BEFORE: After tonight, just one more week of Doc Block, maybe a little more because I have to sneak a couple of ringers in there before the last doc to make sure I end with a solid film, plus an easy link back to fiction films. I'm running out of docs, believe it or not, there will be very few to screen next year, but you know, they build up again over time, you put two together on the list and they start breeding once they're in captivity. You know how it is.
With all the delays caused by work and skip days here and there, in order to line things up with birthdays and such, I managed to get back on Elvis Presley as a topic on the 49th anniversary of his funeral, meaning the memorial service at Graceland. Yes, I've been there, I stood in front of Elvis' grave the way many tourists do, he died on August 16, 1977 and the official funeral was just two days later. See, I knew the chain had something in mind for me with all the skip days, it's very sneaky that way.
Anyway, I've got two Elvis docs, they seem almost identical but that's honestly what I'm here to determine - and I saved two U.S. states for Elvis, the first one's going to be based on where he was born, which was Tupelo in MISSISSIPPI. Since I already covered Tennessee you can probably guess what other state he's associated with, which I'll get to tomorrow. I could have flipped them, but since I just covered Louisiana, Mississippi is just across the river.
Date admitted to the U.S.: December 10, 1817 (20th state)
Claim to fame: Birthplace of Elvis, duh. Also a pretty big river, and all that that entails.
Nickname: The Magnolia State or The Hospitality State
State Motto: "Virtue et armis" or "by valor and arms"
State Flower: Obviously the magnolia
State Bird: Northern mockingbird - northern? must have gotten lost
State Tree: Southern magnolia - wait, I thought it was a flower?
State Food: Sweet potato
State Reptile: American alligator
State Fish: Largemouth bass
State Toy: Teddy bear
Notable Sports Teams: No pro teams, just college-level ones like the Ole Miss Rebels and the Mississippi State Bulldogs. Minor-league baseball affiliates of the Brewers and the Braves.
Fun Facts: Formerly colonized by the French and the Spanish, the state ended up in the hands of the British after the French and Indian War. But the U.S. won it in the American Revolution, before it became a state. No backsies. Americans pulled the usual fast one and made a law that said any Native Americans had to sell their land before moving on to find new tribal land in Oklahoma. Really, it was their mistake in the first place for settling down on land that would be so important to growing cotton in the future. Those cotton plantation owners brought in or acquired slaves, and by 1860 enslaved African-Americans totaled 55% of Mississippi's population. You can probably see by the numbers why the white people were so eager to keep the black people from gaining the right to vote. Back then it was the Democrats who tried to disenfranchise black voters, but still some black candidates managed to get elected, which set off white panic, which led to more violence and those Jim Crow laws. The only good thing to come out of all that was the blues music, along with the Gospel, country and jazz music that got exported to Chicago from the Mississippi Delta region. Of course, after it became popular a lot of it was stolen by white artists like Elvis Presley and Led Zeppelin.
I have NOT been to Mississippi - so I'm still at 26 states visited out of 44 profiled. Just six films to go and seven states left. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon carry over from "Beyond 'JFK': The Question of Conspiracy".
THE PLOT: The story of the behind-the-scenes drama that took place during the making of Elvis Presley's iconic 1968 TV special.
AFTER: Yeah, I kind of know a lot of this story already, from watching that longer 2-part HBO documentary series "Elvis Presley: The Searcher" a few years back. But specifically this is very rich on details about just one milestone concert in Elvis' career, the 1968 comeback special, which was originally meant to be a Christmas special, though once they started rehearsing it and filming it Elvis was having a lot of fun playing with his four-piece band again, playing in the round on a stage surrounded by a bunch of carefully-chosen teenage girls. To play songs like "Hound Dog" and "That's All Right, Mama" again for the first time in years, well, despite Col Tom Parker's incessant urging, they never got around to recording any Christmas music, except by accident.
The director of the '68 Comeback Special, of course, was Steve Binder, who was riding high after a benefit TV special made for the NAACP, which had both white artists like Tony Bennett and black artists like Nat King Cole performing on the same stage. Controversial, because there were still parts of the U.S. back then where if you wanted to shoot a special like that, you had to use TWO soundstages, and one would be "whites only". This was a very good reason to rehearse and shoot the special in Burbank, California. But this meant flying out Elvis and his band, and hiring a bunch of California girls as dancers, and if Elvis was away from his wife and surrounded by a bunch of beautiful women, there's no telling what could happen. You know what, it's fine, we all know he did whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. But he did inquire about renting a house in California and bringing Priscilla and Lisa Marie out there with him, probably so he'd be less likely to cheat.
Steve Binder went on to direct more variety TV shows after this, including the infamous "Star Wars Holiday Special", which I covered in last year's Doc Block, if you recall it was a complete disaster starring Art Carney, Bea Arthur and Harvey Korman, and the only people who could even stand watching it were 10 year old kids like me who didn't know any better, and would come to absolutely hate the TV special when they were in their 20s, forget about it in their 30's and then get curious about it again in their 40's. However, if they then watched in again in their 40's, they would absolutely hate it again, so it's a bit of a vicious cycle.
At this point, Elvis had not been on live TV in over 7 years, he had been concentrating on making terrible movies that all had the same plot, basically, he would be a cowboy or a soldier or a tour guide in Hawaii and there would be a love interest, he'd get into some kind of trouble or a fight, but also he was a singer on the side, so they could showcase and sell more records, proving that a film career and a recording career could work hand-in-hand. However, the Beatles copied his formula and made "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help" meaning he no longer had a monopoly on the formula, which was starting to look quite out of date. And as the 1960's went on, his films kind of got worse and worse, the critics hated them with a passion, but there was an endless supply of teen girls to buy tickets for them, then a lot of them shifted over to the Beatles, too.
Elvis did kind of make himself relevant again through the '68 comeback special - this doc likens his resurgence to the popularity the Beatles enjoyed after JFK was shot, and in a weird bit of cosmic irony, Robert Kennedy was assassinated during the filming of Elvis' show, and the country was in a funk once again, for nearly the same reason. History does not repeat itself, but it frequently rhymes, or something. The last song in the Comeback Special, "If I Can Dream", was written just for the special, and kind of encourages Americans to keep hope alive, to look forward to a brighter day when different races can work together and walk together hand-in-hand, maybe even on the moon. You know, or words to that effect. The song kind of riffed on the words of Martin Luther King Jr., and wouldn't you know it, he'd recently been assassinated too. Yeah, that was a difficult time in U.S. history, many of the people trying to enact change were being shot down. Why, it's almost like there was some kind of giant conspiracy of people who didn't want things to change.
Now, Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis's manager, was against this song, he said it wasn't the kind of song he should be singing, also he reminded everyone this was supposed to be a CHRISTMAS special and they still hadn't done one number with Elvis in a Santa suit or recorded anything even close to a Christmas carol. How the hell are they going to sell Christmas albums if Elvis is singing about racial equality and space travel? It's a valid question - but this doc reveals that Elvis was working with Binder to do their own thing, subvert the mandate of Tom Parker and make something truly new and popular that would be so successful it broke the rules and got Elvis out from under Parker's thumb. By the way, the man was not named Tom Parker, and he was nothing even close to a Colonel, in fact he wasn't even American, he was Dutch. His real name was Andreas Cornelis van Kujik, and he came to America illegally and hid out by working in carnivals, eventually making his way into music promotion. When his father died he cut off all ties with his family in the Netherlands, and this documentary comes very close to suggesting that he killed some woman in Europe and needed to get to America quickly to hide. You can say he managed Elvis or exploited Elvis, but he sure knew how to sell Elvis to America. This is a guy who probably needs his own documentary one of these days, because really, there just HAVE to be a lot of secrets there. Plus he wore a Hawaiian shirt to Elvis' funeral, 49 years ago today.
What was up with the clips from "Bonnie and Clyde", "The Graduate" and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner"? Those films had nothing at all to do with Elvis or the 1968 special. I suppose this was an attempt to summarize the zeitgeist, but it feels more like an easy way to fill up space. Totally not necessary, this isn't "Film Geek", we came here for Elvis and not this. The clips from the NAACP special at least make sense, because they came from the same director, Steve Binder, and that's his origin story.
Well, Elvis went on to make some more good music after this special, like "In the Ghetto" and "Suspicious Minds", and the TV special led to offers to tour again, playing the London Palladium and the International Hotel in Vegas. In 1970 he met with President Nixon, which has been depicted in more than one film, and in 1972 he separated from Priscilla because of all his affairs and such. Another comeback special took place in 1973, filmed in Hawaii. But his health was in rapid decline by 1976, and he died in August 1977. That kind of brings us full circle, but let's see what else we can learn tomorrow.
Directed by John Scheinfeld (director of "Starring Dick Van Dyke" and "What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?")
Also starring Terry Baldwin, Steve Binder (last seen in "A Disturbance in the Force"), Allan Blye, Douglas Brinkley, Joan Gansky, Gillian Garr, Susan Henning, Tanya Lemani, Anita Mann, Maffio, Drake Milligan, Darice Murray-McKay, Alanna Nash, Jaime Rogers, Darius Rucker (last seen in "Jagged"), Kelefa Sanneh,
with archive footage of Elvis Presley (last seen in "Sunday Best: The Untold Story of Ed Sullivan"), Harry Belafonte (ditto), James Brown (ditto), Nat King Cole (ditto), Muhammad Ali (last seen in "Reggie"), Lucille Ball (last seen in "Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion"), Anne Bancroft (last seen in "Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!"), Warren Beatty (last seen in "Starring Dick Van Dyke"), Tony Bennett (last seen in "Mister Rogers: It's You I Like"), Chuck Berry (last seen in "Devo"), Jan Berry (last seen in "The Wrecking Crew!"), Dean Torrence (ditto), Petula Clark, Perry Como (last seen in "Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes"), Faye Dunaway (last seen in "Film Geek"), Gene Hackman (ditto), Dustin Hoffman (ditto), Gene Kelly (ditto), Burt Lancaster (ditto), Sidney Poitier (ditto), Richard Egan, Bob Finkel, D.J. Fontana (last seen in "Elvis Presley: The Searcher", Charlie Hodge (ditto), Scotty Moore (ditto), Alan Ford, Marvin Gaye (last seen in "Diana Ross: Supreme Sensation"), Lesley Gore,
George Harrison (also last seen in "Sunday Best: The Untold Story of Ed Sullivan"), Mick Jagger (ditto), Martin Luther King (ditto), John Lennon (ditto), Paul McCartney (ditto), Katharine Hepburn (also last seen in "Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes"), Paul Newman (ditto), Bones Howe (last seen in "Summer of Soul"), Hubert Humphrey (last seen in "Rather"), Caroline Kennedy (also carrying over from "Beyond 'JFK': The Question of Conspiracy"), John F. Kennedy (ditto), John F. Kennedy Jr. (ditto), Robert F. Kennedy (ditto), Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (ditto),
Debra Paget, Tom Parker (last seen in "ZZ Top: That Little Ol' Band from Texas"), Gladys Presley (also last seen in "Elvis Presley: The Searcher"), Vernon Presley (ditto), Priscilla Presley (last seen in "The Naked Gun"),
Smokey Robinson (also last seen in "Sunday Best: The Untold Story of Ed Sullivan"), Diana Ross (ditto), Ringo Starr (ditto), Ed Sullivan (ditto), Tom Sarnoff, Rod Steiger (last seen in "The Specialist"), Spencer Tracy (also last seen in "Devo"), Leslie Uggams (last seen in "Deadpool & Wolverine"), George Wallace (last seen in "Mike Wallace Is Here"), Andy Williams (last seen in "Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution"), Malcolm X (last seen in "Ali & Cavett: The Tale of the Tapes")
plus the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones and the Supremes
RATING: 6 out of 10 tickets for the historic taping that disappeared after handing them to "Col. Tom Parker"
No comments:
Post a Comment