The hardest movie John Carpenter ever made: “I was too dumb and young”
Being a movie director is far from a walk in the park. Just ask John Carpenter. He’s run the full gamut as a filmmaker, low-budget indie flicks, genre-defining horror franchises, and high-concept sci-fi adventures. He’s done it all. Not only that, but Carpenter often provides the music for his own work, meaning he’s putting in double the effort of any ordinary director. No wonder he hasn’t made anything since 2010. He must be exhausted.
Which of his many excellent efforts caused Carpenter the most agg? Was it the first Halloween, which was filmed over an intense, four-week schedule? Was it The Thing, which was shot in the frozen wastelands of Alaska? Maybe it was They Live, which involved trying to get sense out of famously insane wrestler ‘Rowdy’ Roddy Piper? According to the man himself, it was none of these.
“The hardest thing I’ve ever done was Elvis, a three-hour TV show,” he told Variety. “We had 88 speaking parts and 100 and some odd locations in 30 days. Holy Toledo! I was too dumb and young to realise how tough that is. That was a baptism of fire. Hurry up, let’s shoot! It was unreal.”
Elvis, which aired on ABC in 1979, was a gargantuan made-for-TV movie all about the life and times of the ‘King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’. The story is told via the framing device of a flashback, as Mr Presley sits in his dressing room ahead of a live performance and ponders his tumultuous rise to fame. The cast includes Shelley Winters as the star’s mother, Gladys, Pat Hingle as Colonel Tom Parker, and a relatively unknown Joe Mantegna as Joe Esposito, Elvis’ road manager. The title role was played by none other than Kurt Russell, marking the beginning of a long and successful relationship between him and Carpenter.
The TV version of Elvis clocks in at 150 minutes, so Carpenter was exaggerating slightly when he said it was a ‘three-hour’ film. Presley had died just two years earlier, so nostalgia for the icon was at an all-time high. This would explain why the film did monster ratings for the network, scoring a 27.3 on the Nielsen rating system and ending the week as the sixth-most watched programme across all of television. A shortened version of the movie was then released in cinemas, although it made much less of an impression than it did on the small screen.
Carpenter was at a pivotal stage in his career while making Elvis. He hadn’t yet turned 30 but had already arrived on the main stage with the release of Halloween in 1978. This was very much a change in pace for him, as he’d mainly worked in genre movies before, and the director was excited to helm something a bit more dramatic. Unfortunately, he took on a bit more than he could chew. Elvis was supposedly filmed across 150 different locations in just 30 days. Carpenter wasn’t allowed to edit or score the project, which he wasn’t used to. It’s telling that he never did anything like this ever again.
This might not have been the edifying experience the young Carpenter was looking for, but it did bring him into contact with Russell. Without Elvis, there would be no Thing, Escape From New York, or Big Trouble in Little China. For that, we have a lot to thank it for.
