Elvis pieces (just a few):
Most recently, I wrote about Marion Keisker’s crucial role in “discovering” Elvis.
I wrote on his acting career for Film Comment
For Criterion: Elvis’s Adventures in Hollywood
And here’s the text of the talk I gave in Memphis – at the movie theatre where Elvis used to hang out – about Elvis’ acting career.
My old friend Pat McCurdy and I chatted on the phone about Elvis. I recorded it.
I’ve written so much here about him. I’ll pull out just a couple.
Elvis entering his own dreamspace in King Creole.
This is a really important piece, if I do say so myself. In it, I talk about Elvis as a burlesque artist and how he “uses” himself as a performer in a way normally associated with women. And when he does it, all he has to do is stand there.
Annual birthday post: Elvis, the Twin Who Lived
Happy Elvis day!
Just finished re-reading Last Train to Memphis this morning. A great work, but there is one certain aspect of E’s career that he doesn’t get…
Larry – I agree with you but I’m curious to know what aspect you think he misses.
Did you see Christopher Walken’s Elvis story in Walken’s profile in the NYT earlier this week? About a girl who wouldn’t dance with him. Pretty funny.
ha! No I didn’t. He loves Elvis so much – he wrote (and acted in) a play about Elvis. I’ll have to go read that.
Oh my God this is such a good profile.
He came and spoke at my school and mentioned the whole “I’m from the land of show business” thing – someone had asked him about why he picked so many creepy seeming roles – and how did he get in touch with that whole weird Walken thing. He said that since he is “from the land of show business” he’s just naturally different from other people – people sense the difference – find it … weird … and that translated into the kinds of roles he got. He’s not like other people. He was tap dancing on Broadway when he was 6, 7 years old. That’s not normal!
I love that there’s a little footnote saying that Janice did end up going to the dance with him even though her “older boyfriend” wouldn’t like it.
That was funny! I also liked this exchange:
Is that really true? Somebody said to me once, “The truth is good, but interesting is better.”
I’d noticed those footnotes in recent profiles. I don’t know when the Times began that. I’m not sure what I think about “fact checking” an interview subject. How serious was CW when he said in 1973 that he went through a period as a moon worshipper, for example. Was it just an interesting story he told at the time? Context is worth 80 IQ points, as the saying goes. I’m more of “we all contain multitudes” person and sometimes the footnotes feel rather like a nerdboy’s “well, actually…” than an example of the interview subject’s “multitudes.” I felt that way about a recent NYT interview with Eddie Vedder. But leaving my ambivalence aside, that was fun to learn Janice did go to the dance with him.
Another thing that struck me was about him not wanting to learn new lines. I watched Michael Rosenbaum’s recent podcast with Jensen Ackles – the one where JA made his “fought like brothers and sisters” comment about Jessica Alba. Jensen mentioned having to learn a two page monologue just hours before shooting it (I forget what show). Rosenbaum said that would terrify him and JA said it was something he had no problem with. The contrast between JA and CW with respect to learning new lines struck me. Things like this make me think of the line in Tom Petty’s American Girl “after all it was a great big world.” There are lots of ways to be really good at something.
I also didn’t care for the footnotes.
Also, an aside: part of acting training – either formally or through word of mouth and on the job training – is to ignore punctuation in scripts. I mean, I was told to do that at age 15, 16, when I got my first serious gigs which required real acting. Ignore the punctuation because the punctuation tells you how to say the lines. If there’s an exclamation mark, it tells you HOW to say it. don’t be obedient to the punctuation mark unless expressly told to do so. Like, Harold Pinter: follow his punctuation (and his pauses) to the letter – otherwise the whole thing falls apart and gets flabby. There is no punctuation in Shakespeare beyond periods and commas. If you see an exclamation mark, that was added by an editor in the 1900s, 20th century – do not trust it! Don’t let some editor at Oxford tell you how to say those lines when Shakespeare left it open-ended.
so that footnote was just more indication that culture/film writers know nothing about acting, haven’t done any due diligence to figure out process and even just basic terms and practices – like, “ignore punctuation marks” is … it’s almost as elementary as learning your lines. It’s not specific to Walken although – granted – he does wild things with punctuation.
You may have heard of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.
If culture journalists don’t know the basics of acting why would one assume that other sorts of journalists know the basics of their topics? Gotta always read critically.
I can only speak for film critics. One of the reasons I write the way I do is that at LEAST there IS a resource about acting if anyone actually admits they don’t know shit. My friend Dan Callahan’s books are the same way. It’s unbelievably frustrating to hear this whole “ignore the punctuation” thing as revelatory when you stop literally any actor even down to high school drama clubs – and they’re all ignoring punctuation. (The good ones anyway. It’s a good practice to get into even if you end up following the punctuation!)
I had never heard of this amnesia thing but I feel this guy’s pain – especially the part how one misinterpretation based on ignorance means they get the whole thing wrong. it’s very weird.
Age – and being elderly – may also have something to do with not wanting to have new lines sprung on you. Older actors sometimes have more of an issue learning lines, just because loss of memory is part of the aging process.
Jensen is such a crazy sponge. He can read something once and it’s in his head. He’s just a weirdo phenom.
Hi, Sheila, just dropping in to say how much I enjoy your Elvis pieces. I loved your thoughts on last year’s movie in your viewing diary, and I’m looking forward to the longer piece. I did a brief review of it for my library’s blog, which I’ll link above, just in case you are interested.
Seeing JA pop up in the chat thread put me in mind of this moment from the recent Radio Company concert in Nashville the closed with That’s Alright (complete with horns!), and I saw a GIF of JA seeming to channel Elvis for a moment. Of course, I thought of you and the SPN crew here, but when I went back to try and find it again I had no luck. This clip is not the “full frontal” from the gif, but it’ s the best angle I could find: https://youtu.be/WxeI_c_QGk0
Hope you enjoy!
Barb – I watched the whole concert and just could not believe my eyes – that not only did he sing an Elvis song but
1. he sang THAT song. Not “suspicious minds”, or one of his more well-known hits. but THAT one, the FIRST song.
2. that he sang Elvis at all!!
In Tennessee no less! It’s the kind of thing I couldn’t even dream of asking for – a Jensen-Elvis mashup – and here it is! This is a much better angle than the original version I saw on YouTube!
Well this is 2 weeks late but I just listened to an interview with English poet John Cooper Clarke (the bard of Salford), it turns out he’s a huge Elvis fan. (You don’t seem to have mentioned Clarke on here though I imagine you know him; but who knows what a google search is worth these days.) He mentioned that he writes an Elvis tribute poem every year on the anniversary of his death; there’s one included at the end of this brief article linked below
https://www.thetimes.com/culture/music/article/john-cooper-clarke-why-i-still-write-a-poem-to-elvis-every-year-s0cz33wjd
Figured you’d appreciate it in a birds of a feather way
This is so beautiful – thank you so much for sending!