ELVIS PRESLEY WAS NEVER JUST AN ICON — AND THIS FILM PROVES IT
For decades, the world has been told to remember Elvis Presley as a myth.
The jumpsuits.
The hips.
The screaming fans.
The legendary voice.
The Las Vegas lights.
The King of Rock ’n’ Roll.
But what if we got it all wrong?
What if the most powerful thing about Elvis was never the mythology we created around him — but the human being who existed underneath it?
That is the shocking realization that came after watching Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis in IMAX.
Sitting in that enormous theater, watching footage of a man who died decades before I was even born, something completely unexpected happened. I wasn’t falling for the costume. I wasn’t falling for the legend.
I was falling for Elvis himself.
And that realization sent me back to a film made more than half a century ago: That’s the Way It Is.
Suddenly, two documentaries separated by 55 years began to feel like pieces of the same extraordinary story.
One film gives us Elvis at an almost overwhelming scale. The other strips everything away until there is nowhere left to hide.
And what they reveal is astonishing.
While creating Elvis, Baz Luhrmann’s team discovered 68 boxes of 35mm and 8mm film that had been stored underground in Kansas salt mines for decades. Inside were outtakes, unseen footage, and moments from the making of That’s the Way It Is that audiences had never seen.
Think about that.
Elvis Presley footage — real footage of Elvis — sitting in the darkness for roughly half a century.
No audience.
No applause.
No screaming fans.
Just Elvis, frozen on film, waiting to be discovered.
The footage had no sound. Baz and his team spent years restoring it, cleaning it, synchronizing it with existing audio and rebuilding it frame by frame.
And then something incredible happened.
Elvis came back to life.
Not as a photograph.
Not as a wax figure.
Not as an impersonator.
As a human being.
On an IMAX screen, you can see the sweat on his face. You can see the marks on his skin. You can see the way he leans into the microphone. You can see the absolute control he has over the room.
And suddenly, the stories about people fainting at Elvis concerts don’t sound exaggerated anymore.
They make perfect sense.
But That’s the Way It Is reveals something different.
There is no grand Hollywood mythology here. Denis Sanders simply followed Elvis in 1970 as he prepared for his Las Vegas performances.
Elvis rehearses.
He laughs.
He makes mistakes.
He tries something again.
He talks.
He works.
And that’s where the real shock lies.
Because when you remove the myth, Elvis doesn’t become smaller.
He becomes even more extraordinary.
Culture has a cruel habit of shrinking icons. We turn people like Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe into costumes, impressions, memes and sound bites. We make them familiar. Safe. Manageable.
But Elvis was never manageable.
His myth is something we created.
His magnitude was something he possessed.
And perhaps that explains why, nearly 50 years after his death, we’re still obsessed.
We’re still watching his performances.
Still discovering photographs.
Still uncovering recordings.
Still making documentaries.
Still writing books.
Still creating YouTube videos.
Still arguing about who Elvis really was.
Because there is something about watching the actual man that cannot be reduced to nostalgia.
And perhaps the most extraordinary part is that some of the footage discovered decades later was actually connected to That’s the Way It Is itself.
The same era.
The same man.
The same performances.
The same cameras.
Material that was once considered unnecessary or unsuitable for the final film eventually disappeared into the darkness — only to be rediscovered generations later.
In a strange way, these aren’t simply two films about Elvis.
They are two different windows into the same man.
Elvis is the door.
It introduces a new generation to the sheer scale of Elvis Presley — the performer who could command thousands of people with a single movement, a single look, a single note.
But That’s the Way It Is is what waits on the other side.
The man.
The worker.
The perfectionist.
The human being.
And perhaps that is the greatest secret of Elvis Presley.
He didn’t need the myth to be extraordinary.
He was extraordinary before the lights came on.
He was extraordinary before the audience screamed.
He was extraordinary before history decided what he was supposed to mean.
There is something almost heartbreaking about that realization.
Elvis wanted to travel the world. His impact became global, yet circumstances kept him physically confined in ways that were deeply frustrating. And still, somehow, the man who couldn’t travel everywhere became everywhere.
Decades after his death, Elvis can fill an IMAX screen.
He can make a modern audience gasp when Burning Love begins.
He can make someone fall in love with a man they never had the chance to meet.
That is not merely nostalgia.
That is not simply celebrity worship.
That is the power of encountering something genuinely extraordinary.
Elvis Presley wasn’t just an icon.
He wasn’t just a jumpsuit.
He wasn’t just a voice.
He wasn’t just the King.
He was a human being who possessed something so rare, so magnetic and so powerful that even imperfect film buried underground for decades can still make people feel something in their entire bodies.
And maybe that’s why we’re still here.
Still watching.
Still searching.
Still trying to understand.
Because the deeper we look behind the myth, the more astonishing the man becomes.
