Word: presleys
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There is a red light right at the start. In 1994's Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, Peter Guralnick movingly, and with the greatest empathy, showed the unlikely and glorious shaping of a poor white boy from the Deep South into a musical demigod. Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley (Little, Brown; 767 pages; $27.95), the second and concluding volume, is a long coast on the dark downside, a story of ugliness and indulgence and encroaching desperation...
...full stop. "I know of no sadder story." Any of the black bluesmen Guralnick loves and writes about so well could tell him a dozen before a dropped dime hit the floor. But no bluesman, and few entertainers of any kind, has managed to achieve the sheer dimension of Presley's story. Just as Elvis' girth fascinated fans and the press during his last, misbegotten years, so too it is the outsize scale of Presley's life that makes the story irresistible. Or, at least, unavoidable. The King, dying on the shag-carpeted bathroom floor of Graceland, his gold pajama...
Supporting actors included Emerson student Porter McDonald as the sweet and not particularly bright bartender Freddy, and Douglas W. Horner, a musical theater major at the Boston Conservatory, who played "the Visitor," easily recognizable as Elvis Presley. One of the best scenes is the final one, when The King is juxtaposed with Picasso and Einstein...
...sole duty should be to "the truth" and "facts, facts, facts," as Starr has sanctimoniously and, I think, accurately reminded us, what is he doing chatting with the woman who once abetted a similar Hail Mary p.r. effort by Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley? In going on ABC less than a week after visiting the House Judiciary Committee and appealing directly to the American people on matters both of substance ("There is no excuse for perjury. Never, never, never") and style (Starr confessed to having seen "any number of" R-rated movies), the special prosecutor was practicing the sort...
...Evans' brisk newsreel is disappointingly too selective. His only reference to the Wright brothers, for example, is made not in the context of the birth of the age of flight but in a photo caption showing Teddy Roosevelt sitting in a pusher plane in 1910. Elvis Presley, who wrought a different kind of revolution, is not mentioned...