ELVIS DEAD AT 42: The Shocking Story Behind the Making of This Is Elvis
Four words stopped Andrew Solt in his tracks in Paris in 1977:
“Elvis dead at 42.”
He was walking through Paris during a lunch break while working on a film project with legendary oceanographer and filmmaker Jacques Cousteau. He picked up the International Herald Tribune, saw the headline, and immediately felt a chill.
Decades later, sitting down during Elvis Week 2026, Solt says that feeling is still with him.
What he could not possibly have known on that Paris sidewalk was that Elvis Presley’s death would eventually become connected to one of the most ambitious Elvis films ever made. A few years later, Solt would help create This Is Elvis, the 1981 documentary that attempted to tell the story of Elvis Presley through archival footage, home movies, performances, interviews, and carefully recreated scenes.
But getting that film made was anything but easy.
In fact, the project nearly collapsed multiple times before cameras could even roll.
THE COLONEL WHO COULD HAVE STOPPED EVERYTHING
Solt’s first major doorway into Elvis’s world came through Jerry Schilling, whom he had met while working on Elvis on Tour in 1972.
Schilling introduced Solt to Colonel Tom Parker.
For Solt, this was an enormous moment. Parker was one of the most powerful and controversial figures surrounding Elvis Presley, and he controlled access to much of the singer’s professional legacy.
But Parker did not simply welcome the filmmakers with open arms.
He tested them.
Solt remembers Parker essentially asking: Who are you guys?
That question mattered because access to Elvis was never simple. The King had been one of the biggest stars on Earth, but much of his private and professional history remained locked away.
Solt and his filmmaking partner had an idea.
They wanted to show the Elvis the public had never truly seen.
And that meant opening doors that had been closed for years.
Parker eventually came around.
But another major obstacle was waiting.
“I’M A SINATRA GUY”
David Wolper was a legendary documentary producer who had been involved with hundreds of films and major historical productions.
There was just one problem.
He didn’t really understand Elvis.
According to Solt, Wolper essentially admitted that he was a Sinatra fan. He didn’t understand Elvis, and he didn’t even particularly understand the Beatles.
That could have been the end.
Instead, something unexpected happened.
Wolper’s wife, Gloria, loved Elvis.
She had met Elvis and had friends who were passionate fans. She understood that this project could become something important, and she pushed her husband to take it seriously.
He listened.
And that decision helped change the entire future of This Is Elvis.
Solt later discovered just how important Gloria had been when Wolper questioned why her name appeared in the film’s credits.
Solt explained that she had helped make the project happen.
Wolper reportedly responded by accepting the explanation.
One more door had opened.
Then came the biggest rejection of all.
MGM SAID NO
Parker took Solt and his team to MGM.
For Solt, this seemed like an absolute slam dunk.
Parker had been involved in Elvis’s movie career. MGM controlled an enormous amount of Elvis footage. The project desperately needed those films.
Then MGM rejected them.
Solt was away on holiday with his wife when the message arrived by telex.
The message was brutally simple:
MGM had passed.
The problem wasn’t minor.
Without the MGM footage, David Wolper believed there might not be a movie at all.
The filmmakers needed the energy and power of Elvis’s major screen appearances, including footage connected with Elvis on Tour and Elvis: That’s the Way It Is.
So Solt found himself facing another impossible task.
He was sent to speak with Frank Wells, a powerful Warner Bros. executive.
The message was essentially: Find a way to make MGM cooperate.
Solt had very little leverage.
Yet somehow, it worked.
MGM eventually cooperated, giving the filmmakers access to the footage they desperately needed.
Three enormous barriers had now been overcome.
But the hardest creative problem was still waiting.
How do you show Elvis Presley as a child when almost nobody had filmed him?
THE ELVIS THE WORLD HAD NEVER SEEN
There was virtually no moving footage of Elvis before he became famous.
There were newsreels and scattered pieces of material, but nothing close to what modern audiences would expect from a documentary about a famous person’s childhood.
So Solt and his team made a controversial decision.
They recreated it.
Actors would portray young Elvis.
Locations would be recreated.
Scenes would be constructed to show moments that history had never captured on film.
At the time, critics attacked the decision.
They argued that documentaries shouldn’t mix authentic archival material with staged recreations.
But Solt and his team believed they had no other way to tell the complete story.
And they went further than simply building sets.
They went to Tupelo.
Solt remembers seeing a young actor dressed as Elvis walking down the street, waving to people on porches and heading toward a house designed to resemble Elvis’s birthplace.
To him, it felt like Hollywood had suddenly arrived in Elvis’s hometown.
And that mattered.
Because this wasn’t simply a movie about a celebrity.
It was an attempt to reconstruct the world that created Elvis Presley.
WALKING THROUGH GRACELAND BEFORE THE PUBLIC
Perhaps the most astonishing part of Solt’s story is his access to Graceland.
This happened in 1980.
Graceland would not open to the public until 1982.
Solt therefore walked through Elvis’s home before ordinary fans could ever buy a ticket.
He saw the staircase.
The kitchen.
The Jungle Room.
The rooms where Elvis had lived.
For a filmmaker trying to recreate Elvis’s childhood and private world, this access was priceless.
Today, millions of people know these spaces.
But in 1980, entering Graceland was like stepping behind a curtain that almost nobody outside Elvis’s inner circle had seen.
And Solt knew how extraordinary it was.
A THOUSAND ELVIS IMPERSONATORS SHOWED UP
Then came another unbelievable moment.
The production put out a casting call for Elvis lookalikes.
The response shocked everyone.
Around a thousand people reportedly showed up.
The line stretched around the block.
Remember: this was 1980.
Elvis had been dead for only three years.
This Is Elvis had not even been released.
Yet thousands of people were still willing to stand in line simply for the possibility of being part of an Elvis film.
That moment revealed something the filmmakers already suspected:
Elvis wasn’t disappearing.
His presence was becoming even larger.
THE NIGHT EVERYTHING CAME TOGETHER
Eventually, This Is Elvis premiered in Memphis.
Solt was surrounded by people who had actually known Elvis, including Jerry Schilling and Joe Esposito.
And outside, the fans were waiting.
Solt describes the experience as unreal.
After years of rejection, negotiations, archival searches, recreations, and uncertainty, the film was finally being shown in Elvis’s own city.
But perhaps the most emotional part of the entire story came when Solt began searching the television archives.
CBS.
ABC.
NBC.
He watched the news coverage of Elvis’s death.
This was footage of the national shock he had personally missed in 1977 while standing in Paris.
He had learned about Elvis through a newspaper headline.
Now, years later, he was sitting in American archives watching the full magnitude of what happened.
The crowds.
The grief.
The media frenzy.
The disbelief.
The enormous impact Elvis’s death had on America and the world.
In a strange way, Solt finally got to see what he had missed.
THE FILM WAS MORE THAN ELVIS’S STORY
That’s what makes Andrew Solt’s story so fascinating.
This Is Elvis wasn’t simply the story of a superstar.
It was also the story of a filmmaker who first encountered Elvis’s death through four shocking words printed in a newspaper thousands of miles away.
Then, years later, he became one of the people responsible for helping audiences understand the life behind those four words.
He had to convince Colonel Parker.
He had to win over David Wolper.
He had to overcome MGM.
He had to find a way into Graceland.
He had to recreate the childhood that history failed to film.
And finally, he had to dig through the television archives and confront the enormous cultural earthquake he had personally witnessed only through a headline.
That is the extraordinary journey behind This Is Elvis.
And perhaps the most chilling part is this:
When Andrew Solt read “Elvis dead at 42” in Paris, he had absolutely no idea that Elvis’s death would eventually lead him to tell the story of Elvis’s entire life.
From one newspaper headline…
to Graceland…
to Tupelo…
to the MGM vaults…
to the archives of American television…
Solt’s journey became part of the Elvis story itself.
And more than four decades later, the chills are still there.
