True Stories 57: 20s—Elvis

It’s hard enough to tell the true story of someone people have never heard of, but when you want to write the story of someone whom people know about, there’s a little more pressure to get it right, isn’t there? And then if you’re writing the story of an icon, well, forget about it. You’re going to be under amazing scrutiny.

One of the things you must decide in any true story is how much of the story to tell. And when you’re doing a biopic, that’s a real tough choice. Because you only have so much time to tell the story. And how do you fit a lifetime into two hours? Or - in the case of Elvis [2022] by Baz Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce & Jeremy Doner - 2 ½ hours plus? It’s not an easy task, but the screenwriters came up with a way to do it that pretty much works.

Take a look at the trailer for the film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBDLRvjHVOY

The method that the writers used to tell Elvis’s story is to focus on his manager—Tom Parker. So you have Parker, at the end of his life, reminiscing on his life with Elvis. And this is an easy way for us to see Elvis’s story and to jump from one important part of the story to another.

Well, let me take back the word “easy”—because it’s never easy to tell a story in a seamless fashion, so that it holds together and doesn’t seem like a mish-mash of a person’s life. And that’s the difficulty, making the story seem like this is THE way it could be told. So much so, that as the audience is watching the film they don’t even think about how the story is unfolding, they are just caught up in the story itself.

And when that story is about an icon like Elvis, you have to be careful not to immediately go into ‘worship’ mode. The best way to avoid that, of course, is to go back to the beginning.

Because in the beginning, Elvis was just a kid who thought he’d like to sing. So meeting the icon when he was nothing more than a kid singer works. We immediately respond to his attempts to perform, his attempts to get a foothold into this crazy business of singing. And when Parker “discovers” him it changes his life.

The cool thing about telling the story this way is that we get to see two stories—Elvis’s and Parker's. The talent and the talent manager. And we see Elvis’s success from two different points of view. This lets us see that Elvis’s life wasn’t just about singing, it was about balancing what he loved to do with the constraints placed on him by this manipulative manager.

It’s always good to have conflict in your story—and a true story surely will have conflict, as no one’s life is free of it, is it?

Next week’s story is full of more than just conflict—it’s a combination of family, tragedy, horrific prejudice and death—and the fight to right a wrong. It’s Till.

Copyright © Diane Lake

16Jul23

Email Diane a question to Diane@DianeLake.com