Priscilla nets $1 m to shoot film about marriage to Elvis
SHE was moved to tears by Baz Luhrmann’s version of her late husband’s life story, but now Priscilla Presley is putting herself in the spotlight, after striking a deal for a movie to be made telling the story from her perspective.
The film, Priscilla, will be based on her best-selling 1985 memoir Elvis And Me.
Directed by Sofia Coppola, it will tell how she first met Elvis when she was 14, she moved in with his parents. The couple were married — in Vegas — in 1967 when she was 22 ( pictured), and divorced in 1973. Now, 50 years on, the tale is coming to the big screen. Sources describe the script, written by Coppola, as ‘intimate’ and say it offers a view which was not in the Elvis movie. ‘It’s a love story,’ I’m told. ‘It starts when they fall in love and ends when their love story ends.’
Priscilla said the marriage failed because the King, ten years her senior, wasn’t faithful. She eventually fell in love with a karate instructor, and left him. Priscilla’s role will be taken by newcomer Cailee Spaeny, who played single mum Erin in the acclaimed TV drama Mare Of Easttown. Euphoria star Jacob Elordi, an Australian, will play Elvis.
Filming on the picture will start imminently in Toronto. Director Coppola is also producing the project, in tandem with Lorenzo Miele of The Apartment (a Fremantle company) and A24. Charles Finch, the British publisher and producer, is also co-producing, through his Sony-based film company Standalone.
Presley, 77, is believed to have struck a
FURTHER $1 million deal for the rights to her book. revenue will pour into the Presley estate from licensing Elvis’s songs. It’s thought that the recent Warner Bros film, which starred Austin Butler and Tom Hanks, garnered as much as $20 million in music rights alone. (Colonel Parker, Elvis’s crafty manager, used to insist that he and his star got half the publishing rights — and subsequent royalties — on anything Presley recorded.)
Priscilla and Elvis’s daughter Lisa Marie is the music legend’s sole surviving heir.
Meanwhile, Elvis will be back on screen soon ... as a cartoon. Netflix’s animated offering Agent King sees Presley trade in his jumpsuit for a jetpack. The series, created by Sony Pictures Animation, shows Elvis joining a secret government spy programme, while still carrying on with his day job. Character designer Rob Valley told an animation festival in Annecy, France, in June: ‘I wanted him to look adorable and dangerous.’
Priscilla Presley is an executive producer of the show. She said: ‘I worry about the scripts, because it’s an adult animation. So you’re leaving it to Sony and Netflix. Sometimes the script comes in and I go: “God, Elvis would never say that!” ’