(IMAGE: ABC Television)
I haven’t seen the Baz Lurhmann movie ELVIS yet. But in my heart, I know it to be fabulous. A crime of passion, in the same way the completely overlooked Joe Eszterhas fever dream of a Bill Clinton biography AMERICAN RHAPSODY was–as a multi-tiered, self contradicting and celebratory attack on the unquantifiable mixture of yearning, desire and crime-scene-flash-photographic curiosity so many people feel in the presence of cautionary-tale superstardom.
Bear with me for a minute, because there’s a link here, by way of the fact that Bill Clinton’s penis is a character with a speaking part in AMERICAN RHAPSODY (one wonders how Eszterhas landed the interview). Clinton had an Elvis fetish, and so he allegedly called his joint by the nickname Elvis supposedly gave to his own appendage.
In the Eszterhas telling, Bill’s love thing is “Little Elvis.” And that’s hilarious in nine ways, not one.
To tell one version of the Elvis story, you have to have some sort of access to what might be called the National Id, the part of the space in his own era’s heads that dreamed of sleeping with him, or of replacing him onstage and sleeping with the swooners in his audience, or maybe just fantasized about owning a hundred Cadillacs. Bill Clinton held that fantasy in his heart, and such was its power over him that it perverted his presidency, destroyed his legacy, and wounded the nation, maybe irredeemably.
In the Clinton vision of the Elvis legacy–the mirage that seduced a hundred million Baby Boomers–you have to inflate the tires on the metaphoric Cadillac until they reach the Moon. Luhrmann is just the director for it. I admire him for taking aim at the task, and I can’t wait to see how he did with it.
But even if it’s great, the Luhrmann ELVIS will be only the second best biographical work to go by that name for me. Because I’m biased. In one of my first jobs in television, I worked as a sound effects cutter and post-house “runner” for a biographical TV series also called ELVIS–a show that ran for just three months and a week on ABC Television, way back in 1990.
ELVIS 1990 is a series you don’t remember, or one you never heard of, take your pick. Thirteen episodes shot, only ten of which ever aired.
And it was beautiful. Brainy and poetic, in a manner that’s got to be 180 degrees away from Luhrmann’s established Fellini-on-laughing-gas technique. And because it was thoughtful, ELVIS 1990 fell between two stools: a show too sophisticated for the rockabilly diehards, who wanted to see a rampaging godhead, while Elvis himself was too lowbrow as a subject to draw the kind of “sophisticated” audience that might have responded to such thoughtful and even daring programming if it was called, I dunno, THIRTYSOMETHING, to pick a hot New Yorker Magazine op ed obsession of the day.
ELVIS 1990 was a failure. But I’ve worked constantly as a media creator in the decades since, and it’s still some of the best material I’ve ever been involved with.
The idea was to depict Elvis’ life in depth and detail from the day he started recording his first demo at Sun Records, and thanks to a short run, the series only barely made it to the threshold of Presley’s initial success. If I had to listen to “Blue Moon of Kentucky” (the first Presley hit) just five more times, I think my ears would have stopped speaking to me, although all the recordings created for the show by Presley tribute artist Ronnie McDowell were respectful and energized.
HAIRSPRAY actor Michael St. Gerard looked SCARILY like Elvis and played the lead, embodying soft-spoken gentility more than rockabilly passion. Jesse Dabson and Blake Gibbons, the actors portraying guitarist Scotty Moore and upright bass player Bill Black, were uncannilly authentic as good old boys with their own ambitions and dreams. The sometimes prickly relationship between these three musicians–Presley, Moore and Black–and the one between Elvis and his mom were at the heart and soul of the show.
Col. Tom Parker was still alive as we aired. ELVIS 1990 very briefly depicted him as a shadowy and unnamed figure backstage at a concert whose face was never seen but who quietly whispered into a telephone that he’d “found something special.” The word came back that the producers’ phone rang off the hook the next day, with Col. Tom’s lawyer telling all concerned they’d best watch their step.
Priscilla was an executive producer on ELVIS 1990, so I worked with her and in proximity to her several times. I remember her as a tough, brittle woman who stood up for herself and took no nonsense from anybody. Ravishingly beautiful. Very fussy about her coffee creamers being straight from the dairy case. Having just graduated from film school, I was the low employee on the staff roster. So in addition to cutting basic sound effects and backgrounds for Priscilla’s show, I ran to the 7-11 at her beck and call to buy fresh cream and fresh milk and fresh half and half, so she could have her coffee just the way she wanted it.
Two ELVIS episodes contained storylines about Elvis’ debt to Black musicians. The second of these was called “Moody’s Blues,” and along with the final episode to air, it was easily my favorite show.* (*Note: The IMDB contradicts my memory on a few plotpoints here, so caveat emptor. But I know what I know.) In “Moody’s Blues,” Elvis bought a battered hollowbody electric guitar that once belonged to a journeyman blues artist from a pawnshop. The bluesman’s troubled life (along with the life of his guitar) was shown in flashback.
The program ended with Elvis and “Moody” playing an unknowing acoustic jump blues duet across time and space. As far as I know, it was an entirely fictional episode. But it was profound and moving.
The network refused to air it.
And I had my first lesson in Hollywood caprice.
(The cast of ELVIS 1990, a show so old they promoted it with photos printed in black and white)
Various talent and producing combinations would ebb and flow around me during each episode’s post production cycle, and as a newbie, I used to hang out in the margins of the action where I could. The actors would come in to do their ADR re-recording sessions (Priscilla narrated the series, so that’s how I met her too). My memory of Michael St. Gerard is that he was a very polite man, sweet and seemingly level-headed, who became a bit wistful as the weeks went on, because he probably knew his series was in trouble. I was not surprised years later to find out he had chucked showbiz shortly after the series got pulled, and that he subsequently became a minister.
I rewatched some ELVIS 1990 episodes online at one point, in prints bootlegged from what looked to be analogue VHS sources. Even with that kind of degradation, the beauty of the cinematography shimmered, often in a kind of Terrence Malick, golden twilight sort of way. In my biased opinion, ELVIS 1990 is right up there with CRIME STORY and MIAMI VICE and even TWIN PEAKS as an early attempt to bring cinematic production values to television–a link in a chain that extends all the way to STRANGER THINGS.
And the writers used metaphor, for crying out loud, which TV still doesn’t know how to do all that well. Our ELVIS was actually trafficking in subtext 32 years ago. At a time when it was an industry aphorism that “movies have subtext, but television is just text,” i.e., without subtlety.
No wonder even critics failed to understand what the show was trying to do.
For instance: When Elvis’ first single gets played on regional radio and he’s overwhelmed by the sudden shift in the way people treat him, he hides in a moviehouse, where only his mom knows to look for him. She finds him at closing time in an otherwise deserted auditorium, and compassionately persuades him to come home.
And then they walk outside (in what I remember as loose, Kubrickian compositions) and there’s a clouded night sky and a flash of lightning.
“Storm’s coming, mama.” Elvis says.
“I know son. I know.”
End of episode.
Even at the time, I remember thinking that what made the show special was that it was created from things you can’t purchase, including intimacy and love. Not fan love, although someone on the creative team clearly adored the idea of Elvis as a metaphor for American madness, and all the producers probably liked his music well enough. No, there was real love in that program, and it was delicately expressed, and that probably came to the series by way of Priscilla. She was deeply involved in Elvis Presley Enterpises in those days, and surely had foundational input on the show. She had her own ideas about the Elvis legacy from the moment he passed; remember, the preservation of Graceland–where the formative experiences of her own life took place–was her idea.
I read Priscilla’s book ELVIS AND ME around this time, and it confirmed something working on the show had already suggested. Priscilla saw showbusiness as something Elvis was very good at that killed him right before her eyes.
ELVIS 1990 is a narrative about a sweet and unsophisticated kid with a profound gift who lives in the same perplexed relationship to his talent the rest of the world inhabited. Elvis is life-sized on that show, a manchild who gets sucked into a poisonously seductive atmosphere and breathes it in, reluctantly at first and then gladly, until it leaks into his soul.
He is the Elvis of Priscilla’s book, transported back in time so he can become a creation myth.
Since we only did 13 shows, the deeper part of the statement was mostly made through foreshadowing, which made the Priscillian viewpoint I thought I saw embodied there both subtler and more powerful.
Tragedy was in the mix, even at the earliest moments of triumph and possibility.
When the show got cancelled, they closed it all out with an episode called “Let It Burn,” on a death wish image of Elvis, standing before a flaming Cadillac, with a weeping groupie at his side, his jaw set and fire reflected in his eyes. It was a premonition of all that was to come to him, and all that was to come for him too.
There was so much story left, as we had barely made it to 1955.
But somehow the statement felt so complete that there was nothing left to say.
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