Well, who am I to disagree with a talented director I admire as much as John Carpenter? Elvis is a pretty banal piece of work, alright, and it's hard to imagine any scenario in which it wouldn't be. He basically wasn't involved with post, not overseeing the edit nor involving himself with the music (since the great majority of the music was new covers of Elvis Presley songs performed by soundalike Ronnie McDowell, it's hard to say what his involvement there would have consisted of anyways), and as a result, he has basically had nothing kind to say about the film in all the decades since, regarding it as essentially just a mistake that he's since outgrown, something that taxed his creativity not at all, and which he accordingly treated without putting in any but the most rudimentary. Specifically, he learned that he never, ever wanted to make a film this way for the rest of his career. But it mattered a great deal to his development as a filmmaker: he learned something very important from making it. In hindsight, it's a very weird moment for Carpenter to have directed Elvis, which is by virtually any measure I can imagine the biggest outlier in his entire career (most obviously, it's his only project in neither the horror nor science-fiction genres). So all in all, very exciting times for the young director, very career-making times, the times when every single choice is going to open one set of doors and close a different set. Halloween, in particular, was a major success (it may have had the highest return on investment in film history up to that point) with an enormous positive impact on Carpenter's career that could hardly have been imagined at the time he signed up to direct Elvis, which was in the middle of its production when Halloween opened. In a certain weird way, it's entirely possible we would have seen a very different career for iconic horror director John Carpenter if he hadn't directed the 1979 telefilm Elvis, a biopic of the iconic rock legend Elvis Presley It came at a crucial point in his career, after an extremely productive 1978, which saw the release of the thriller Eyes of Laura Mars (adapted from a spec script he wrote), as well as the production and release of two movies about murderous men with knives stalking women, the legendary Halloween (shot in May and released in October), and his first television film, Someone's Watching Me! (shot in April and aired in November). Elvis being Elvis, this isn't even the first film about Elvis simply titled Elvis.
This week: Baz Luhrmann directs his first feature in nine years, Elvis. Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases.
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