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AT LAST - THE FIRST ELVIS PRESLEY MOVIE
(Rolling Stone / Nov. 9, 1972)
by Judith Sims
LOS ANGELES - A tiny black and white photograph appears in the middle of the huge black screen. It's an old photograph, a rural family of mother, father and young son. Sharecroppers. As the photograph gets larger and larger on the screen, a deep, familiar, slightly Southern voice starts talking:
"My father knew a lot of guitar players and most of them didn't work, so I'd better make up my mind whether I wanted to be a guitar player or an electrician because he never knew a guitar player who was worth a damn." Elvis Presley's face appears on the screen next to the photograph. He's laughing.
It's the opening shot of Elvis on Tour, a documentary film of Presley's April, 1972, concert tour that also presents some brief glimpses into his personal past and present.
The film was produced and directed by Pierre Adidge and Robert Abel, the two filmmakers who did Mad Dogs and Englishmen and several television specials, among them "In Concert: Creedence Clearwater Revival" and "Mason Williams: A Gift of Song." About a year ago they suggested to David Netter, an executive at MGM (distributors for Mad Dogs) that they'd really like to do a documentary film on Elvis Presley.
Cut to Las Vegas. March, 1972, the Hilton Hotel. Colonel Parker.
"If you can imagine a 65-year-old Southern version of Bill Graham, then you can imagine what the Colonel is like," Bob Abel said. "The Colonel doesn't stomp around or swear or yell, but in his power and his bravado . . . behind it there's a guy who really knows what he's doing. He's more interested in what your reaction is to him. He tests you. Sometimes he'll try to appear to be a very simple man from the South, but he's an incredibly shrewd guy." Adidge and Abel apparently passed the first test, gaining Parker's respect and confidence. "He liked our method or approach, you know, small cameras. The big problem on the other film (Elvis: That's the Way It Is, a concert documentary released last year), they brought in big lights and Panavision cameras and Elvis had to wait around for them to set up; the Colonel and Elvis wanted to do a film that was spontaneous without making any demands on Elvis. That was our approach." (The Colonel, by the way, chose not to appear in Elvis on Tour.)
As with Woodstock and Fillmore, the wide screen has been split in all directions; while it isn't original with Adidge and Abel, it is the most exciting way to film a rock concert - so far. Elvis front, back and sideways, bejeweled and sweating - and cool.
But we've all seen Elvis perform before, either in person or in his feature films or in the previous documentary, which was basically just one long concert interspersed with fan talk. What makes Elvis on Tour different - according to those who've worked with Elvis before - is his unprecedented willingness to expose, even slightly, that well-guarded personal life of his.
When Adidge and Abel had finished shooting last April they asked Elvis to do some voice-overs to be dubbed into the film. What actually happened was a two-hour taped interview at MGM in Elvis' old movie dressing room. On tape, no cameras. Some of that tape is used in the film, but not all of it. Some of it appears here. Two copies of the transcript are carefully guarded, one by Adidge and Abel, the other by MGM publicist Stan Brossette. They all spoke of the transcript the way some men speak of maps to the Flying Dutchman mine.
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Adidge: "Jerry Schilling, who's known Elvis since high school, told us that Elvis revealed more in that taped interview than even Jerry knew about." Brossette, who's worked with Elvis on most of those MGM movies, said that in all those years he'd never learned half so much about the man as he did from reading the transcript. "But I never asked, which is maybe why I lasted so long."
Adidge, Abel and Brossette did a luncheon interview at the MGM commissary because it was just a few feet from the projection room where the filmmakers were dubbing. There was only a month until the early November release date, but they weren't frantic. Not yet. Adidge is dark, quiet, clean-shaven - the opposite of Abel, who's blond, bearded, voluble and intense.
Abel: "Our first day of shooting we brought the cameras into a recording session at RCA. We were just going to have the cameras there. Not really shoot, just get used to each other.' (But they did film Elvis, in glasses and earphones and red satin shirt, tightly ringed by his band, grinning as he cruised into the low notes.)
"We sat with them until 2 in the morning. He was cutting a couple of singles, 'American Trilogy' and 'Burnin' Love.' We asked a friend of Elvis what they did at the end of a session. 'We sing gospel songs,' he said. So we tried to arrange it without being too obvious, asked someone to go to the piano. They sang two or three songs and Elvis just watched. Elvis was always aware of the cameras. He knew we'd manipulated it but it was also a natural thing. Gospel music, that's where his roots are, the side you never see. He told us later, 'In Las Vegas this is my way of coming down, we sit around and play and unwind. Since I was two years old all I knew was gospel music, in church, and my family sang it. That was music to me. It became such a part of my life it was as natural as dancing, a way to escape from the problems and my way of release.'"
Elvis: "I first realized I could sing at two years of age. I found myself singing, I was singing and people would listen to me around the housing project where I lived. I was about eight years old and they entered me in a talent show. I wore glasses, no music, and I won, I think it was fifth place. I got a whipping the same day, my mother whipped me for something. Destroyed my ego completely. But I'd sing in church with my mother and father and when I was about ten years old they gave me a choice between a guitar and a bicycle, so I took the giutar and I watched people and I learned to play it a little bit, but I'd never sing in public. I was very shy about it, you know. In the 11th grade in school they entered me in another talent show. Nobody knew I sang, I wasn't popular in school, I wasn't dating anybody. Anyway, I came out and did my two songs [he remembers only one. Teresa Brewer's "Till I Waltz Again With You"] and I heard people kinda rumbling and whispering. It was amazing how popular I became in school after that."
He was already an "outlaw" in school because of his sideburns: "When I was old enough to grow sideburns, I grew them; I got criticized a lot for them kicked off the football team." But even the sideburns couldn't frighten those plucky Southern girls. They knew something sexy when they saw it.
"The first time it happened, the first time that I appeared on stage it was a charity thing in Memphis, a place called the Shell. When I left the stage they were yelling and screaming and so forth and it scared me to death, man. I didn't know what I'd done, I went to the manager backstage, I said, 'What did I do? What did I do?' and he said, 'Well, whatever it is, go back and do it again.' So I went back out there and I did the same thing again. I really didn't know what the yelling was about. I didn't realize that my body was moving. It's a natural thing to me, you know.
"I got ten or 11 encores. They just kinda ended the show at that point and it scared me but then I got very happy too. But I was still shy about it. I was dating a girl and waiting for her to get out of school so we could get married. I was training to he an electrician because they made $3 an hour and I was very serious about it. I made that first record really as a personal thing for my mother and that same company called me a year later and said, 'We got a song you might be able to do.' It was 12 o'clock and they said, 'Can you be here by 3?' I was there by the time they hung up the phone."
That "first record" Elvis cut himself, two songs for $4, was at the Memphis Recording Service, a sideline of Sun Records. Sun Records' Sam Phillips was calling him back to make a real record; after several months of tries and misses, Elvis and two other guys recorded "That's All Right (Mama)."
"We use that record in the film," Abel said. "We also have a six-minute segment of old kinescopes from early performances and his Ed Sullivan appearance - the full body shot," Abel said with a dramatic grin. The Sullivan show censored Elvis, displaying him to TV viewers from the waist up. They also use old photographs, most of them never published before, of Elvis as a boy and as a fledgling rocker.
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