Drug use, death threats, and secret identities.
Baz Luhrmann's Elvis Presley biopic takes a few liberties with the truth, and leaves
a few major things out.
Here's everything "Elvis" gets wrong about Elvis.
As the film begins, Elvis has already cut his first hit record, "That's All Right, Mama."
But it's his appearance on the syndicated country music radio show "Louisiana Hayride"
that makes him a star and brings him to the attention of former carnival barker turned
music promoter Colonel Tom Parker.
The headliner on "Hayride" is longtime country star Hank Snow, who is aghast at the way Presley
gyrates in front of the crowd.
Later, when Parker convinces Elvis to strike out on his own, Snow seems all too eager to
see the young man gone.
Snow's reaction works as a symbol of how the musical establishment of the day was threatened
by Presley and rock and roll in general.
However, in real life Snow was no prude.
Both he and Parker saw the money making potential in Elvis early on, and the two even co-managed
Presley's career for a short time.
As his son Jimmie Rodgers Snow noted years later, Snow had every financial reason to
make Elvis as successful as possible, even allowing Elvis to close out their shows.
Snow's exit from the Elvis Presley story in real life came at the hands of Parker, who
used Snow to sweet-talk Presley's family into signing a new contract before cheating Snow
out of his share.
As biographer James Dickerson told the New York Post in June 2022,
"Hank Snow said that Parker was the lowest human being that had ever walked the Earth."
The contract that in real life cheated Hank Snow out of managing Presley's career is presented
as a kind of deal with the devil in the film.
Presley's manager, Colonel Parker, is seen pouring honey into the ears of Elvis' parents
Gladys and Vernon to convince them to sign.
At this point, Parker has already masterminded Presley's move from the regional Sun Records
to major label RCA-Victor, and he solidifies his control over the entire family by having
them sign into existence a new business called Elvis Presley Enterprises.
Elvis' father Vernon, who had been jailed for check forgery when his son was a boy,
would be his business manager.
Gladys is skeptical of the Colonel, and would remain so up until her death in 1958.
Ultimately, she signs the contract anyway when Parker coos about Elvis having the strength
of two men, a knowing reference to Elvis' stillborn twin brother Jesse.
Parker did indeed have Elvis and his family under contract, with Vernon serving as the
manager of Elvis' personal business.
But the business venture known as Elvis Presley Enterprises, or EPE, wouldn't be formed until
after Presley's death.
EPE was founded by Vernon, the Presleys' longtime accountant Joseph Hanks, and Elvis' ex-wife
Priscilla Presley as a way to preserve and manage his estate.
One of the most controversial aspects of Presley's life and legacy is his relationship with blues
music and southern African-American culture in general.
Baz Luhrmann's film suggests that Elvis' use of Black music and culture was appreciation,
not appropriation.
The movie works hard to convey that the musician discovered blues and gospel sincerely, with
flashbacks showing a young Elvis in a Black Pentecostal church in Mississippi.
Meanwhile, the scenes of Elvis' early days in Memphis show him on Beale Street, surrounded
by the sounds of Little Richard, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Big Mama Thornton, whose hit song
"Hound Dog" would become one of Elvis' signature tunes.
The film also gives Elvis a friendship with blues legend B.B.
King, already a well-known musician at the time, who views Presley's fame with a certain
wry detachment.
However, according to biographer Alanna Nash, this relationship seems to have been extrapolated
from a famous photograph of the two men backstage at a Memphis charity show.
Presley did not play at the show, but appeared briefly on stage and gave the crowd a little
leg shake.
In real life, King appears to have been fond of Presley on a personal level, if ambivalent
about the success Elvis and other white artists had adapting Black music.
"Elvis was very shy when I first met him."
But there is no evidence that the close friendship portrayed in the film ever existed in real
life.
In just a few short years at the end of the 1950s, Presley went from transgressive provocateur
to clean-cut all-American family entertainer.
In the film, this is orchestrated by Colonel Parker against Elvis' will, starting with
a humiliating performance on "The Steve Allen Show" where he performs "Hound Dog" with an
actual dog on stage.
"I got you a very cute hound dog right here."
Protesters line the streets outside Graceland waving signs that read "Don't Change, Elvis!"
and "We Want the Old Elvis Back!"
At a pivotal show at the Memphis Fairgrounds, after being warned against wiggling by both
the Memphis police and his manager, Elvis' performance is so intense that it causes a
riot.
Elvis is taken away in a police car and is threatened with jail or a stint in the Army.
While the "Steve Allen" performance is based on a true story, the Memphis fairground riot
is a composite of several different concerts.
Most notably, during one show in Jacksonville, Florida, a local judge warned Presley against
any lewd behavior.
But the film gives the impression that Parker altered Elvis' image under the threat of blackmail
from shadowy establishment forces, which is untrue.
Biographer Alanna Nash told Variety,
"Parker wanted to make Elvis clean-cut after he came back from the army in part because
when Elvis went into the army, neither Elvis nor Parker thought rock ‘n’ roll would
last.
Elvis, especially, thought that it might even be over by the time he got out."
From 1956 to 1969, Elvis Presley starred in over 30 Hollywood movies.
His film work dominated his career for the bulk of the '60s, which Baz Luhrmann glides
over via a zippy montage.
The film seems to believe that Elvis' Hollywood years were filled with hokey kitsch that bears
little resemblance to the transgressive, inherently political artist he was at heart.
In 1968, however, his conscience is stirred by the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. in April and Robert F. Kennedy in June.
After King's assassination in Memphis, Priscilla suggests that Presley should release a statement,
telling him that "Memphis is burning."
While King's murder sparked riots and violence in major cities across the country, the public
reaction in Memphis was more muted.
Hampton Sides wrote about King's murderer James Earl Ray in the 2010 book "Hellhound
On His Trail."
Sides explained that the first night in Memphis after the murder had isolated incidents of
violence and looting.
But where the riots in other cities lasted nearly two weeks after King's death, Memphis
fell into an eerie calm, or a deep mourning, instead.
In the movie, Elvis is in the midst of filming a television comeback special when Robert
Kennedy's assassination occurs in June 1968.
Colonel Tom Parker has explicitly sold the show to NBC as a Christmas special to be aired
in December.
However, Elvis wants to use the special to get back to his rock and roll roots and chart
a new way forward in his career.
Against the Colonel's wishes, he ditches the Christmas sweaters for a black leather jumpsuit.
The resulting concert film, commonly known as the '68 "Comeback Special," is a smash
hit and latter-day triumph for The King.
"There's been a big change in the music field in the last ten or twelve years."
However, Presley and Parker's clash is largely invented for the film.
In real life, the special was never meant to be a Christmas special, other than by virtue
of airing in December.
Biographer Alanna Nash told Variety,
"There was never a Christmas sweater or fairy-tale Christmas set.
That's Luhrmann being a showman."
In the movie, after the success of the 1968 "Comeback Special," Presley is riding high
and dreaming big.
He announces plans to finally tour the world, but first Parker books him into a weeks-long
gig at the brand new Hilton International Hotel in Las Vegas.
The Vegas residency is a huge hit and gets extended.
Presley continues to plan his global tour, but Parker has grave concerns about securing
Elvis' safety overseas, especially once startling death threats start showing up in the mail.
The real reason Parker is delaying the start of the international tour is because he is
an illegal immigrant and fears being deported if he ever leaves the country.
The film heavily suggests that a slew of death threats received by Presley were staged by
Parker in order to support his bogus security concerns about traveling abroad.
"Are you ready to fly?"
We may never know if some of those death threats were forgeries by Colonel Tom, but thanks
to the FBI, we know that many of them were very real.
From his earliest days on the national scene, the FBI kept careful tabs on Elvis and his
activities, as director J. Edgar Hoover feared that he might be a corrupting influence on
the nation's youth.
The FBI's extensive file on Presley contains a death threat sent through the mail in 1956,
as well as confirmations of threats made to Presley and his associates in the 1970s.
For decades, Colonel Parker claimed to be a good old boy from Huntington, West Virginia
who ran off to join the circus as a youth, which is where he picked up an ever-so-slight
European accent.
Despite making enemies left and right in the music business, no one seemed to mind where
this carnival barker came from, as long as the money kept rolling in.
The movie "Elvis" is told from Parker's perspective, and weighted by the revelations about his
life that only came to light after Presley's death.
It wasn't until the early 1980s that it became widely known that Parker was actually Andreas
Cornelius van Kuijk, a Dutch immigrant who had briefly served in the U.S. Army but had
never become a naturalized citizen.
He fled from the Netherlands in 1929, possibly after being implicated in a murder, and he
still had family in Europe that he had broken all contact with.
The filmmakers know all of these things, and assume that the audience does as well, which
is perhaps why Tom Hanks affects a thick Dutch accent throughout the movie.
"We are the same, you and I.
Two odd lonely children."
In the film, things finally come to a head between Presley and Parker in 1974.
An anonymous letter reveals the truth about Parker, from his illegal status to the fact
that he essentially sold Elvis to the International Hotel in exchange for unlimited credit on
the casino floor.
An overcome Elvis collapses backstage before a show, and is given a shot of amphetamines
to revive him at Parker's command.
Once onstage, the singer fires Parker in full view of the audience.
However, this never happened in real life, with writer Alanna Nash telling Variety,
"Elvis would never have been so crass as to have fired Colonel from the stage."
The extent of Presley's addiction to prescription drugs wouldn't come to light until after his
untimely death at the age of 42 of a heart attack that was likely caused by his persistent
substance abuse.
He had a reliance on amphetamines, or "uppers," to keep up with his daunting tour schedule,
and barbiturates, or "downers," to help him sleep, especially in the last decade of his
life.
While it's never been confirmed exactly how early in his career the drug use began, the
movie establishes that Presley's pill habit began on the singer's very first backwoods
tour in 1955.
In 1979, The New York Times quoted anonymous sources speculating that Presley's pill habit
began in the 1950s, possibly due to Presley's religious aversion to alcohol.
As a result, the musician allegedly felt that prescription drugs were more "legitimate"
than street narcotics.
Another rumor is that he was snatching his mother's diet pills long before that.
According to Presley biographer Peter Guralnick, it was a fellow soldier who introduced Elvis
to amphetamines during his two-year stint in the Army from 1958 to 1960.
The truth about when Elvis' drug use really started remains unknown.
If you or anyone you know is struggling with addiction issues, help is available.
Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact
SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).