Editors note: Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series debuts and celebrates the scripts of films that will factor in this year’s movie awards races.
With his latest feature Elvis, Baz Luhrmann aims to restore the humanity of Elvis Presley, an artist with depths to equal his talents who in the more than 45 years since his passing has commonly been reduced to a pop-culture caricature.
In order to do so, Luhrmann takes as his focus for the Warner Bros movie the complicated relationship between the King of Rock and Roll (Austin Butler) and his Dutch-born manager Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks).
While Parker helped launched Elvis’ career into the stratosphere after signing him in 1956, undoubtedly playing a role in his becoming the bestselling solo musical artist of all time, he’s remembered as a Svengali rather than a visionary given his financial exploitation of Presley over the span of 20-plus years.
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