Elvis Presley - CBS, Six Feet Under producers team for mini.

IGN.COM - Variety reports that CBS is developing a four-hour mini-series tentatively titled Elvis about – take a wild guess! – Elvis Presley. Six Feet Under's Robert Greenblatt and David Janollari will produce Elvis from a screenplay by Patrick Sheane Duncan (Courage Under Fire, Mr. Holland's Opus). Howard Braunstein and Michael Jaffe (10.5) will executive produce the project, which airs next season.

Elvis will be produced with the approval of the Presley estate, which allows the mini-series to be the first TV biopic to utilize Elvis' actual master recordings as opposed to using a sound-alike.

"We thought that if you're going to do this right, you just can't do it without their co-operation," Braunstein told Variety. "They're going to open their archives for us, and that means we really get first-hand information about his life rather than just some biography." Greenblatt added that, "When our Elvis actor opens his mouth, it'll be Elvis' voice that comes out."

Fans apparently shouldn't expect a whitewashed, standard issue birth-to-death biopic of The King, although the filmmakers are still determining which parts of the late rock star's life to dramatize.

"I just thought this story had never been told in a complete and classy way," said Greenblatt. "The closest thing was the Kurt Russell project (in 1979), and that was only two hours." [Stax note: Elvis: The Movie was originally three hours long when it aired. It's the US home video version that's been chopped down to two hours.]

"We told the estate from the beginning that we want to do warts and all," said Braunstein. "The estate understands that you need to tell the true version of his story. And hopefully, with access to the archives, we can learn all sorts of new and provocative things."

"The estate is not afraid of doing the darker side (of Presley). It just wants it done with class and integrity, like Craig (Zadan) and Neil (Meron) did with their Judy Garland movie," said Greenblatt. Calling Duncan "the perfect expert and a great writer, rolled into one," he also noted that the scribe is "a complete Elvis nut – and I say that in the most positive way."

But after all the many small screen retellings of Elvis' life – many of them not very good – why produce yet another one? "The CD collections released a couple years ago went to the top of the charts," Greenblatt advised the trade. "This man still has an enormous fan base."

Brought to you by IGN.COM and EBROADCAST AUSTRALIA

© Copyright 2004 by eBroadcast.com.au

Top of Page