The John Carpenter movie nobody wanted to make: “They thought it was going to be a piece of shit”
Even though he grew up and subsequently remained obsessed with westerns, Howard Hawks, John Wayne, and Clint Eastwood, John Carpenter has never made one of his own, which seems strange.
In his defence, Assault on Precinct 13 was basically a remake of Hawks and Wayne’s Rio Bravo, not that the filmmaker tried to hide it when he credited himself as the editor under the pseudonym of John T Chance, the name of the protagonist played by ‘The Duke’ in the 1959 classic.
The genre, particularly Eastwood’s ‘Man with No Name’, had a profound influence on Snake Plissken and his two outings in Escape from New York and Escape from LA, while Vampires borrows many western tropes, plants them in the modern day, and gives them a self-explanatory and toothy twist.
Carpenter was never going to be a guy who dabbled in serious drama or broad comedy, although his movies have often featured plenty of both, which is why his Elvis Presley biopic remains such an outlier in a filmography that’s almost entirely populated by nerve-shredding thrills, unsettling sci-fi, and knife-wielding mayhem.
It’s the only non-genre feature he’s ever directed, and the fact that it premiered on ABC less than four months after Halloween was released made it even stranger. Carpenter had just made one of the most profitable pictures in cinema history and instigated a paradigm shift in big-screen horror, only to immediately pivot to telling the life story of a musical icon.
He did it because he fancied a change of pace, with Elvis being the first post-Halloween script that didn’t involve blood, guts, and horror that he felt a personal connection with, being a fan of ‘The King’. However, the only reason the screenplay ended up on his desk in the first place was that nobody else wanted to do it.
“My earliest memory of Elvis was the gigantic screenplay,” Carpenter recalled to Justin Beahm. “Everybody in town had turned this thing down because they thought it was going to be a piece of shit. I loved Elvis, and was a big fan. We got this guy I didn’t know named Kurt Russell to play Elvis. That was baptism by fire.”
Russell wasn’t entirely sold on the prospect either, but since everyone told him he wouldn’t be able to pull it off, he agreed to play the lead role, prove his critics wrong, and give them a performative middle finger. After dealing with “180 pages of script, 88 speaking parts, and 150 different locations, all in 30 days,” though, Carpenter admitted that he “would never want to work that hard again.”
The filmmaker wasn’t enthused at not being allowed to edit or compose the score for Elvis, something he’d become accustomed to, but a Golden Globe nomination for ‘Best Television Film’ and showcasing his abilities to direct something other than horror must have helped soften the blow.
