Big Elvis fan who's read and owns the 2 volume Guralnick . . . Elvis was a friend of BB King's??? He heard Little Richard in a bar singing "Tutti Frutti" when LR released that previous to Elvis' career? The famous pic of Elvis standing with BB and (I think) Junior Parker backstage does not mean he hung out with these musicians in real life. Even if he was this "integrated" the way the black performers were portrayed, like their whole importance and existence was due to Elvis' involvement came off very dated. The whole movie is garish and sensationalistic, I'm very surprised so many like this flashy, empty movie??
I get Boswell's point and to some extent agree with his take on how the movie glossed over and made it appear Elvis was all so palsy walsy with the African American community. But there just wasn't enough meat in the storyline to make it believable. As a quick way to tell the story, yeah. But there could've been more focus placed on this part of the Elvis story line and history in the movie.
I didn't get that impression at all. I thought that scene - following on from the fallout of the Steve Allen show - captured very well the sense Elvis must have felt of being an outsider. As great as Guralnick's books are, they're now 30 years old and probably due for an update in terms of new research that's come to light. I think it was at the Cannes presser where Baz mentioned having seen footage of the owner of Club Handy saying to the camera that Elvis dropped in from time to time. There's also an interview floating around the net with one of BB King's musicians who said that Elvis was in and out of his dressing room in Vegas. Does that translate as them being bosom buddies? No, but clearly there was at the very least a rapport, musician to musician.
Correct. We forgive these details even in documentaries. If only people knew just how often photographs used in a documentary are moved around the subject's timeline used in spots when the actual photograph wasn't taken, would that really change the events? The photographs are arranged loosely to the timeline but will be used primarily to visualize a particular part of the story regardless if the photo matches the timeline. I was watching the George Carlin doc and it got to be confusing/distracting to have photographs representing one part of his life being used over other parts of his life only because the photograph demonstrated George laughing/pouting/angry or whatever emotion just to match the emotion of the story at that point in the film. Would most people notice or care? Probably not. For people not really familiar with George, they're not really going to notice this at all. Since I'm a big fan of his I was able to spot when a 1979 photo was being used to depict something happening in 1984. So that's why it's understandable for most Elvis fans to be triggered by this, but it shouldn't really be a real minus to the movie. Same goes for these biopics. These stories are shuffled around and blended together for dramatic purposes but shouldn't change the general idea being put across. The truth always lies somewhere between the long standing myth and the scenes in the movie trying to correct that myth.
Ya know, that's actually a very good point. 30 years--wow. Yup, we definitely need reminding of that. Those books may be the gold standard but they're not immune from aging.
Aging from what? If anything it would be more challenging to craft a biography now, with so many primary sources now deceased. Guralnick's books stand apart for the sheer weight of primary research that he did for them. Sadly the only "biography" people out there en masse are going to embrace is this movie, which is so factually inaccurate it beggars belief.
If they really want to know the story, they’ll look it up. I know I learned a great deal more about Elvis thanks to this movie and the various media supporting it, and the discussion around it than I had in the last 15 years. It’s also opened the discussion to new fans and people who show him as passé or had lost interest in his catalog and history. It just seems like to have to stretch to see this awareness and activity as bad.
I'm not convinced the average movie goer will presume what they're watching is anything other than factual, so what are they really learning about Elvis? My wife asked me multiple times throughout the movie, "did that actually happen?", I would sigh and answer, "no."
And hopefully rather than getting annoyed at the artistic license of the movie, you used that as an opportunity to explain to her the actual story on the way home from the theater? And if so, I assume that conversation increased her understanding of Elvis? And how much spontaneous interest did your wife have in the history of Elvis before this movie? And do you think you’re the only knowledgeable person who saw this movie with people who didn’t know as much as you? It’s almost like the attention of the film was an opportunity to educate people on areas where the movie differed from reality. And maybe after explaining transition into some other fun stories about Elvis that didn’t make it into the movie. Or just talk about Elvis, because people really were starting to forget him. But I guess that would require seeing the opportunity in the situation when you don’t want to find it.
Well there are a lot more photos than those two Dan Ribera on TikTok I agree having Richard performing as a newcomer in 56 was inaccurate, but it's not false that The African American Memphis World newspaper wrote that Elvis “cracked Memphis segregation laws by attending the Fairgrounds Memphis amusement park on East Parkway, during what is designated as ‘colored night.’” in June 56, or that in Dec 56 Elvis attended the otherwise segregated WDIA black radio station's annual fundraiser for 'needy Negro children' at Memphis' Ellis Auditorium. Did Guralnick cover these? Did he interview Sam Bell who gave specifics about Elvis living in the black neighborhood and sneaking into black churches, and hanging out in Shake Rag and with the exception of Elvis, being part of an all black gang of kids, and how he got his nickname EP from them? His Shake Rag activities are shown in the 1981 This Is Elvis documentary. Elvis also sang in the choir at the Black church in Memphis at East Trigg Baptist Church as stated by the black pastor Rev Brewster. Elvis literally went to church and worshiped with black Christians as a kid and teenager in both Mississippi and Tennessee. He was played regularly by black Mississippi DJ Early Wright because of his connection to the black community. If you're unaware of these things than maybe you shouldn't trust one author so much. And his interactions with B.B. King are far more than you are insinuating. B.B. has stated that Elvis used to watch him at Sun records, he has also stated that he had a a conversation with Elvis one time about music. He then said that Elvis told him another time that he remembed that conversation about music being for everyone like water is. This shows they spoke more than just once. B.B. also went on to say that he and Elvis were the original Blues Brothers when it came to them jamming together in Vegas. So their friendship was apparently strong enough in the past for them to feel comfortable enough to get together in Elvis' suite and hang out. And it is also a fact that Elvis was threatened to be arrested because of his stage antics either being too vulgar or too black and he was banned by plenty of southern white owned radio stations, and they were also going around and asking jukebox owners to remove his records. The film does not make it appear as if the black artists needed Elvis for their existence. What it shows is that Elvis helped to open the door for those black artists to become more successful because of the racist times. That is exactly what Little Richard said about Elvis being a Messiah because they wouldn't let black music through. James Brown said the same thing about Elvis being the guy that allowed people like him to get more exposure. Stevie Wonder and Al Green said the same about Elvis either helping to end racism or breaking the ice for black artists. It doesn't mean that they needed Elvis to be great artist, it means they needed him for mass acceptance, and to break down barriers so that people would say hey music is what matters, we don't care about race. Even the great Ernest Withers, civil rights photographer, who of course was black, and knew Elvis, said that Elvis did a lot more for civil rights than people realize
Although... when Peter Guarlnick wrote Last Train to Memphis in 1995, Elvis had already been dead for 18 years. My experience, having worked on at least TV & film 50 documentaries over the last four decades or so, is that the subject gets harder and harder to research the further away you get from their death. I think it'd actually be harder to do that research today (2022), 45 years from Elvis' death, than it would have been in 1995, because so many potential interview subjects wouldn't be around for interviews and fact-checking. And there's tons of newspapers and magazines and film interviews that never got digitized, so trying to find physical copies of them would be very frustrating. There are rare exceptions, like the massive Beatles archive that Neil Aspinall painstakingly assembled from the early 1970s to the day he died in 2008, so they were more than ready to do the Anthology project in 1994, since they had a head start on gathering all the material. I think that's kind of a lazy response from filmmakers when people point out very real problems with the facts, or with anachronisms. I've literally had producers or directors roll their eyes and say, "well, only you would notice this." My standard answer is, "hey, if I can notice it, anybody can notice it." But usually by the time we get projects in for post, it's too late to make a change. If you make a film about a very specific point in time, particularly a real-life person or incident, it's important to get all the subtle details right. For example, I notice that they often get pay phones wrong in films about the 1950s, 1960s, or 1970s: the little "clicks" and "dings" they make aren't quite correct, I think because the sound editors and mixers working on them weren't alive when pay phones existed. Old cars from that period also don't sound like they do in contemporary films: they sound like 60-70 year old cars being run in 2022, which is not what a new 1960 car sounded like 62 years ago. Type faces were different, hair styles were different, elevators were different... it's a whole slew of things. (Spielberg's current The Fablemans is a rare case where they got all the historical details right, but in that case, the director was alive when all those situations took place, so he actually knows when it's right or wrong.) I think in the case of Baz Luhrmann's Elvis, the "gist" of what's there is essentially true, but in a few cases they combined some characters, simplified some situations, or they shortened the time-frame to cram it into a single 159-minute movie. BTW, after re-reading both Guaralnick books on the life of Elvis Presley, I came to the conclusion that Col. Tom Parker was actually worse in real life than he was in the movie, and that was not how I remembered the books from the first time I read them 20 years ago.
Challenging? Perhaps. But crafting a new interpretation from the old is what historians do all the time. They re-evaluate the sources tucked away in archives and update the record, by bringing in additional material pulled in from newspaper and magazine archives, manuscripts, film, photos, letters and interviews that got missed the last time around. More often than not the story is refined rather than transformed. Guralnick understood this, which was why he wrote in one of the prefaces that his books wouldn't be the last word on Elvis Presley. So, regardless of whether you liked this film or not, the filmmakers behaved like historians. Whether trawling through the archives, which produced the footage with the owner of Club Handy confirming that Elvis attended the club; or conducting original research, such as the interview Baz Luhrmann did with Sam Bell. Done within the last 5 years too. Boswell's post [#4601] seemed to question the extent to which Elvis was "integrated". Perhaps the interview will answer that question. If not, it's a valuable document nonetheless. Surely we can agree on that.
Finally (!) got around to watching this. The Good: The acting. Great performances and direction. I would have preferred someone else other than Tom Hanks. Hanks is a great actor, but he's just so ingrained in film-lovers brains, it's hard for me to shift his typical style/appearance to something dramatically different like Col. Parker here. I appreciate how well they appeared to make the interiors of Graceland authentic. I visited last year, and although I'm no expert, it really looked like the recreated Graceland inch-for-inch. I spot-checked a few of the historical performances via photos online, and it looks like they nailed the outfits as well. The Bad: Although I realize 'this is not a documentary', my only complaint was the modern/rap music woven into some scenes. I don't mind rap at all! But it really threw me out of the mindset of the 60's/70's, and I don't think it will age well.
Austin Butler will be hosting Saturday Night Live on December 17: Steve Martin & Martin Short, Austin Butler to Host 'SNL' in December - Variety
Hated the hip-hop in Elvis. Totally took me out of the film. I would've been fine with period 1950s R&B.
Some sort of symbolism I think, saying that today's prominent black music goes back to Beale Street and its attitude is similar to the attitude of Elvis in the 50s. I'm speculating of course
Let's agree to disagree. I think it was done to appease studio execs and investors who wanted a successful film for 2022 audiences, even if it wasn't true to the period.
If it were any director but Baz, I would agree with you, but he has a history with this sort of thing when it comes to period pieces. I just found this article and it basically is saying he's just trying to create mood Elvis: Why Baz Luhrmann Uses So Much Modern Music (screenrant.com)
It's no coincidence that those who hated the hip hop elements in the movie also hated the movie's truth bending. It's a matter of taste; those who are accustomed to more conservative standards will likely be irritated the most. And circling back to Guralnick: even by 2009 fans already gained new insights into Presley's life not covered by Guralnick in Alanna Nash's Baby Let's Play House, not to mention her other book The Colonel. It's not just about re-interviewing original sources but finding new ones (like Sam Bell). One just has to look at the books written about another legend: Robert Johnson to see how it can be done. The recent biography Up Jumped The Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson proves that even after more than 80 years after the musician's death there are still more pieces of the puzzle still to be found. Same goes with many other important historical figures; just ask David McCullough or Ron Chernow.
Nope. I'm not at all irritated by the bending of historical facts. The equivalent to using modern hip-hop in Elvis would be if Oliver Stone used P.M. Dawn's Set Adrift on Memory Bliss as a musical interlude for his 1991 film The Doors. The movie would be forever tied to 1991 zeitgeist, even if you can draw a line between the lyrics and Jim Morrison. Forever anachronistic.
Hollywood is a bad place to go for a history lesson. A cinema director's objective is seldom to inform but entertain.
