INT: There is innumerable shows that were all a kind of a continuum of time because once you got into the mainstream and got a reputation, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, those things happened, but I want to jump a very, another milestone in your career and a very important milestone in one of the greatest stars of American music: EP, Elvis Presley. And, you know, Elvis [Elvis Presley] had burst on the scene; there was no star bigger, no more influential character in American music, I think. Had a huge, huge explosion of popularity and then he never got unpopular, but he kind of sunk back into something that one would call, you know, comfortable, you know, the Colonel [Colonel Tom Parker] sold him into, you know, indentured slavery to MGM [Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer] where he did all these movies where, you know, LOVE ME TENDER showed some real acting talent. VIVA LAS VEGAS was really sexy. But most of those things were terrible, and just didn't have any life and certainly didn't give Elvis [Elvis Presley] the opportunity to show the kind of raw energy and talent that he had, until 1968. And at this point I want you to pick it up and give us a view of how you fell into this big pile.

SB: I was in the middle of working with a very famous producer, Walter Wanger, and he had come to me with a book that he had optioned and wanted me to direct. And I thought this is a great opportunity to leave television and became a feature film Director. So I work – [INT: Just for our members, Walter Wanger's also famous for a very, very famous moment where he was married to a very famous actress-] Joan Bennett [INT: Who was fooling around with a man named Jennings Lang who was a big executive at MCA [Music Corporation of America] and he found his wife and this particular producer in flagrato in the parking lot of a market over in Silverlake, and Walter Wanger went in and shot the, you know, right between his-] In the testicles [INT: legs and, very famous, very famous moment, but that's an aside, go on.]

SB: That's what he became famous for. Then he produced some movies besides- [INT: He was a very famous Producer, also.] Very famous. And I was working on this project, trying to mold the script and the book itself was a straight detective murder story. I was getting a different slant of a television, documentary director who gets assigned to do a story about this detective. In the middle of this I got a phone call from Bob Finkel, a DGA [Directors Guild of America] member who was a very famous variety Producer/Director in his own time and Bob [Bob Finkel] at the time was producing the new Jerry Lewis [THE JERRY LEWIS SHOW], NBC series and the Phyllis Diller series [THE PHYLLIS DILLER SHOW]. He called me up and he said, I had just completed doing a television special [PETULA] with Harry Belafonte and Petula Clark that was sponsored by Plymouth Motor Cars and without going into detail it broke the color line in primetime television. Petula [Petula Clark] actually touched Harry [Harry Belafonte] and the sponsor representative had a fit, wanted it edited out of the show, I refused to, and it was a shot heard around the world and it was in NEWSWEEK and TIME MAGAZINE and there's a lot of controversy about, you know, this irreverent, you know, uncontrollable young Director who's, you know, I actually went down in the editing room and had the editor erase all the other takes so the only choice for that particular song was the actual touching scene. I received a phone call after the show aired, and it was very successful, and really did well and I was - many people said you'll never get another job in this business. You've really committed suicide politically by, you know, doing what you did.

SB: I got a telephone call from Bob Finkel and Bob [Bob Finkel] said, “NBC,” he had a, he has a company called Teram Productions, owned by NBC, or was at that time. Tom Sarnoff, who's the president of NBC, used to work for Bob Finkel when he was first breaking in the business, his father, you know, Sarnoff, David Sarnoff was the father of television in America and Bob [Bob Finkel] said, “Tom Sarnoff was at a cocktail party with Colonel Parker [Colonel Tom Parker] and the two of them worked out a deal to do a television special with Elvis [Elvis Presley] for NBC and make a movie afterwards that NBC would finance. And I was supposed to produce and direct it. And up ‘til now I can't even talk to Elvis Presley 'cause he keeps calling me Mr. Finkel [Bob Finkel]. He never will warm up or talk to me about Bob [Bob Finkel] and I've come to the conclusion I'm too old and I need to find somebody young who Elvis [Elvis Presley] can communicate one-on-one with and after I read your Petula Clark-Harry Belafonte incident I decided you're enough of a rebel where I think it would work." And I told Bob [Bob Finkel] that I was working on this Walter Wanger film, I was gonna make a transition from TV to movies, and I wasn't sure I was interested. At that point, my partner at the time was a very famous music producer, Bones Howe. Bones [Bones Howe] was producing big, big music acts in basically the ‘60s, THE ASSOCIATION who recorded "Never My Love" and "Cherish" and his big act was THE FIFTH DIMENSION and also we had just started recording Laura Nyro and Bones [Bones Howe] overheard the phone conversation, and he came to me and said, "Steve [Steve Binder], you are crazy. You and Elvis [Elvis Presley] would be perfect together." He said, "I engineered a recording with Elvis [Elvis Presley] before he went in the army and he's great to work with. You’d really, I know him and I know you and I think you'd be a great team."

SB: So I called Finkel [Bob Finkel] back and I said, "I'm not saying I'm going to do it, but if you can set up a meeting one-on-one with Elvis [Elvis Presley] and myself I'd be willing to meet with him and talk about it." The first meeting was at Finkel's office in, at NBC, Burbank and Finkel [Bob Finkel] basically set up a meeting for me to go to MGM [Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer] and meet with Colonel Parker [Colonel Tom Parker] and his entourage. This was before Elvis [Elvis Presley]. And he said, "Now be prepared because the Colonel [Colonel Tom Parker] is gonna tell you that he wants this to be a Christmas show with 20 Christmas songs and Elvis [Elvis Presley] is going to say 'Good evening' at the beginning and he's gonna say 'Good evening' at the end and that's all of the dialog you're gonna get out of him. It's going to be his gift to America." And he said, "So that's the show he wants to do, but you're on your own." I went over to Colonel Parker's [Colonel Tom Parker] office with my partner, Bones [Bones Howe] and the Colonel [Colonel Tom Parker] spent the entire time sort of wooing me. He handed me a box, quarter inch audiotape of 20 Christmas songs, a script in it for disc jockeys all over America who could pretend on their local stations they were actually interviewing Elvis [Elvis Presley] and he said, "This is the show that I wanna do." In the meantime he showed me his movie contracts that were one page long, you pay Elvis [Elvis Presley] a million dollars to make a movie and you own him between 9-5 for so many days and, you know, he shows up on time, he leaves on time, he'll do anything you want him to do in between and then he also told me and showed me his fire drill, which is, he had a van parked on the MGM [Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer] lot, if he got in any dispute with the studio he'd be out of there in a half hour. He'd load his office up and away they'd go. His office was like a kitchen. It was a, you know, it had a big table in the middle and four antique gold chairs and so forth. And he made me an official member of what was called Colonel Parker [Colonel Tom Parker] was the chief potentate - I'm trying to think of the name of the - he gave me a book and membership card and it was basically, it was a joke club that he had started about, if you're really a good bullshitter you could get into his club.

INT: Of course, you know, Colonel Parker [Colonel Tom Parker] was a former carnie. You know, he was a carnival, you know, guy and a real hustler, you know, who was Dutch, who supposedly killed somebody in Holland and came to the United States illegally and never could go out of the country, right?
SB: A young woman. He became - actually he went back and forth twice illegally and he was a dog catcher in Florida for a little bit as well. He then went to a concerts organization called Louisiana Hayride, which is where he met Elvis [Elvis Presley]. Elvis [Elvis Presley] was booked on the show. All the country artists hated Elvis Presley. They just didn't think he was country; he was too, you know, much of a flashy showman, and all the girls were going crazy over Elvis [Elvis Presley] and that irritated a lot of the country stars at that time. And Colonel Parker [Colonel Tom Parker] basically went to RCA Records, quit his job with Louisiana Hayride, got them to put up $25,000 and buy out his contract. [INT: And bought him from Sun Records.]

INT: But, you know, Colonel Parker [Colonel Tom Parker] before managed Hank Snow. He was, you know, he was into the country scene, it was very interesting. This Dutch guy comes and he, but regardless, we know, one thing I was interested in, you know, the sense that Colonel Parker [Colonel Tom Parker] was smart to a degree, but on the other hand, you know, did those contracts you saw give Elvis [Elvis Presley] any kind of residual participation? I mean, did he have royalties?
SB: He screwed Elvis [Elvis Presley] is really what he did, but the point is Elvis [Elvis Presley] was so insecure. He never was sure whether his success was based around Colonel Parker’s [Colonel Tom Parker] showmanship and promoter, you know, his bullshitting, or it was because he was that talented, so he kept him under his svengali control [a magic trick], you know, for his entire career. When Elvis [Elvis Presley] wanted to get out of the contract with Colonel Parker [Colonel Tom Parker] it was too late. The Colonel [Colonel Tom Parker] had too many, he owed Colonel Parker [Colonel Tom Parker] too much money and paper and so forth and so on but -

INT: What was your response? How did you respond to this guy? Did you just nod your head?
SB: I just listened. I really didn't say anything and I just, he did all the tap dancing and all the selling basically. And he then said, "I'm gonna set up a meeting with you and Elvis [Elvis Presley]. Elvis [Elvis Presley] will come to your office." At that time we had our offices, our company was next to Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard, right on the Sunset Strip: 8833 Sunset Boulevard. And sure enough, 4 o'clock in the afternoon, in comes a Lincoln Continental with the, you know, license plate, TENNESSEE license plates and- [INT: The entourage.] in comes Elvis [Elvis Presley] with the entourage. And we had a little reception area and then Bones [Bones Howe] had an office and I had an office and so we asked the entourage to wait out in the reception area and Elvis [Elvis Presley] came in. And I had by this time had enough experience and also this kind of attitude of "Hey, if show business doesn't work out, I can always go work in my dad's gas station," and so I learned really early is, I wasn't into playing games or politics or anything. I just, you know, from where I was coming from, I just wanted to tell the truth. First question Elvis [Elvis Presley] asked me was, you know, "What do you think of my career?" I said, "What career? You know, I'm in the music business as well as the television business and I haven't seen a hit record on the charts in at least a couple of years." Movies, from what I understand, you wouldn't be in my office unless, you know, the movie business had dried up for him.

SB: You know, he was sick of doing movies, and in fact he made jokes on the show about, you know, snearing kind of his lip in a crooked way, and so forth, and joked about how terrible most of the movies were. And I was there, basically, to probe, first of all, when he walked in, I mean, this guy was special. I mean, just, being a straight male, you look at Elvis Presley, you’ll say there's a perfect male, you know, human being. I mean he had no bad sides- [INT: He’s the king.] He was very handsome and he was in great shape. I mean he was on his way to Hawaii to vacation to get in better shape and get a suntan. I never, through my entire experience, ever felt that he was on drugs or had any - I mean he was, you know, in the meeting, he showed a flair for a good sense of humor, which he proved as we went along with the production, and I could see he was questioning the fear of going on TV. He said, "What would happen if I went on television and bombed?" And I said, "Your career will be over. You'll be known as somebody who was famous and you passed, but that will be it. On the other hand, if the show's a success, it's like being born again. I mean the next day, it's not like a movie, all of America will know who you are and you have this great opportunity to come back, bigger than ever." And so he said, "What about this Christmas show?" And I said, "We're not gonna do a Christmas show, you know? I hate Christmas shows, basically. And, you know, for sure you're not gonna do what Perry Como does or Bing Crosby or somebody like that. I mean, why don’t you let me…" I had a, my staff now was solid. Elvis [Elvis Presley] was the third of a trilogy of specials. Started with Leslie Uggams in New York, which was an ABC special, it went to Petula Clark and Harry Belafonte, and now this team that had really honed in on our craft was ready to do the Elvis Presley special [ELVIS]. So I said, "Let me meet with my staff, my writers, and you go to Hawaii and when you come back, you can make a decision. We'll pitch you a show. If you like the show, we'll be in business. If you don't like it, you know, at least we met and we shook hands and you go from there." He said great. So he left, and Allan Blye and Chris Bearde were the writers. [INT: Very famous duo.]

SB: And basically, they came up with, what we did was we ran next door to Tower Records and we just bought every Elvis Presley album that was ever written. And I had made up my mind early on that the shows that I want to do had to be tailor-made to an artist. Nobody else could take the Leslie Uggams format or the Belafonte-Petula format or what was to be the Elvis Presley format. And if they got sick or injured or died, it wasn't the case, "Okay, let's give it to, you know, another artist, let's give it to Johnny Cash" or somebody like that. If they didn't do it, nobody could do it. It was built, like if you went and got a tailor-made suit. It was your music, your life, and we would work from that premise. So, he came back from Hawaii, came back to the office with the entourage and the Colonel [Colonel Tom Parker], and we pitched the show. Allan [Allan Blye] and Chris [Chris Bearde], you know, Chris [Chris Bearde] is very funny and he, they hit it off really well right from the beginning. And Elvis [Elvis Presley] said, "I love it. Let's do it." And I said, "What don't you love in it?" He said, "I love everything about it, let's just do it," which sort of scared me because I like artists who really question and, you know, and they want to know why you're doing certain things. He bought it too easily for me. I always thought about that, in hindsight, you know? It was like he had made a commitment to break away from Colonel Parker [Colonel Tom Parker]. He’d made a commitment to, for whatever reasons, maybe out of that first meeting where he said, "I can trust this guy, he speaks the truth." And he did say one thing, which he told me later was the key to the special, and very, very important. He said, "I know how to make records. I don't know how to do television shows. I've been a fool in television, you know? They've either put me on where they have a hound dog in a, put me in a tuxedo on THE STEVE ALLEN SHOW [THE STEVE ALLEN PLYMOUTH SHOW] or, you know, make me a fool on THE MILTON BERLE SHOW [THE BUICK-BERLE SHOW] as a guest star. Or Ed Sullivan, you know, won't show my body except from the waist up.” And he said, "I just, I don’t like, I’m uncomfortable doing television." And I said, "I understand that." I said, "Elvis, you make an album, I'll make the television show." And that's what he came back to me, months later, and said, "That was the key to me wanting to work with you. It just took a weight off of my shoulders and, you know, I spent all my time thinking about the soundtrack, you know?" Now, the only person Elvis [Elvis Presley] asked me to use in the show [ELVIS, ELVIS' '68 COMEBACK SPECIAL] was, because I always ask an artist, you know, "Is there anybody in your world that you want to be involved in your show?" And he said, "There's one person that I want on the show and that's a Musical Director named Billy Strange." I'd known Billy [Billy Strange] 'cause he was writing songs with Mac Davis, he was Nancy Sinatra's Producer when she had this huge hit record BOOTS [THESE BOOTS ARE MADE FOR WALKIN’], and I said, "Fine." And I called Billy Strange, he came over to the office and said, "Yeah, you know, I'd love to do the show." And we went to work in laying out the whole concept of the special.

INT: Now wait a minute. What did Colonel Parker [Colonel Tom Parker] say when he realized it wasn't gonna be a Christmas special?
SB: He never, never reappeared. [INT: Really?] That was it. Right. I mean we never discussed it wasn't gonna be a Christmas special. What he, as weeks went by, the Christmas song, one Christmas song became the big thing 'cause Colonel [Colonel Tom Parker] hated to lose face in front of anybody. When Ann-Margret did VIVA LAS VEGAS over at 20th Century Fox, because George Sidney, the Director, had basically, you know, fallen in love with this young, sexy Elvis [Elvis Presley], a lot of the camera shots favored Ann-Margret, if you go back and look at that movie. And Colonel Parker [Colonel Tom Parker] said, which Ann-Margret told me, is that he will never use another artist in an Elvis Presley movie who's gonna upstage him the way – [INT: They were great together though. They were fantastic together.] Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

SB: So anyway, when we started pre-production on the show [ELVIS, ELVIS' '68 COMEBACK SPECIAL], and trying to figure out exactly the, I like putting in an A-theme for a musical special, which is basically the beginning and the end, and then everything in between becomes the B-themes and kind of supports the main theme. So our story was a young, you know, guitar player from The South who really, you know, doesn't know where life is gonna take him, he just loves his guitar. And I kind of used the idea of, and this is in feeding the concept, the A-concept to the writers. And I said, "I want this guy to go out like the bluebird and discover life, but he realizes that happiness is home." So it goes full circle from beginning to end. And that's kind of how we chose the music and the various segments, and so forth. We did a whole huge production number with multiple groups of songs that Elvis [Elvis Presley] had recorded, where he starts out as this guitar player who’s nobody, you know, he's in 'nothingsville,' and he's a guitar man, which is how we open. Then he goes to a boardwalk and he sees this beautiful, girl and there's a bully on the boardwalk and he breaks his guitar, and then jumps to...he wants to experience life and he ends up, not knowingly, in a bordello. And there's a girl there who, to me, represented innocence. It's her first day, she hasn't had her first, you know, john yet and Elvis [Elvis Presley] spies her, she spies him, and they start getting close together and the place is raided and he has to jump out the window. Then it goes from there to a little rock-n-roll club to a more sophisticated club, eventually to a huge arena, and the closing is that he realizes after all these experiences, he wants to be, you know, just a guitar man, simple life, back home. That all took place in about thirteen minutes of, you know, of a song medley in a sense, with different sets and costumes, and so forth. And a big cast of dancers and-

INT: One of the things, I mean, of course you have that famous opening [of ELVIS, ELVIS' '68 COMEBACK SPECIAL] with all the Elvis [Elvis Presley] look-alikes.
SB: The hundred Elvises. [INT: You know? The thing that was interesting about that was the humor of it. In other words, here's an icon and we now were completely used to Elvis [Elvis Presley] impersonators, but in that instance you've got all these Elvises with Elvis [Elvis Presley].] Well, if I had to do it over again as a Director, I would do it over again because I learned another big lesson. I think it was, Allan Blye came to me and he said, "What do you think of opening - " you know "you start out with Elvis [Elvis Presley] singing 'If you're looking for trouble, you came to the right place. If you're looking for trouble just look into my face," and I have this huge close-up of him. And then, as the camera pulls back, you're hearing scratching guitars. And there's another example: in the recording session, one of the guitar players was screwing around and just scratching his guitar and I went over to Bones [Bones Howe] who was producing the music and I said, "I love that sound, let's use it in the show," which I've always been very, you know, putting in put-ins especially in the music area. I mean, I love that. And sure enough it became the scratching sound of the opening titles, etc. So anyway, it, I've lost my train of thought in this.

INT: Well, you were just talking about the beginning. You said you might, you would do the opening [of ELVIS, ELVIS' '68 COMEBACK SPECIAL] over again.
SB: Oh yeah. So I went to Bob Finkel and I said, "Bob [Bob Finkel], I need a hundred Elvises. They're all gonna be dressed in black, so the costuming will be easy. And we've gotta get a hundred toy guitars or cheap, you know, twenty dollar guitars." And he said, "How long are you gonna use them?" And I said, "Oh, I figure maybe a minute and a half." He said, "I'm gonna have a tough time selling this to NBC. Could you use them some place else in the show?" And I said, "No, because if I use them again it takes away from the impact of what it’s, of what that's gonna mean when we pull back from this close-up and you see a hundred guys dressed like Elvis [Elvis Presley]." And we had built this opening sign, which I actually stole from a Judy Garland series [THE JUDY GARLAND SHOW] where her signature was this light bulb set with her name spelled out in initials, J-U-D-Y, and so we designed the thing without light bulbs, you know, neon we used. And the concept, which I told the Art Director, is I visualize the entire show being black and white only not black and white television, we'd paint everything black and we’d paint everything white, and the only thing that would change would be the costuming and that would be the color in the show. And, so we built this huge sign, it was a structure that could hold the weight of a hundred guys. And then came time to fill up the holes in between the letters, and it was completely filled with only using around sixty guys and so, not wanting to hurt anybody's feeling, I kinda took people and I doubled them up in certain platforms and to me, that's why I'd like to do it over again, I made a big mistake. I should have sent forty of them home. I didn't need anymore. And wanting to be a good guy, I cluttered the background. It would have been so much better had it been cleaner and visually, you know, it would have made the same impact.

INT: You know, one of my, my favorite part of that show [ELVIS, ELVIS' '68 COMEBACK SPECIAL] is the very intimate, almost improvisational quality of Elvis [Elvis Presley], you know, in that black leather jacket, with the people, you know, on this kind of square stage, with those women around him. Mostly women, you probably had a few guys too, but I noticed the women. And there wasn't a lot of fancy stuff. There wasn't production numbers. There wasn't anything else. It was him talking and singing and being absolutely the Elvis [Elvis Presley] that you always imagined. The guy had it. He was able just his own personality, his own charm, his ability to sing, his ability to entertain. I mean to me, that moment was the high point of the show. I mean I know there's a lot of other great things in the show, but my God, that was, where did that come from? Because it seemed to be the antithesis of what he'd been put up to do for a long time.
SB: Taylor [Taylor Hackford], that's my forte. I mean that was my idea and how it happened was all this great production we were doing, the gospel segment, the bordello, the dancers, etcetera, was basically a television variety show.

INT: Which is what NBC wanted?
SB: Absolutely. And the Colonel [Colonel Tom Parker] wanted Christmas. Once we started production [of ELVIS, ELVIS' '68 COMEBACK SPECIAL], Elvis [Elvis Presley] made the decision, which was great, that he wanted to live at NBC, not go home. So we converted basically, what was the Jerry Lewis or Dean Martin dressing room and we made it his home. So we had a bed in there, we had a, you know, a piano with a piano room in the other room, his shower and toilet and so forth. Every day we would work really hard in putting this production show together and after production was over, say six in the evening or six thirty, seven whatever, he would go into the dressing room with his guys and unwind; unwind for hours, improvising. I was privy to this. I went into the dressing room and I lived at NBC practically and I said to myself, "This is the show. This is the whole show. Forget all this stuff we're doing out on the stage, I gotta get a camera into that dressing room because this is the Elvis [Elvis Presley] that nobody ever saw and that Colonel Parker [Colonel Tom Parker] was, you know, to the death, insisting we not show it, and I became, you know, totally, that was, that was my thing. How do I do it?" So I went to the Colonel [Colonel Tom Parker] and I said, "I want to bring a camera in there." "Absolutely not." The Colonel [Colonel Tom Parker] loved edicts because it was a power trip. He wanted to, nobody could bring a still camera anywhere, nobody could do this, nobody could do that. And he said, you know, basically, "Over my dead body will I allow you to come into his dressing room. He's living there, that's his home, you know?" So I went in everyday and I brought my little Sony tape recorder, audiotape recorder, and I recorded everything and I took notes. Every song he sang, you know, everything he joked about, and so forth and I realized also, he had this incredible personality. I mean, you know, he really was funny. I mean, and serious at times. In the middle of production, Bobby Kennedy [Robert F. Kennedy] was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel and we were rehearsing the show before we went to NBC and we spent the whole evening talking about the Kennedy [Robert F. Kennedy], Martin Luther King assassinations and found out he was incredibly well-read on these subjects.

SB: When I was in Elvis' [Elvis Presley] home in Graceland, in his bedroom, there wasn't one Elvis [Elvis Presley] anything in the room. I mean he lived, he had Liberace records in his room or, I mean, you know, strange things. The only thing he was famous for was shooting the television set when Wayne Newton came on. That was his big thing and that's supposedly a really true story. So now I'm in the dressing room and I keep going back to the Colonel [Colonel Tom Parker] saying, "Colonel [Colonel Tom Parker], you gotta let me do this." And the Colonel's [Colonel Tom Parker] saying, I got Binder [Steve Binder] by the balls, he’s not, you're not gonna get in there. And we're starting to shoot the show [ELVIS, ELVIS' '68 COMEBACK SPECIAL] now, we're taping all these segments and, you know, Elvis [Elvis Presley] was really working hard and finally the Colonel [Colonel Tom Parker] came to me on his own and he said, "I'll tell you what to do, Bindel [Steve Binder]." He used to call me "Bindel" [Steve Binder], you know, when we were on good terms. And he said, "I'm gonna let you tape this stuff you’re, you know, you want to tape.” And I thought, "Wow, this is fantastic." "But not in the dressing room, you've gotta recreate it up on the stage." Well, I figured doing something was better than nothing, so I agreed to it. And basically what I did, even before I went on to do this, I inserted it in saying I'll figure out where to use it later, let me just get it on tape and we planned two sessions, two different audiences, two sessions. And I said, basically I gave Elvis [Elvis Presley] a piece of paper, which he brought on the stage with him, and I had listed bullet points of everything he had done in the dressing room. And I said, "If you forget what you did, you just look at the paper and it'll remind you of what song you sang, what you talked about, you know, the Pan Pacific Auditorium gig where, you know, the police were there and they made sure you didn't wiggle and move, etcetera."

SB: And Elvis [Elvis Presley], incidentally, had told me very early on that he grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi among a black population. He didn't realize he was doing anything different than what everybody else did. But when he, you know, started his career and he moved the way he moved, it was all because of the blacks and watching them and being part of that whole world, etcetera. And for me coming off of Petula Clark and Belafonte [Harry Belafonte] and having this black-white prejudice hit me in the face, and go to Elvis Presley where he had a Puerto Rican choreographer, he had a black choreographer, he had a back-up group of all blacks, THE BLOSSOMS, and so forth and nobody said anything, you know? It was strange in terms of just, I was expecting to run into all these hurdles along the way and nothing ever happened. And what happened is that the Colonel [Colonel Tom Parker], this is a story that's been written about a lot, but the Colonel [Colonel Tom Parker], I went to him and I said, "Okay, we're gonna do the improv [of ELVIS, ELVIS' '68 COMEBACK SPECIAL] on Tuesday. How many tickets do you want?" You know? And the Colonel [Colonel Tom Parker] looked at me and he said, "Look, the Colonel [Colonel Tom Parker] either gets every single ticket, and I mean every ticket. You can't hold any out for your families, for your girlfriends, for your wives, the sponsors can't have any, NBC can't have any, you give me all the tickets and I'll make sure everybody in that audience has a bouffant blonde hair-do, you know, beehive, and they'll all come from Memphis and, you know, you'll have the greatest audience you ever had." It was a hard sell to go to NBC and Singer Sewing Machines and tell ‘em, "You can't come to the taping on Tuesday because, you know, the Colonel [Colonel Tom Parker] is controlling the whole audience." But I sold it to them all and the Colonel [Colonel Tom Parker] got all the tickets.

SB: The night before the taping I get to the studio really early and I'm convinced, oh it's the night before [the taping of ELVIS, ELVIS' '68 COMEBACK SPECIAL], I'm driving out the guard gate and the guard says, "Hey Steve [Steve Binder], you got a minute?" And I say, "Sure." And I pull my car over by the guard and he says, "Do you need any tickets for tomorrow?" And I said, "What are you talking about?" And he's got, on his guard gate shelf, all the tickets practically. And I said, "What's going on? What are they doing there?" And he said, "Oh some, you know, kind of bald headed guy came over to me and told me to give these out." So, I got my clue the night before the taping that it was all B.S. The Colonel [Colonel Tom Parker] was totally, you know, was trying to sabotage what I was about to do. And so the next morning I got there and I was still expecting to see a line around the block like they stand for Jay Leno [THE TONIGHT SHOW WITH JAY LENO] or whatever. Nobody was there and I'd hired extra NBC personnel to handle the crowd control. We had taken, instead of building a new set, that little boxing ring came from the opening of the show where he's in the big arena and we had a live audience and a live, you know, forty piece orchestra.

SB: And so I told Gene McAvoy [Eugene McAvoy], our Art Director, who I work very, very closely with, and I told him, "Let's use just the boxing ring and then we'll put the people on the steps and surround Elvis [Elvis Presley] and that's the way we'll do the improv [for ELVIS, ELVIS' '68 COMEBACK SPECIAL]." And I wouldn't allow any of the musicians to bring their amplifiers. Everybody had to play acoustically. In fact, Scotty Moore, the drummer, played sticks on his chair, on a wooden chair and, you know, D.J., oh, D.J. Fontana, Scotty [Scotty Moore] was the guitar player, D.J. Fontana was the drummer, and Scotty [Scotty Moore] played acoustic guitar. Lance LeGault, who was his stand-in, played the tambourine below the stage and Charlie Hodge played an acoustic guitar as well. And there was another guy, Lamar Fike who, his grand, his uncle I think was on the Supreme Court of the United States and he and Elvis [Elvis Presley], he was like the buffoon of the group. And I liked him a lot, but Elvis [Elvis Presley] always made fun of his, as did the entourage and so forth. So, now I insisted that NBC had just launched sports with handheld cameras. Mobile, small cameras. And I insisted that they let me use it in variety and that was a big fight and finally NBC acquiesced and I got to use that, which I used in the improv section. Just telling the cameraman, "Just go around and find the greatest angles and shots you can find." And then I had the hard cameras up in the, you know, up in the audience area. We also had some bleachers off-camera where people could sit.

SB: And we spent the entire morning trying to get an audience to come to see Elvis [Elvis Presley] do the improv [for ELVIS, ELVIS' '68 COMEBACK SPECIAL]. We went to Bob's Big Boy Restaurant, which was kind of a historical hamburger drive-in in the Valley and we went up to customers eating their breakfast and lunch asking them, "Do you want to come to NBC and see Elvis Presley today?" And we got a couple local disc jockeys who we knew to go on the air and say, "If you want to see Elvis [Elvis Presley], go to NBC at, you know, 6 o'clock, whatever." And that's how we kind of put it together. Now, right before we're going to do it and we got an audience finally in there and we hand picked the girls who looked like they might be Elvis [Elvis Presley] fans, they were secretaries from NBC, people who were just, you know, eating lunch or whatever, and we put them around where Elvis [Elvis Presley] would be. And Elvis [Elvis Presley] called me in the make-up room and I walk in the make-up room and he said, "Steve [Steve Binder], it was a great idea, but I'm not doing it." And I said, "What are you talking about?" He said, "My mind's a blank. I can't think of a song. I can’t think." I said, "Well, I gave you the paper." "It's not gonna work. I don't wanna go out there." In the meantime, Bob Finkel is warming up the crowd saying, you know, "Get ready, he's coming." And I'm listening to this on the PA in the background and I said, "Elvis [Elvis Presley], this is one case where you have no choice. You're going out there. And I don't care if you go out there, look at the audience, say, you know, 'Nice to see ya,' turn around and come back, but you're not going to not go out there. We've come too far to let this happen." And so Elvis [Elvis Presley] went out there with the paper in hand, all the guys were already re, pre-positioned and the rest was history. That was the show.