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To celebrate Elvis Presley’s 81st birthday, TCM will show four feature films and two documentaries this Friday, January 8. I have a soft spot for the last film scheduled, This Is Elvis, because it was the movie that motivated me to write my dissertation on Presley, which provided the core material for several books.
Produced, directed, and written by Andrew Solt and Malcolm Leo, This Is Elvis combines television appearances, news footage, voice-over narration, and re-created scenes with actors to interpret Presley’s life and career. In other words, don’t expect an expository documentary like you might find on the Biography Channel. Instead, the heavy use of re-created scenes, simulated newsreels, and feigned interviews make this an example of a performative documentary, in which the filmmakers stage scenes and direct performances to mimic drama or to depict a specific outcome.
The film is structured in flashback, which adds drama and interest to the material. It opens with the shocking news of Elvis’s death and then cuts back to his childhood in Tupelo, Mississippi. Altogether, four separate actors portray Presley at various points in his life, including Paul Boensh III who plays ten-year-old Elvis. In the childhood scenes, Elvis is depicted learning the guitar from an old blues singer, played by real-life bluesman Furry Lewis. David Scott stars as the teenage Elvis, who performs in front of his high-school class for a talent show. Dana Mackay portrays Elvis during the sequence in which his mother becomes ill and then dies, which occurred when the singer was in the army. The most authentic portrayal is given by Johnny Harra, a real-life tribute artist who plays Presley during his Vegas years.
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ELVIS’S REAL-LIFE COOK, MARY JENKINS, SPEAKS WITH JOHNNY HARRA ON THE SET .
Key events in his career, including the 1950s when Elvis was dubbed the Pelvis for his hip-thrusting performance style, are reconstructed through actual news footage, home movies, concert material, still photos, movie clips, and television performances. Likewise, clips from his 1960s musical romances represent the movie-star phase of his career. Excerpts from The ’68 Comeback Special signal a creative turning point that resulted in his return to concert performances and his record-breaking appearances in Las Vegas. This Is Elvis smoothly interweaves its diverse material, making it difficult at times to determine re-creation from actual documentation. For example, in recounting the death of Elvis’s mother, real news photos of Elvis and Vernon Presley waiting in the hospital corridor are edited together with simulated newsreel footage featuring David Scott as Elvis and Lawrence Koller as Vernon. The faked newsreel includes scratches and dirt to suggest old, worn-out news footage from another time.
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SONNY WEST AND DAVE HEBLER SPEAK AT A PRESS CONFERENCE ABOUT THEIR TELL-ALL BOOK.
Elvis’s physical and emotional decline is tied in with the famous “Bodyguard Book,” the tell-all by former Memphis Mafia insiders Red West, Sonny West, and Dave Hebler. Released just two weeks before Elvis’s death, the controversial book revealed the singer’s drug abuse and other shortcomings for the first time. The trio held a press conference, which is included in the documentary along with clips of a bloated and obviously unhealthy Elvis in concert stumbling over the words to “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” Though Elvis often deliberately played around with the lyrics to that song as a joke for the audience, the clip in this context serves as “proof” of his decline. The footage came from a CBS-produced program about Elvis that never aired for obvious reasons.
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ELVIS PERFORMS AT THE HUDSON THEATER IN NEW YORK IN JULY 1956, HIS BREAKOUT YEAR.
Die-hard Elvis fans will notice that images used to represent certain events or time frames are not always of that event or time frame. The documentary posits 1956 as the year that Presley catapulted from regional sensation to national stardom, but intermixed with performances that are supposed to be from 1956 are those from 1957. Later, when chronicling his comeback to live performance after a decade of making fluffy romantic musicals, footage from the 1970 documentary Elvis: That’s the Way It Is is used to depict Presley rehearsing for The ’68 Comeback Special and to represent his first Vegas concert in 1969. I doubt if this was done in error. Instead, the clips were used to suggest or represent a phase of Elvis’s career; they were not intended to prove a specific point.
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ELVIS WITH GIRLFRIEND LINDA THOMPSON, WHO LATER MARRIED BRUCE JENNER, WHO IS NOW CAITLYN JENNER. AN INTERESTING LIFE.
Voice-over narration ties the disparate elements together. The narration is a combination of actors portraying key people in Elvis’s life and career and the voices of real-life friends and family. Elvis’s voice is provided by Ral Donner, who could be considered the fifth actor to portray Presley in the film. Elvis’s foreman, Joe Esposito, and ex-girlfriend Linda Thompson do their own narration, though Thompson is portrayed onscreen by Cheryl Needham.
This Is Elvis doesn’t uncover the “real” Elvis Presley so much as to reaffirm his status as a legend—the singer who changed the course of popular music and popular culture. That was the goal—to document the myth, not the man. Exact control of the story, exerted via re-enactments, re-creations, and the re-organization of authentic materials, was necessary to achieve that goal.
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ANOTHER DYNAMIC PHOTO FROM ELVIS’S BIG YEAR, 1956. HERE HE PERFORMS IN OKLAHOMA CITY.
Important to consider is the date of release—1981. Elvis had been dead four years, but, unlike other famous icons of popular culture whose contributions were assessed and appreciated just after death, no music historian, culture critic, or even entertainment biographer stepped forward to assess Elvis Presley. Instead, the years after Elvis’s death were dominated by the specter of the Bodyguard Book (i.e., Elvis: What Happened?). Associates and former employees either confirmed the shocking allegations or denied them, generally in a kind of hastily written, first-hand account. The books that corroborated the drug use include Elvis: Portrait of a Friend (1979) by Marty and Patsy Lacker (part of the Presley entourage) and Elvis: We Love You Tender (1979) by Dee Presley and her sons Billy, Rick, and David Stanley (Elvis’s step-family). Those who denied the singer’s drug use included Elvis: Why Don’t They Leave You Alone? (1982) by May Mann (a journalist who befriended Presley and Col. Tom Parker) and My Life With Elvis (1977) by Becky Yancey (a Graceland secretary). No matter which side they took, these biographies were considered little more than anecdotal accounts by those cashing in on their relationships to Elvis, which did little for Presley’s memory in the eyes of cultural pundits or the mainstream press.
Most damaging was Albert Goldman’s Elvis, a hatchet job masquerading as biography. Published in 1981, the book gained instant notoriety because of Goldman’s accusations and accounts. A self-confessed Presley hater, he relied on the stories of financially destitute ex-members of Elvis’s entourage for the unsubstantiated rumors and half-truths he propagated. For those who were not Presley fans, the book and the publicity it received seemed to validate not only his drug abuse but other unseemly behavior. The mainstream media, which had never depicted Elvis Presley accurately or understood his career, reveled in the sordid details. Even the postmaster general declared the U.S.P.S. would never issue a stamp with the likeness of someone who had abused drugs or engaged in unsavory behavior, though if the postmaster general had scrutinized the musicians and athletes already immortalized on stamps, he might have realized the hypocrisy of his statement.
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MY FAVORITE PART OF ‘THIS IS ELVIS’ IS THIS PERFORMANCE OF ‘AMERICAN TTRILOGY’. SHOT IN SLOW MOTION, ELVIS DROPS TO HIS KNEES FOR THE FINALE–AN OTHERWORLDLY MOMENT.
This Is Elvis was a box office success, grossing over $2 million on its initial release to theaters—a tidy sum for a documentary. More importantly, it reminded the public of the whole of Elvis’s unique career as well as his musical accomplishments while not denying the dark side to the Presley story. This Is Elvis, along with Dave Marsh’s 1982 career biography Elvis, an excellent evaluation of Presley’s music, helped to refocus attention on his music and sway public opinion in a different direction. Still, it would be another decade or so before Elvis Presley got his due as an important cultural figure.
This Is Elvis is also interesting for reasons beyond its subject. According to press materials, the film was “the first theatrical movie to tell a story by blending existing footage with historically accurate re-creations.” Today, this is a common approach to nonfiction films and programming, particularly if you watch the History Channel or other cable programming. These techniques are also used in a documentary style called performative. However in 1981, such techniques were frowned upon and considered a throwback to the faked scenes in documentaries of the distant past, e.g. Nanook of the North.
Cinema verite still dominated the nonfiction format in 1981. With its agenda of direct observation and minimal participation on the part of the filmmakers, cinema verite would never have included re-enactments, fake newsreels, or other manufactured elements. Given the dominance of verite, This Is Elvis was controversial, with many reviewers attacking the film for its manufactured scenes and dramatic techniques. In the Chicago Reader, Dave Kehr wrote, “The questionable passages in this 1981 release are clearly marked in the credits as re-creations, but there’s still something dishonest about faking a documentary style (and badly—no self-respecting newsreel cameraman of the 1950s would have turned in such sloppy handheld footage).” Janet Maslin of The New York Times was much harsher: “. . . with unmistakable intent to hoodwink, the directors, Malcolm Leo and Andrew Solt, have faked interviews, dramatic scenes and newsreels and interspersed them with the real thing.” Pauline Kael of the New Yorker, a magazine that never understood Elvis Presley at any point in his career, could not contain herself: “The movie is a monstrosity,” its combination of documentary and re-enactment a case of “playing devious games. . . .”
Filmmakers Solt and Leo went on to establish prominent careers as packagers of entertainment documentaries, including tributes to beloved television series and celebrations of rock performers. But, they would not surpass This Is Elvis in terms of service to its subject.