Out on the lakefront, Chicago filmmaker Heather McAdams is playing tunes by the King on a junky little tape recorder. Trent Carlini–“Italy’s #1 Elvis Stylist” reads his tour jacket–is going through his time-worn Elvis moves in sync with the music as McAdams shoots. She’s worried the late afternoon sun isn’t sharp enough to make his rhinestones sparkle. He needs to know, “Do you want me to perform the song, or should I pose it?”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Carlini, the star of one of McAdams’s two recently finished films on Elvis impersonators, is uncomfortable being compared to other denizens of the Elvis-impersonator cosmos. “A lot of people who don’t believe in themselves–goofballs and social rejects, frankly–just want attention, so they go out and get a suit made. They are really, really ruining the entertainment end of this thing,” he observes. In his shows Carlini really sings, with a real band. Other Elvises rely only on physical resemblance. “Hey, I’ll turn down parades, because I just don’t look that much like him,” he says.
McAdams’s two Elvis films premiere tonight at Chicago Filmmakers. The second one portrays Jay Elvis, another local impersonator. While both works are off at the lab getting printed, a frantic McAdams has agreed to sit still for an interview, but first she wants to serve up a yellowish orange “energy” beverage–clearly an impulse purchase by someone with an eye for color. “Looks like piss with a lot of vitamins, doesn’t it?” she says. “How’s it taste?”
McAdams’s next project, if she can get the NEA grant, will be a film on folk faiths in Kentucky whose believers speak in tongues and handle snakes. And if that funding falls through, she’ll probably improvise–take her camera to the zoo, buy rubber snakes from toy shops, and hand scratch interpretive markings on old nature footage. Or she might explore the world of people-who-talk-in-peculiar-voices-to-pets. “I have a friend who talks to her ferret in a very special way,” she explains, admitting to a similar tendency herself with Edwina, her cat, who pokes her head through plastic bags, wears them like capes, and runs around the apartment preying on vermin. “Can’t you just see the National Enquirer headline: ‘Government Wastes $25,000 on Pet-Talk Movie’?” she fantasizes. “Getting in the National Enquirer–actually, I can’t figure out if that’s my greatest fear, or my goal in life.”
