Elvis pal produces his final tributes

Jerry Schilling first left the auspices of employer and friend Elvis Presley in the late 1960s. Safe to say, he has never really left.

A former Memphian and, more to the point, member of Presley's Memphis Mafia, Schilling - now a Los Angeles producer - has been involved in so many Presley movies and presentations, the King continues to write the check.

Schilling produced the first two volumes of the Disney home videos, Elvis: The Great Performances and its subsequent two-hour special, with host Priscilla Presley; he also produced the 1989 radio show, From Graceland, the Turner video The Lost Performances and the RCA/BMG docudrama Elvis in Hollywood; he co-produced the ABC series Elvis and has been a consultant for several projects, including Elvis and Me, Heartbreak Hotel and This is Elvis.

The latest in the Schilling oeuvre is the third and final instalment of The Great Performances, called Elvis from the Waist Up (airs 9 p.m. Monday on VH1). And he is getting close to completing his pet project of two years, a feature-film version of Peter Guralnick's definitive Elvis biography, Last Train to Memphis.

It all fits for a man whose job description for many years was assistant to Elvis.

Memphis-born Schilling, 55, first met Elvis in a game of touch football at the Dave Wells Community Center. The year was 1954, literally days after Dewey Phillips had spun That's All Right on WHBQ, altering forever the course of popular music. Schilling was about eight years younger than Elvis, who had been trying to get a game together with a few friends.

'This will tell you how popular Elvis was (at the time); he couldn't get six people to play football', says Schilling, who was asked to join in the extemporaneous fun. 'Those football games, after that, became weekly rituals'.

The rituals grew. Football progressed to all-night movies, which progressed to Graceland parties. In 1964, the call came. Schilling, then a college senior, was asked to see Presley.

'He said, 'I need you to go to work for me'. He didn't say what as because Elvis basically hired his inner circle of people out of trust, whether it was security, running errands (or) maybe even doing something important'.

Schilling did not refuse the offer and remembers his first night on the job as tossing a football at a truck stop on the way to L.A. and - now that he was among the inner circle - some rather deep conversation with the King.

'He was the first human being that ever talked about real things (to me)', says Schilling. 'I learned a lot from him by just being around him'.

Schilling also learned a lot being around Elvis' movies. He became a stand-in for Elvis on the set and began studying camera work and film editing. Movie interest was so strong that Schilling stopped working for Elvis in 1967 and took a position at ABC as apprentice film editor.

'My job was to scrape the labels off of syndicated shows in a basement by myself', he laughs.

If Elvis had many comebacks, so did Schilling, who found himself back in the King's favor shortly after resigning.

'I was doing this (ABC job) for a few weeks, and I get a call from Elvis in my little apartment', Schilling says. 'And he said, 'Do you do this editing on the weekends?' - He did not like to be said 'no' to - I said, 'No'. He said, 'I'm on my way by. We're going to Palm Springs'.'

For the next few years, Schilling led the most erratic of lifestyles, scraping labels off cans during the week and then on weekends taking a Lear jet to Las Vegas, where he handled sundry arrangements for Presley. He even ended up at the White House in 1970 when Elvis met Richard Nixon.

Schilling quit once again in the early 1970s, this time to work as a tour manager for an unknown artist called Billy Joel. Since then, he also has been personal manager for the Beach Boys and Lisa Marie Presley and has served as a creative-affairs consultant for the Graceland estate.

But it is the movies to which Schilling and his self-named management company, begun in 1975, keep returning.

Elvis from the Waist Up, produced by Schilling and directed by Andrew Solt, the team behind the other Great Performances, is a collection of Elvis' earliest live appearances, including television spots on the Milton Berle, Steve Allen and, of course, Ed Sullivan shows. It is common knowledge that, because of his uninhibited gyrations, Presley was filmed from the waist up on Sullivan's family variety show. What people may have forgotten is that Presley's third appearance was censored, not his first.

Another interesting clip from the video is the earliest extant footage of Elvis at an outdoor Texas show from 1955. There is no audio to the home movie, which was fortuitously found in a trunk, but it shows a short-sleeved, charismatic Elvis already in command of an audience (and the camera).

'It's the story about how Elvis became a household name... how his confidence builds', says Solt, who met Schilling when both were involved in postproduction of the 1972 documentary Elvis On Tour. 'It's interesting in looking at an artist's career to see how it happened, how they load the rocket fuel in the early days'.

The hourlong video, budgeted around $800,000, was meant for the Disney Channel but was sold to VH1 instead, Schilling says, when Disney reverted to mostly children's programming.

Guralnick wrote the script that U2 singer Bono narrated. In fact, Bono recorded his narration at House of Blues Memphis after U2's May performance in town.

'I just knew he was going to choose Memphis', says Schilling, who held the release date back six months to get Bono on board. 'And he wouldn't take a penny for it. He said, 'No, I'm not doing this for money'.

Do not expect more Great Performances after this one. Not only have all the Elvis shots been shot, but also licensing footage has become too pricey.

'Stuff has become so rare', says Schilling, who worked four years getting Elvis from the Waist Up off the ground. 'That's why I'm glad this is the last of the series'. Schilling adds that an Elvis documentary cannot be made today without losing money. 'There are so many artists, publishers and people that got ripped off for years, and I think there's a new consciousness. These people are wanting to rightfully get paid for what they own - and probably a little bit for what they've lost over the years'.

Schilling's next Elvis project forgoes archival film for filmed re-enactment. One of Hollywood's hottest properties is a screen treatment of the Guralnick biography on Elvis, Last Train To Memphis, on which Schilling is a producer. The project has been in development for several years by 20th Century Fox and executive producer Steve Tisch (Forrest Gump), and it is awaiting screenplay approval. The theatrical release, budgeted between $20 million and $30 million, will be directed by Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral) and should be out sometime next year through Fox 2000, Schilling says.

Newell was chosen not for his British comedic films but for the way he got inside the characters' minds in his gangster movie, Donnie Brasco.

'I said if you can do that with the characters in these early days of Elvis, we can have a really special film', Schilling says.

A cinema newcomer, Jim Uhls, is writing the script and took in a recent Schilling-guided tour of the Birthplace of Rock and Roll that including the opening night of Elvis Presley's Memphis club. Uhls also visited Sun Records owner and producer Sam Phillips, the man responsible for Presley's first hits.

Phillips's son, Knox, said it was a productive meeting that should result in an accurate portrait of Presley.

'Everybody feels good about the project again', he said. According to Knox, the Phillips family was disappointed in the last screenplay by Coal Miner's Daughter writer Tom Rickman.

Last Train is, however, the last Elvis film Schilling says he will produce. He has had plenty of movie opportunities because of his association with Presley and is proud of the relationship, but he feels it's time to move on.

'Nothing is more important to me whatever else I ever do. (But) I want to produce films, not just Elvis films. I don't think it's good for Elvis, and I don't think it's good for me'.

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