Elvis Presley: The Searcher (HBO Documentary Films, Sony Pictures Television, copyrighted 2017, released 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, September 3) my husband Charles and I watched a 3 ½-hour documentary on Elvis Presley called Elvis Presley: The Searcher, made by Sony Pictures Television in 2017 for release on HBO (am I the only one who remembers that those initials stood for “Home Box Office”?). The date on the imdb.com page for the film is 2018 but the copyright date is a year earlier, and I got interested in seeing this movie when I stopped in at Record City in Point Loma and bought a copy of the three-CD soundtrack album for the film. Two of the discs feature Elvis and the third was a compilation of some of the records that inspired him, white as well as Black, including two songs by The Blackwoods, the white gospel quartette (that’s how it was spelled originally) Elvis auditioned for … and was rejected. The genesis of the project was a conversation Priscilla Presley, who wasn’t strictly speaking Elvis’s widow (they had divorced in 1973, four years before his death) but became the Keeper of the Flame and the architect of Elvis’s posthumous career, had in 2014 with Elvis’s lifelong friend Jerry Schilling about making a film that would do justice to Elvis the Artist instead of just another run-through of his life. The thesis of Elvis Presley: The Searcher was that Elvis was an intensely committed musician and actor who wanted more of a career than he had – which begs the question of why he didn’t use the clout he had to demand better songs and scripts instead of going along with Col. Tom Parker’s master plan for his career.

In his controversial 1981 “black” biography of Elvis, Albert Goldman argued that Elvis was a fundamentally weak person whom Parker, with his instincts trained by years of working in carnivals, “read” as someone he could manipulate easily – and though Goldman’s biographies of Elvis and John Lennon are books their fans love to hate (and I’ve never read his Lennon bio), I must say Goldman’s understanding of Elvis has basically become mine. I’ve often written about what I’ve called “the Elvis perplex”: how much potential talent he had, how little of it he actually used, and how big a star he became on that little. Over and over again, Elvis would show just the briefest, barest inkling of rebellion against the Colonel and his authority, and over and over again the Colonel would just bide his time and wait out Elvis’s brief flash of self-assertion until he could re-assert control. I’ve written before about how the 1957 film A Face in the Crowd, directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulberg, is one of the great might-have-beens of Elvis’s career. Kazan originally offered the role to Elvis before finally casting Andy Griffith (who was quite good in the role except that it really needed someone who could sing, which Elvis could and Griffith couldn’t), and as an admirer of Marlon Brando and James Dean, had Elvis known that the man who had directed both their star-making vehicles (A Streetcar Named Desire for Brando and East of Eden for Dean) wanted him for a movie, he’d have raced to Kazan’s office and said, “Where do I sign?” But Col. Parker turned down A Face in the Crowd without ever having told Elvis it had been offered to him. It wasn’t part of his master plan for Elvis’s career that Elvis actually do a quality film with a major director and writer that might have led to him being taken seriously as an actor by critics and non-teen audiences.

Elvis, according to this movie, was hoping to make his screen debut in a movie in which he wouldn’t sing at all; instead Col. Parker signed him to Hal Wallis’s independent production unit at Paramount, though Elvis’s actual film debut was on loanout to 20th Century-Fox in a Civil War script originally called The Reno Brothers. Its title was changed to Love Me Tender, and its script was given a hasty rewrite to throw in four songs for Elvis, including the title track, an adaptation of a Civil War-era ballad called “Aura Lee.” Elvis Presley: The Searcher’s writer, Alan Light, and director, Thom Zimny (most of whose credits are for feature documentaries and music videos on Bruce Springsteen, which explains how and why Springsteen ended up being interviewed extensively on this film), try to draw a line of quality between Elvis’s first four films, made before he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1960 – Love Me Tender, Loving You (the first Elvis movie produced by Hal Wallis and a thinly veiled biopic), Jailhouse Rock and King Creole (which this film claims was a script originally intended for James Dean, though none of my sources on Dean mention it; the two films Dean had been set for when he died were Somebody Up There Likes Me and The Left-Handed Gun, both of which were filmed with Paul Newman) – and his later ones. Sorry, but I don’t buy it; though King Creole at least had a major director (Michael Curtiz, a refugee – like Wallis – from the Warner Bros. salt mines, where he’d made many of Humphrey Bogart’s films, including Casablanca), it also features a surprising amount of Dixieland jazz and doesn’t really come off despite Curtiz’s and cinematographer Russell Harlan’s film noir-style atmospherics.

One of the points made in The Searcher is Elvis’s lifelong love of gospel music, white and Black; as I mentioned, he’d auditioned and been rejected by The Blackwoods – though when he’d made it in secular music and had enough money, he hired The Blackwoods as part of his enormous touring entourage and thus could sing with them any time he wanted to – and in his Army years he bonded with an ex-gospel singer named Charlie Hodge whom he roomed with on the troop ship taking him to Germany. The private tapes Elvis made with Hodge are some of the most powerful music-making in this film; though on balance the Army years were a disaster for Elvis’s career (especially since Col. Parker wouldn’t let him perform live or make records during his tour, even though he could have easily done so during his leaves), at least away from the pressure of the Colonel’s all-enveloping management style and with a friend who shared his love of the church and its music, he audibly relaxed and rediscovered the sheer joy of music-making. One fact about Elvis’s Army stint that oddly went unmentioned in this film was that in Germany Elvis was assigned to an artillery unit, and while there wasn’t an actual war going on, his unit did enough practice firing that his mother Gladys, who went to see him in Germany, was worried that his career would suffer long-term from all the noise he was being subjected to and the likely hearing loss that would result. Though she didn’t have long to live herself (she died of a heart attack at 42, Elvis died of a heart attack at 42, and Elvis’s daughter Lisa Marie died of a heart attack at 54, suggesting that the Presleys have an hereditary disposition to congestive heart failure), she was right; when Elvis returned to live performance in 1969, he became notorious for having the loudest monitor speakers (the ones that point away from the audience and are there so the musicians can hear themselves and each other) in the business. When Elvis was finally released from the Army in 1960 he made a comeback album, Elvis Is Back!, in Nashville (rather than Memphis, where he’d grown up and made his first recordings for Sam Phillips’ Sun label), combining his original bandmates – lead guitarist Scotty Moore, bassist Bill Black and drummer D. J. Fontana – with Nashville session guys like saxophonist Boots Randolph, guitarist Chet Atkins and pianist Floyd Cramer.

This film portrays Elvis Is Back! as a uniquely personal project for him, an attempt to update his style while remaining true to his roots, but it didn’t last. Once again Col. Parker’s master plan kicked in: after his bizarre appearance on a “Welcome Home” special hosted by Frank Sinatra (who hated rock ‘n’ roll) in which the two sang a duet on each other’s songs (Sinatra did an ill-advised attempt to swing “Love Me Tender” and Elvis croaked his way through “Witchcraft” with no clue as to what rhythm the song needed), the next items on Elvis’s agenda were a movie called G. I. Blues, a light-hearted knock-off of Elvis’s real life for the previous two years, and a soundtrack album from it. (The Searcher includes a bizarre clip from G. I. Blues showing Elvis singing a German song called “Wooden Heart” to a puppet, in a scene that looks like someone spliced Elvis into the middle of The Sound of Music. And the film flashes the sheet music of “Wooden Heart” that reveals that one of its composers was Bert Kämpfbert, whose career also interfaced Frank Sinatra’s and The Beatles’; he co-wrote “Strangers in the Night” and produced The Beatles’ first professional recording sessions in Hamburg, Germany on June 22, 1961.) When the G. I. Blues album outsold Elvis Is Back! and the movie outgrossed Elvis’s next two films, Flaming Star and Wild in the Country (made with at least semi-major collaborators; Flaming Star was a Native-sympathetic Western originally written for Marlon Brando and directed by Don Siegel, and Wild in the Country was co-written by Clifford Odets), Parker used those facts to snap Elvis back into line. For the rest of the 1960’s Elvis made one formula movie after another, with cookie-cutter plots that co-starred him with hot young women in various odd locales – Elvis derisively referred to one of these movies as “my latest travelogue” – and the one 1960’s Elvis movie that was even halfway decent, Viva Las Vegas, was good largely because his co-star was the electrifying Ann-Margret, who so out-danced and out-charisma’ed Elvis the Colonel made sure they never worked together again.

By 1968 the formula had worn so thin even Col. Parker realized that Elvis’s career would die a slow death without something to perk it up again, and the something turned up in the form of an offer to star Elvis in a TV special sponsored by the Singer Sewing Machine Company. Since the special was scheduled to air during the 1968 holiday season, Col. Parker’s original plan was to feature Elvis in a night of Christmas songs. But the director who actually came on board, Steve Binder, wasn’t interested in anything that schlocky; he wanted to reunite Elvis with his original Sun bandmates (except Bill Black, who’d died in 1965) and feature Elvis in what would be essentially a retrospective of his career and also point him towards the future. Zimny and Light decided to make the Singer special the spine of the movie – both parts of The Searcher begin and end with clips from it – though the opening performance of Elvis’s first record, “That’s All Right, Mama” from the Singer special compared to the Sun record from 1954 shows that Elvis’s voice (like those of many untrained singers) had dropped in register over the years. When he made the Sun record he’d been a tenor with a low extension; by 1968 he was definitively a baritone. Also, 1968 was a major year of political turmoil in the U.S., with the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy; the riot in the streets during the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago; and the eventual election of Richard Nixon to the Presidency. One of Steve Binder’s biggest arguments with Col. Parker was his desire to have Elvis sing a political song on the show to say he cared about the country’s situation. Predictably, Col. Parker said no – Elvis was an entertainer, pure and simple, and he wasn’t supposed to make political statements in his songs. Binder then commissioned his musical director, Billy Goldenberg, and lyricist Walter Earl Brown to write a message song that would be vague enough to get by Col. Parker while still communicating that Elvis knew and cared about the country’s political craziness. The result was “If I Can Dream,” a song inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington, which produced one of Elvis’s most heartfelt performances even though (at least to me) Goldenberg’s arrangement is overdone and takes the edge off Elvis’s emotional power.

Like most depictions of Elvis, either documentary or dramatized, there’s a lot of “first-itis” – the tendency of biographers to claim the person they’re biographing was the first one to do something, even though others had done it before them – in this film. When Light’s script claimed that Elvis was the first popular singer to make it as a major movie star, I yelled at the TV, “Do the names ‘Bing Crosby’ and ‘Frank Sinatra’ mean anything to you?” (To be fair, it’s possible Light was saying that Elvis was the first to do it as young as he was; both Crosby and Sinatra were in their late 20’s when they began starring in feature films, while Elvis was just 20.) Also, Elvis’s career raises questions about race and racism, and white artistic appropriation of African-American culture. Certainly white artists had taken Black culture and put a white face on it to sell it to white audiences well before Elvis – white jazz bands had done it in the 1920’s and big swing bands like Benny Goodman’s and Artie Shaw’s had in the 1930’s – and well before Elvis white singers like Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray had raided the legacy of Black R&B and brought it, or some of it, to white audiences. In his loathsome book Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music critic Greil Marcus made the absurd claim that Elvis developed a completely new style of music that owed virtually nothing to Black models. Sorry, but that’s demonstrably untrue: Elvis’s first record was a 1954 cover of Black blues musician Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right, Mama,” and when I finally heard Crudup’s 1946 original I was struck by how closely Elvis copied him. Indeed, though Sam Phillips made a point of coupling every Elvis record he released with a Black blues song on the A-side and a white country song on the B-side, Elvis’s remodelings of the country songs were far more extreme than what he did with the blues numbers. The flip side of “That’s All Right, Mama” was a cover of Bill Monroe’s bluegrass hit “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” and Elvis sped it way up and tore through it in a very different manner from Monroe’s plaintive original. (Monroe reinforced the point when he did the song in the mid-1960’s at one of the Newport Folk Festivals; in his first chorus he sang the song at his original tempo, then he sped it up to approach Elvis’s version.) For his second Sun record, “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” Elvis closely copied the dramatic register shifts of the song’s composer, Roy Brown. Brown hadn’t even had the Black hit on the song – Wynonie Harris did – but it’s clear from Elvis’s register breaks and the original lyrics from Brown’s version instead of Harris’s screw-ups that Elvis learned it from Brown’s record. And when Elvis ended up on a major label, RCA Victor, and started covering songs by major Black artists like Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Clyde McPhatter’s vocal group, The Drifters, it’s obvious how closely he’s copied the Black originals.

For the second half of The Searcher Zimny and Light focused on the concert years from 1969 to 1977, first at the International Hotel in Las Vegas (where Elvis would have two extended residencies every year until he died) and then the long U.S. tours that followed, which like the movies Elvis had yearned to make versus the repetitive routine they degenerated into, also turned into long cycles of oppressive sameness broken only by an occasional challenge like the so-called “Satellite Show” of 1973. This came about because a group of Japanese promoters desperately wanted Elvis to tour their country, which scared Col. Parker shitless because – as was virtually unknown until after Elvis’s death – he was really an undocumented immigrant to the U.S. who was afraid he wouldn’t be readmitted if he left. His real name was “Andreas van Kuijk” and he was born in Breda, The Netherlands (though there are rumors he was really Russian and even his Dutch origins were a fake cover story), and he sneaked into the U.S. and joined the Army in Hawai’i in the early 1930’s. Col. Parker turned down all offers from foreign promoters to tour Elvis in their countries, and as usual he didn’t tell Elvis why. Instead he booked the Satellite Show in Hawai’i and filled the hall with Japanese banners because it was as close as he could get to Japan and still be in the United States. Between the Vegas engagements and the constant touring between them, Elvis responded by putting on weight – all his life he’d eaten the high-fat, high-carbohydrates, high-cholesterol food he’d grown up with in Mississippi and Tennessee – and ramping up his prescription drug consumption. Like a lot of people at the time, Elvis drew a distinction between “drugs” – illegal street drugs sold through clandestine dealers – and “medications,” which came in little amber bottles with doctors’ names on them. Indeed, it’s occurred to me that there’s a strong parallel between Judy Garland’s career and Elvis’s; both spent the first half of their professional lives mostly making movies and the second half mostly performing live, both became prescription drug addicts for the same reason – to keep their weights down to camera-friendly levels – and both died of overdoses in their 40’s. Elvis’s career as well as his drug use spiraled out of control once he and Priscilla finally broke up in 1973, and in the movie she talks about watching his last performances and being heartbroken at how bad they were.

Elvis died on August 16, 1977 in the bathroom at Graceland, his legendary home in Memphis – a white elephant a local realtor had unloaded on the Presleys when Elvis’s music career first started hitting it big in the 1950’s. Priscilla, deprived of any income from Elvis’s record sales because of a spectacularly ill-advised deal Col. Parker had made in 1974 to sell all Elvis’s future record royalties to RCA Victor for $5.4 million, bailed out Elvis’s estate by turning Graceland into a major tourist attraction and the key stop on Elvis-themed pilgrimages to Memphis. Elvis Presley: The Searcher is a tragic story, and throughout the movie I kept comparing Elvis to Frank Sinatra – a far more intellectually and emotionally secure man who wouldn’t have let a super-manager push him around the way Elvis did with Col. Parker. It’s a real pity Sinatra couldn’t or wouldn’t pull Elvis to his side and ask him, “Just why do you take all that shit from that old man?”