Steven Spielberg’s favourite Elvis Presley movie: “It was very funny”
As someone born in 1946 who was still a kid when Elvis Presley became a global sensation, there’s no chance that Steven Spielberg doesn’t have at least one fond memory of ‘The King’ from his childhood.
He’s always been more of a self-professed Beatles guy, though, but having been born in Ohio and spending his formative years in Arizona, he wouldn’t have been able to escape the frenzy that followed Elvis anywhere and everywhere he went when he first exploded in popularity to take over the world.
Spielberg’s directorial career was still in its infancy when the icon passed away, but they do have a couple of tangential connections. Most famously, Colonel Tom Parker declined an offer for his client to play Richard Beymer’s role as Tony in 1961’s West Side Story, which the filmmaker would go on to remake.
One of his proteges, Chris Columbus, who wrote Gremlins and The Goonies for Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, which also produced the filmmaker’s Netflix movie, The Thursday Murder Club, helmed 1988’s Heartbreak Hotel with David Keith as Elvis, but those tenuous ties are as close as he’s gotten.
The three-time Academy Award winner did once reveal that an Elvis flick was among his favourites, though, and it came with the added bonus of a revelation that caught him completely off-guard. Teri Garr played the female lead in Close Encounters of the Third Kind as Ronnie Neary, the wife of Richard Dreyfuss’ Roy, and a conversation with Spielberg blew his mind.
Early in her career, Garr was a background dancer in multiple features starring ‘The King’, including Kissin’ Cousins, Fun in Acapulco, Roustabout, Girl Happy, and Clambake. Little did the Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List maestro know it at the time, but he was about to reveal his favourite Elvis film to somebody who’d played a minor part in it.
Garr shared with Elvis Australia that the last time she saw him in person was in Mobile, Alabama, when she was shooting Close Encounters. Production began in May 1976, little over a year before his death. “Steven Spielberg was directing it, and one day he was talking about his favourite movies,” she said. “His favourite movie was Viva Las Vegas. And I was in Viva Las Vegas.”
Understandably, it took the director a minute to process such a coincidence. “He said, ‘You were not,'” Garr recalled. “I said, ‘Oh, yes, yes I was. It was my first movie’. It was very funny.” What were the chances of Spielberg talking about his all-time favourite Elvis picture, only for the person he was talking about it to have starred in that very same film? Slim to none, but life frequently throws up nuggets of cosmic what-the-fuckery like that.
That said, it feels safe to say that Viva Las Vegas isn’t his favourite movie, Elvis or not. Spielberg’s lifelong love of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia has informed his entire career, while he won’t start work on a production of his own until he’s revisited John Ford’s The Searchers.
