Kevin Spacey and Michael Shannon to Play Nixon and Elvis in Oddball Oval Office Flick
The bizarre secret meeting of the King and the President is being turned into a star-studded new film called Elvis & Nixon.
It was announced on Wednesday that Michael Shannon will play an older, delusional version of Elvis, while Kevin Spacey will take on the similarly constituted Richard Nixon in a Cary Elwes-scripted imagining of the impromptu pow-wow the pair had in the White House in 1970.
The surreal true story behind this bizarre meeting certainly seems ready-made for the big-screen. It began after Elvis stormed out of his home after his family criticized him for spending $100,000 on Christmas presents, which included 32 hand guns and 10 Mercedes Benz cars.
Scooping up some of his favorite guns and honorary police badges, Elvis flew to LA, where he decided that it would be a good idea for him to get a badge from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
“The narc badge represented some kind of ultimate power to him,” Priscilla Presley, Elvis’ wife, later wrote in her memoir, Elvis and Me. “With the federal narcotics badge, he [believed he] could legally enter any country both wearing guns and carrying any drugs he wished.”
Spacey and Shannon
The bureau was located in Washington, D.C., so Presley flew across the country to make his case. He hand-delivered a letter to the White House, hoping that Nixon might help him, and when he returned later that day, he was granted an audience with POTUS.
Turns out that the two men — both products of the 1950s, and weary of the youthful counterculture — shared many priorities. “Presley indicated that he thought the Beatles had been a real force for anti-American spirit,” Egil Krogh, a Nixon aide, wrote in his notes about that day. “The President then indicated that those who use drugs are also those in the vanguard of anti-American protest.”
The two guys got along so swimmingly, in fact, that Nixon granted Presley — who’d die years later of a drug overdose — his own Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs badge.
This won’t be the first time this story has been told on screen. It was made into a TV move starring Rick Peters and Bob Gunter in 1997, and more recently was recounted with strict factual adherence in Comedy Central’s Drunk History, which featured Jack Black as Elvis and Bob Odenkirk as Nixon.
It will be hard to top those two performers, but Spacey has plenty of experience playing deceptive political monsters, given his role in House of Cards. And Shannon is a terribly underrated actor who can pretty much do anything.
Photo credits: Nixon Presidential Library (Nixon and Elvis); Getty Images (Spacey and Shannon) Photo: Getty
