The King

The King (2018)

The rise of a king, the fall of an empire.

A cultural portrait of the American dream at a critical time in the nation’s history. Set against the 2016 American election, The King takes a musical road trip across the country in Elvis Presley's 1963 Rolls Royce.

Date of release
2018-06-22
TMDB
6.3 / 10 (31)
Runtime
1h 47m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Eugene Jarecki

Casting

Interesting facts

The King is a 2017 American documentary film directed and co-written by American filmmaker, author and two-time Sundance nominee Eugene Jarecki. As indicated in the film title, the documentary is about Elvis Presley and America during his career. Blending archival footage, celebrity interviews and footage of significant American events such as the twin towers collapse, the documentary adopts Presley as a metaphor for the rise and fall of the American Dream.

Production

The documentary's central director and producer Eugene Jarecki is award-winning in his investigative documentary field. Winning the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for his 2002 film The Trials of Henry Kissinger, Jarecki went on to win the 2005 Peabody Award for his 2005 film Why We Fight.

An organic and continually altered process, the production of Jarecki's 2017 film The King took 2 years. Specifically, this included; filming which occurred between 2015 and 2016, and editing which occurred between 2016 and 2017. The conception of The King came to Jarecki while touring for his 2013 film The House I Live In.

While confident in the exploration of Elvis Presley's rise and fall as a metaphor for America, the documentary's road trip method was not Jarecki's original concept. Originally planning to convey the “young nation’s rapid transformation solely through archival footage and direct interviews, Jarecki’s decision to change this method prevailed as a result of his vision to unify the film.

Although aware of Presley's story, and the significant locations which framed his rise and fall, Jarecki's integration of interviews throughout the documentary were spontaneous, often occurring within real-time. A prominent example of this was Jarecki's interviewing of students in Memphis.

Premiered as Promised Land at the 2017 Cannes film festival, The King was further edited prior to its commercial release. Trimmed and made more concise, the documentary shifted from a broad exploration of Elvis Presley as a metaphor for America, to a nonfiction chronicle urging audiences to consider What happened to America? This questioning is specifically in relation to the nation's distance from reality, and obsession with wealth and material…

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended