HBO Max to Showcase a Big Hunk o’ Elvis Movies Just in Time for Oscar Voting (Exclusive)
thewrap.com“Elvis” “I always thought, if you’re going to do a movie about a music icon, go big,” Luhrmann said when he first spoke to TheWrap about Elvis.
And the film does indeed go big, even though the writer-director started with the idea of Elvis as canvas or Elvis as metaphor before realizing that the man was pretty interesting too – particularly when played by an actor as obsessive as Butler, who immersed himself in all things Elvis for years.
In TheWrap’s review of the film at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, I wrote, “The film is part spirited homage to a titanic force in American music, delivered with the brio and extravagance of Lurhmann riffs like ‘Moulin Rouge!’ and ‘Romeo + Juliet’; part sad cautionary tale of a quick rise and a long, slow decline; and part showcase for Austin Butler, who takes an impossible role and does a terrific job even though he, like everyone else on the planet, doesn’t really look like Elvis.”“Just a Boy From Tupelo: Bringing Elvis to the Big Screen” This 30-minute feature about the making of “Elvis” is partly an extended EPK looking behind the scenes at Luhrmann’s film, but it also plays as much like a tribute to Elvis as a look at the making of the movie.
As it moves chronologically through the events of the film – from Elvis discovering gospel and blues to the 1968 “comeback” special to the Las Vegas shows and the long, slow decline that followed – Luhrmann keeps repeating how impossible it is for us to realize how strange, how revolutionary and how dangerous the singer was in his time.
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