Quentin Tarantino believes Elvis Presley could have been the biggest movie star of the 1960s — “if he had ever taken his movie career seriously.”
In his excellent book, Cinema Speculation, Tarantino begins a chapter on the 1968 Steve McQueen film Bullitt by explaining that McQueen, Paul Newman and Warren Beatty were the biggest “younger male movie stars of the sixties.”
Tarantino’s admiration of McQueen will come as no surprise to anyone who saw Tarantino’s 2019 Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, in which he is briefly played by Damian Lewis. But Tarantino opines in the new book that Elvis could have been even bigger than McQueen, Newman or Beatty. Except: “Elvis was a prisoner of both Col. Tom Parker and his own success. Elvis made two movies a year and none of them ever lost money. Now, not all of those Elvis movies were bad. But it’s safe to say they weren’t real movies, they were ‘Elvis Presley movies.'”
The recent Baz Luhrmann film Elvis, featuring Tom Hanks as Col. Tom Parker and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood veteran Austin Butler as Presley, spells out the extent of the Colonel’s control over the King, as Parker milks his cash cow with an emphasis on quantity over quality. But Elvis could have been great, Tarantino writes, if he or someone around him had been more selective in his movie choices.
One reason for McQueen’s movie stardom, Tarantino explains, was his wife. Neile McQueen, formerly Neile Adams, was married to McQueen from 1956 to 1972 and read all of the scripts that came his way, wisely funneling them down to the ones that would best show of McQueen’s “King of Cool” skills.
“A Neile McQueen is what Elvis needed,” Tarantino writes.
While Tarantino hasn’t included Presley in a film he directed, the singer does appear prominently in one of his scripts. True Romance, which Tarantino wrote and the late Tony Scott directed, features Val Kilmer as an undeniably Elvis-like character who counsels Clarence, the former comic-shop employee-turned-tough guy played by Christian Slater. And an Elvis impersonator turns up at Jack Rabbit Slim’s in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, released in 1994. And two of Tarantino’s go-to actors, Kurt Russell and Harvey Keitel, have also portrayed the King.
Even if Tarantino didn’t love all the Elvis Presley movies, he does seem to have paid close attention: The Quentin Tarantino Archives says Jack Rabbit Slim’s was inspired by the 1968 Elvis film Speedway.
The Presley aside, of course, is just one of the many draws of Cinema Speculation, a charming and personable exploration of Tarantino’s influences, favorite films, and stray observations. A section where he recounts watching a movie with an all-Black audience as a white seven-year-old boy, with his mother’s then-boyfriend, is by itself worth the whole price of admission.
Cinema Speculation, by Quentin Tarantino, is now available from Harper Collins.
Main image: Val Kilmer in True Romance, written by Quentin Tarantino.
Share:
