In the spring of 1972, a film crew trailed Elvis Presley everywhere he went to capture a pivotal moment in his career – his first tour in nearly a decade. Ironically, one of the most crucial things that happened during that project occurred way off camera. “We really wanted to get an interview with Elvis on film,” said Jerry Schilling, a confidant and employee of the King who at that time was working for the company behind the movie. “But he was tired when we were going to do it and for whatever reason we never wound up getting anything on camera.”
They did, however, get Presley to talk casually on tape for about 40 minutes, during which he said things he never put on record before. That was enough to raise concerns for his notoriously censorious manager, Colonel Tom Parker, who insured that little of that talk saw the light of day during his lifetime.
Now, more than five decades later, significant parts of that audio tape are finally being heard in a new film by Baz Luhrmann, who four years ago directed the global blockbuster biopic Elvis. His follow-up, titled Epic: Elvis Presley in Concert, is far from the conventional concert movie its title implies, thanks in key part to that interview. The tape “was our lightbulb moment”, said Lurhmann by Zoom from his office in LA. “Because Elvis was off camera when it was taped, I think he was really unguarded and really open hearted. We thought, ‘What if we use this in the film so that Elvis tells his story himself?’”
Quotes from that interview wound up functioning as the film’s thematic spine, connecting a mad swirl of images, voice overs and editing derring-dos that turn the movie into what the director calls “a dreamscape poem of Elvis”.
That approach – hallucinogenic in tone and sweeping in reach – extends the style Luhrmann established in films like Strictly Ballroom, Moulin Rouge and his first Elvis movie, all of which use manic editing, surreal imagery, gaudy sets and blurred time frames to reinvent the movie musical for the modern age. “Much as I try, I have never been able to follow the system,” Luhrmann said. “I have to tell the story my own way.”
The story he told here began as a kind of accident. While making the first Elvis movie, Luhrmann heard rumors about unseen footage from two important concert films from the early 70s, Elvis: That’s the Way It Is and Elvis on Tour. Using the considerable resources he had at his disposal, he sent researchers into Warner Bros’ vaults, improbably located in underground salt mines in Kansas. There, they found 59 hours of never-before-seen film negatives. Combining that with rare Super 8 footage from the Graceland Archives and other bits he came across, Luhrmann and his team were able to spiff up the footage, then painstakingly match to it sound sterling enough to achieve the look and fidelity worthy of the Imax treatment. An invaluable assist in that two-year effort came from Peter Jackson, who had performed similar feats for the Beatles’ footage for his gripping series Get Back. Other footage came from private collectors, a notoriously prickly, sometimes shady, bunch. “There was a bit of going to see gangsters in car parks at midnight,” Luhrmann said with a smile.
The result presents a level of visual clarity and richness beyond any filmed presentation of the King before. In fact, the film looks and sounds so good, many may smell the presence of AI. “I heard a kid say the other day, ‘Ah, don’t’ get so excited, it’s just AI,” Lurhmann said. “But I’m making it clear that there’s not a frame of AI. The only visual effect in this film is the effect Elvis has on the audience.”
In fact, his performance in the film proves even more arresting than the look or sound, which may come as a surprise to some viewers given the time frame. Two years before the earliest footage here was filmed, Elvis managed a creative resurrection on his 1968 TV special with a performance that wholly resuscitated the spark and edge of his early years. Its success went a long way towards making up for the long period in the 60s when his image and spirit were drained by his roles in a string of laughably rote Hollywood films. After the triumph of the TV special, though, he went straight into performing in Las Vegas, a city then seen as the elephant’s graveyard for talent. The result helped make Elvis the antithesis of cool to hipsters at the time, a sentiment exacerbated by his subsequent years in Vegas (1973 to 77) where he degenerated into the sad, drugged and bloated caricature Luhmann now alternately describes as “a Halloween costume” and “a joke”.
In striking contrast to that perception is the Vegas footage we see in Epic. His performances from 1970, swirled with the tour footage from 72, show both the depth of Elvis’ personal dynamism and the range of his vocal command. Those karate chop moves, big collars and grand gestures that later became satiric here thrill. Key to that was the star’s rapport with the army of musicians, backup singers and orchestral accompanists that support him. The first thing that hits you is the sheer velocity of the music they make together. Performances of rockers like Polk Salad Annie and Burning Love are bullet-train fast. Gospel numbers, like Oh Happy Day and How Great Thou Art show Elvis’ operatic range while R&B standards like You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling bear his soul. Throughout we see how Elvis directs the band and the singers, altering the arrangements as they go to build up and tear down a song in mounting waves. “It’s all happening in the moment,” Luhrmann said. “It’s not a show where they go through twelve numbers and hit all the marks. He makes it up as he goes along.”
That comes through most clearly in the rehearsal footage included in the film. “That’s where you see that Elvis was the most underrated producer in music,” Schilling said. “He’s fixing the musicians, fixing the backup singers, and fixing the music overall. Elvis wasn’t just a great artist, he was a great listener.”
Case in point is an extended version of Suspicious Minds where Elvis’ patterns of calls and responses with his backup singers, the Sweet Inspirations, so delight them they giggle with joy. “It wasn’t like it was Elvis and then the back-up singers and the band,” Schilling said. “He saw himself as part of the band.”
The most valuable player in their ranks has to be guitarist James Burton, whose licks and leads consistently toughen the beats and elaborate the melodies. “He put the band together,” Schilling said, “He’s the most humble guy and yet the most talented.”
Another aspect of Elvis revealed by the footage is his eager banter with the crowd. At one show he jokingly introduces himself as Fats Domino; At another he takes a swig from a woman’s cocktail on a front table to her delight. Lurhmann believes Elvis consciously devised such moment to counteract the common view of him as “a Greek God with the voice of Orpheus. Being goofy and funny was his way of disarming the audience and letting them know he is, in fact, a human being,” he said.
To Schilling, it was a true feat for Luhrmann and his longtime editor Johnathan Redmond to make the disparate footage here cohere. “The key to the film was the editing,” he said.
Despite the triumph of the performances, however, the interview quotes threaded through the film find Elvis expressing some of the frustrations that would metastasize by the mid to late 70s. “Hollywood’s image of me was wrong and I knew it,” he says in the interview. “And I could not do anything about it.”
Schilling said the bad scripts he had to work with upset Elvis so much he “became physically sick. He wanted to be a James Dean or Marlon Brando, and they weren’t giving him those roles,” he said.
Luhrmann believes Elvis had it in him to be a great actor if he’d gotten finer material. “If you look at him in Kid Creole (directed by Michael Curtiz) you see he’s got real chops.”
In his interview, Elvis makes clear another core frustration – his desire to tour outside of North America, something he never got to do. “He wanted to go to Japan, he wanted to go to Europe,” Schilling said. “But it just kept getting delayed.”
The reason, Schilling believes, was the Colonel and his background. The manager never told anyone he was a Dutch citizen or that he didn’t own an American passport, something which would have been revealed had he tried to leave the country. As a result, he would never consider staging the global tours the star desired. “Like all despots,” Luhrmann said, “he had to control the room and everyone in it.” When it came to his acting ambitions, Elvis had specific ideas about the roles he wanted to play, including starring in a splashy Matt Helm-type film in the vein of Dean Martin’s hit franchise and a karate-related project. He jumped at one prestigious offer that did come his way from Barbara Streisand to co-star with her in the 1976 version of A Star Is Born. They met and bonded during Elvis’ extended Vegas run, a connection Schilling witnessed first-hand. “If you saw the chemistry between them, it was magical,” he said.
Because the Colonel wasn’t consulted in the original discussions, however, Schilling sabotaged the deal. “If somebody can come in and make a deal with your artist and you’re not there, you’re either going to be a weak manager or not a manager,” Schilling said.
To avoid that, Colonel asked for an outrageous fee and insisted that Elvis have billing over Streisand which, Schilling said, “made it impossible.” (The lead male part eventually went to Kris Kristopherson).
In lieu of that project or other potential opportunities, the Colonel kept extending Elvis’ Vegas residencies, turning what began as an enlivening showcase into a soul-crushing grind. “You can’t have a genius do the same thing over and over again,” Schilling said. “They have to spread their wings.”
Schilling believes Elvis’ subsequent boredom and frustration played a key part in his turn to drugs. By 1974 things turned especially dark for him – literally. He was staying up all night and sleeping all day, robbing him of any glimpse of daylight for months on end. “There’s something to that, psychologically,” Schilling said.
“I didn’t know Elvis,” Lurhmann said, “but I knew Michael Jackson and I worked with Prince twice. All three of them seemed to have a pharmaceutical knowledge of prescription drugs and all three said, ‘I’m not on drugs.’”
In August of 1977, two months before the star’s death, CBS taped several performances of the star for a TV special called Elvis in Concert. “Elvis looked so bad in that I cried,” Shilling said. “I was angry. I was hurt. I actually called the Colonel and said, ‘How could you let him be filmed looking like that and going on stage like that?’ He told me, ‘he wanted to work and I made this ridiculous offer to CBS and they took it, so I had to take it.’ Well, I wouldn’t do that,” Schilling replied.
Given the drama of his decline, Luhrmann feels lucky to have captured Elvis just before that, when he still looked and sounded unbeatable. That’s the view of the star he hopes audiences will leave with. At the same time, he hopes the vulnerability of the interview will let fans see beyond his starry persona. “There’s the image of Elvis and then there’s the man,” Luhrmann said. “I hope with this film people will get to know Elvis, the man, at last.”
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