Long Live The King! Baz Luhrmann and Vanity Fair Host a Snowy, Society-Heavy Screening of EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert
Luhrmann’s film doesn’t quite square with Bangs’s counterman source there. After the screening, he tells Vanity Fair that Elvis at this point of his life was completely co-opted by his questionable manager, Colonel Tom Parker, who only let him tour in America and sometimes made him play up to three times a day. Parker had him in Las Vegas, playing nightly, for close to a decade. “He’s fatter, he loses his spirit. He’s deteriorating, that’s what you’re seeing. Imagine wanting to tour overseas and doing that for seven years?” Luhrmann says. “But Clive Davis told me to this day he still has never been to an opening night as great as that Vegas show was.” Indeed, while some moments of the film show Elvis sweating, sluggish, and struggling to get through his set, others show his once-in-a-lifetime performing prowess, like when he belts out Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water.” For those of us who weren’t alive when Elvis was, it feels like an a-ha moment: where you finally get why the generations of …

