Rock-and-Roll Fantasy

Memphis’ exploitation-film auteur dissects the night Elvis met the Beatles.

by Mark Jordan

Just weeks after birth week, atonement week has officially begun.

“I would like to apologize for the yellow fever epidemic, Martin Luther King, the destruction of Stax, Alex Chilton, the Flyer not being open on birth week, and of course, the movie not being ready on time,” says a genuinely remorseful John Michael McCarthy.

Memphis’ exploitation-film auteur, McCarthy is sorry for the recent “showing” of his latest opus, Elvis Meets the Beatles. Based very loosely on a brief account in Peter Guralnick’s Elvis biography Careless Love, the film is a fantasia about the night the Fab Four and the King spent together in 1965.

McCarthy and executive producer Craig Brewer rushed the film through production with the goal of having the premiere during Elvis’ birth week. And, indeed, on January 8th the premiere party was held at Last Place on Earth. A few hundred people turned out to see the film and hear bands such as the Subteens, the Joint Chiefs, and Polisiclone, each of which could boast cast members among their line-ups.

Only one problem: no film. A last-minute glitch in transferring the film from the computer to videotape prevented McCarthy from ever showing the film that night.

Two weeks later, the problem is now fixed, and this Saturday, at Last Place on Earth (again), a repentant McCarthy will hold a free showing of the Elvis Meets the Beatles. The film will be shown three times straight starting at 9:30 p.m. The showings will be followed by a performance by a Ramones tribute band being thrown together just for this occasion.

“We figured that if you cross the Beatles with Elvis you get the Ramones,” says McCarthy of bringing yet another set of music stars into the mix. “And since Paul used to sign into hotels as Paul Ramone, why not?”

Oddly, the problem with the download was a single corrupted frame of footage that popped up in the exact moment in the movie when the filmmakers suggest that Paul McCartney is really dead. It was a fitting coincidence for a film that takes great fun in poking fun at all the weird connections and conspiracy theories that have arisen around these two cultural icons.

The film starts in 1970 with Elvis talking to President Nixon (in an industrial park!) about the dangerous influence of the Beatles, as best exemplified by Charles Manson’s use of “Helter Skelter.” Then the movie flashes back to August 27, 1965, when Brian Epstein brought the Beatles to Elvis’ Bel Air mansion for an audience with the King. In McCarthy’s version of events, Ringo (Helmut Ploderer) plays pool with the Memphis mafia and is then seduced by Priscilla; George (Wheat) gets stoned with Elvis’ hair stylist/spiritual adviser Larry Geller (Paul Woodard) and unwittingly introduces the king to LSD; and Paul (Basil Wayne Whatley) and a disillusioned John (Archie Müller) pick tunes and pop pills with Elvis (Joe Machamer). The whole thing ends with a send-up of A Hard Day’s Night.

Only about 20 minutes long, Elvis Meets the Beatles is a departure for McCarthy, best known for trashy, big-busted epics such as The Sore Losers and Teenage Tupelo. (You can survey McCarthy’s oeuvre at www.bigbroad.com.)

“There are none of my usual trademarks in this one,” says McCarthy. “It’s exploitation but of a different sort. … Everything I’ve done has been unpopular, so I thought why not take the two most popular music figures of the 20th century and try to make them unpopular.”

Fans should not despair over the temporarily mature McCarthy, however. His next film — trumpeted in the coming attraction reel at the beginning of Elvis Meets the Beatles, along with Brewers’ upcoming feature The Poor and Hungry and Sean Plemmons’ and Jim Rose’s Strange Cargo — is Superstarlet A.D. about “beauty cults with machineguns in search of ancient stag films, [hunting] cavemen at the end of the world.” n

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