Luhrmann’s film doesn’t quite square with Bangs’s counterman source there. After the screening, he tells Vanity Fair that Elvis at this point of his life was completely co-opted by his questionable manager, Colonel Tom Parker, who only let him tour in America and sometimes made him play up to three times a day.
Parker had him in Las Vegas, playing nightly, for close to a decade. “He’s fatter, he loses his spirit. He’s deteriorating, that’s what you’re seeing. Imagine wanting to tour overseas and doing that for seven years?” Luhrmann says. “But Clive Davis told me to this day he still has never been to an opening night as great as that Vegas show was.”
Indeed, while some moments of the film show Elvis sweating, sluggish, and struggling to get through his set, others show his once-in-a-lifetime performing prowess, like when he belts out Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water.” For those of us who weren’t alive when Elvis was, it feels like an a-ha moment: where you finally get why the generations of the past were obsessed with the guy. (As well as the artists of the present: there is no Mick Jagger or Harry Styles without Elvis.) Oh, and his costumes? Bejeweled and amazing. “Elvis didn’t have a stylist,” Luhrmann notes. His stage costumes felt like a forebear for Alessandro Michele’s Gucci, with its flamboyant colors and ornamentation. And, frankly, they probably were the reference.
Why, after the success of his dramatized Elvis film, did Luhrmann decide to do another? Part of it was the richness of source material—in a speech to the crowd, he describes going to the MGM archive and discovering 67 boxes of negatives. Another part of it was, well, artistic duty. At one moment in the documentary, Elvis, blue eyes wide, tells the crowd that one of his life wishes is to perform in New York or Britain. He never got to do so in his lifetime. “We’re giving Elvis the world tour he dreamed but never had,” Luhrmann says, gesturing around the crowd at The Crosby. Indeed, EPiC opens worldwide on February 27, bringing The King and his rich baritone to the global masses. Who knows, maybe it’ll start a new wave of Elvis fervor too.
