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Executive Producers for Memphis Weirdos are Omnivore Recordings, Memphis Flavor and Bluff City Tattoo.
Baz Luhrmann’s, Elvis is the number one movie in the United States. Southern filmmaker, Mike McCarthy shares his take on the movie.
I have stood in the tiny room where Elvis and Jesse were born and still born. I have stood on the wooden bleachers where my parents (and most of Tupelo) sat during the 1956 Homecoming show. I have travelled Highway 78, the 100 mile trek between Memphis and Tupelo, more times now than Elvis. I continue to visit Jesse’ obscure grave in Priceville Cemetery. For 4 years I worked at Sun and stood in the spot where Elvis helped create rock and roll. I have eaten at Elvis’ booth at the Western Steak Lounge. Many of us have been to the Mid-South Coliseum. Several years ago I loaned my 1947 copy of CAPTAIN MARVEL JR. to the newly restored Lauderdale Courts where it spent the summer in Elvis’ teenage bedroom.
I have stood in the tinfoiled window room at Baptist Memorial hospital where Elvis recovered and inside the Emergency Room where he was pronounced dead. Like many Memphians, I shunned Graceland for years before falling in love with the concept of walking through 42 years of a man’s life and arriving at his grave. I have stood in the Mausoleum that originally contained his body.
I used these moments to create an isolation from myself and reality, a solace, religion, a fascination with death, a meaning for life, something to make my art better. I even named my son John Marvel after Elvis’ favorite superhero. I say all this to make you understand my level of Elvis understanding and yet I am still bewildered by his actions that led to his death.
I believe director Baz Luhrmann is trying to get to the same meaning in his new film ELVIS (clocking in at 5.6 minutes for every year Elvis lived, or, as long as it takes to see everything at Graceland). Is Luhrmann trying to remake Todd Browning’s classic 1932 film FREAKS? If so, then which freak is Elvis, first revealed in the film standing next to a shocking poster depicting a geek? A man who survived the toxins of his embryonic dead brother to become the greatest entertainer who ever lived. What sort of geek is that? Someone who stopped aging at nineteen until the final year of his life when it all came crashing like Dorian Gray. A man who says goodbye to the real Lisa Marie then crawls inside the body of a piece of metal called the Lisa Marie – as Elvis recites self-reflective poetry that seems to, ironically, come across as self-awareness.
Colonel Parker had an obsession with elephants that began with his old carny days. We see an array of elephant sculptures in the very first frames of the movie. As freaks go, you can’t beat John Merrick the Elephant Man; cinematic ground already covered by David Lynch who went on to make his own Elvis film WILD AT HEART. ELVIS is Baz Luhrmann’s attempt at ELEPHANT MAN with the Colonel as lead.
It’s rumored that the Nixon scene was filmed but not included in this movie. It makes me wonder if Elvis brushed shoulders that day in the White House with the wife of vice-president Gerald Ford. Betty Ford, a drug addict herself, went on to found the Betty Ford clinic specifically for those in the limelight who dealt with these issues. Elvis should have shaken hands with Betty Ford, not Nixon.
I have seen the movie twice. The Captain Marvel, Jr. worship is astounding. So nice to see obscure references to things I have obsessed over for decades with no budgets in my films spread across the screen in this epic way. The first time I was not emotionally prepared for what Luhrmann does at the end. You do not forget watching a movie, something of perhaps questionable value filled with cardboard characters, through a veil of unstoppable tears. “God speed, my love…”. -JMM
Mike McCarthy is a filmmaker, living in Memphis, Tennessee. Look for his film, Teenage Tupelo on Blu-ray this Christmas season along with a book published by Fantagraphics.
On this broadcast I read a list of people who checked out books from the library and haven’t returned them yet. Music from Elvis Presley, Jeremy Scott, Reigning Sound and O.V. Wright.
Executive Producers for Memphis Weirdos are Omnivore Recordings and Michael S. De Mita.
The Executive Producers for Memphis Weirdos are Omnivore Recordings and Michael S De Mita
On a sunny afternoon, walking from the university back to my apartment, I see Elvis’s face stickered on a lamppost. He is smiling and wears a cowboy hat. Here, in Texas, I often hear Elvis’s music drifting out of the bars and see his face stenciled on crosswalks. Elvis is everywhere. He is the ghost story in Mystery Train. He is Val Kilmer in a mirror talking to Christian Slater in True Romance. He is the blue eyed skinny southern son in a shack in Tupelo, the hunk a hunk of burning love in leather, the jailbird rocking in stripes, and the soldier off to war. He is bloated and beautiful. A player of racquetball. A lover of pills. He sings the slow and best version of “Blue Moon.” I live in Denton, Texas now for a belated stint in graduate school, but Memphis is where I am from. Memphis is home. Yet, I’ve only been inside Graceland once when a friend of my sister’s, a New Yorker, was passing through. Most Memphians have never been inside the mansion of the King, but practically every member of the older generation, the parents of my generation, have an Elvis story. My mother has a few.
My family on my mother’s side is from Tupelo like Elvis, but they didn’t know him then. It wasn’t until after my family settled in Memphis and my oldest aunt attended Humes High that the Elvis stories began. My aunt smoked cigarettes with her bright red lipstick smudging the filter. Her hair swooped up in a blonde beehive, and her cat eyes sizzling the heart of teen boys. She had a car and drove her best friend plus the dorky boy that lived a few blocks away to school with her. The boy dressed funny, talked funny, and was painfully shy. She made him lie down in the backseat so no one would see him in her car. That boy was Elvis. By the time Elvis shook his hips all over national TV, my aunt was married and working as a custodian at Baptist Hospital, the hospital where Elvis would have his own private wing, the same hospital where he was pronounced dead in August of 77, a month after I was born.
While I enjoy the stories about Elvis, Memphis is more than just the King to me.
Memphis Weirdos 