonel, which led him to completely rewrite the script to present a much more complex take on their relationship. And from what I can tell, that is also the source of delving much more deeply into Elvis's childhood, growing up surrounded by Black culture - that he wasn't "appropriating" it, that it was honestly the world he had grown up in.
Most biopics are lousy, so I have no problem with artistic license. Not trying to "tell history" is what made the Elton John movie fun and a hit. The best biopic I've ever seen is "Get Back!" I think the best way to preserve someone's legacy is just watch THEM.
That's a documentary. This is a drama. It's two different things. I think you want a different movie. Don't watch this one.
The biopic was Get On Up starring Chadwick Boseman. Alex Gibney created a great documentary called Mr Dynamite, The Rise of James Brown. Edit: I see the confusion. My apologies. Not very many artists got followed with a film crew to make something like the Beatles documentary Get Back. Personally, I quite like seeing musical biopics (as long as they use the correct microphones.)
You must be really upset with yourself since John Lennon and Paul McCartney held Elvis in such high regard.
Ghostworld (to whom I was responding) specifically cited Get Back. I thought Get On Up was a terrible drama (and it was also a huge bomb that got marginal reviews) because they mainly showed how James Brown was a damaged individual who was a total jerk to the people in his life. I think he was a lot more than that, and they diminished how magnetic he was on stage, and how much he changed the music business in his era. I don't dispute that it's difficult to take a guy who was basically a jerk and also show the sides of his personality that made him charming and brilliant as an entertainer. This is kind of the same problem as Bob Woodward's Wired, the John Belushi book & movie, which shows Belushi out to be an insecure, manic-depressive, drugged-out nutcase. I think Belushi was that some of the time, and that part of the book is factual, but the story didn't balance it out with the comedian's positive attributes. For that reason, I think it's very hard to make a drama about a real-life celebrity that everybody knows. I think you're a lot better off doing a thorough documentary that goes very deep into the subject: the current George Carlin's American Dream HBO documentary is absolutely superb, and they went through a mountain of archival footage and new interviews to tell that story in 4 hours. Still, I look forward to Baz Luhrmann's new Elvis movie and I hope it's fantastic and makes a ton of money.
I thought HBO's The Searcher was a terrific two part documentary on Elvis. It was about 3 1/2 hours long and used a lot of archival film on Elvis. Did you see that documentary and did you like it? I think a dramatic motion picture and a documentary are just entirely different animals. With a film you have a real chance to reach an entirely new generation of fans the way Walk The Line did for Johnny Cash. With a documentary, your're just really only going to reach us older dinosaurs and not a lot of new, younger fans, Lol.