A Star Is Imagined

Abstract Posthumous discourses that present alternative histories of Elvis Presley have often used the most-maligned episode of his professional biography—his film career—to create myths “at odds with history.” By imagining the possibilities latent in an ostensible period of oblivion and presenting the star in an alternative position in relation to the film production practices of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, such accounts take root in the tensions between the star who was available on screen and a mythical Presley that might have been. This chapter adopts adopts the term “unproduction” from Peter C. Kunze, who uses recent studies of “failure” by media and cultural studies scholars to propose “unproduction studies” as an area of academic inquiry that contests the “historiographic preference and market logic toward media successes by closely examining the possibilities that exist within a serious study of media failures.” The chapter argues that “unproduction” cultures have constituted or inspired modes of cultural production of their own. Film critics, historians, and documentarians have shown a pronounced fascination with movies that were never completed. Such fascination has arguably been even more potent in the field of rock, where dead stars continue to inspire fans to imagine what directions such figures’ lives might have otherwise taken. The “unproduction culture” surrounding Elvis Presley’s film career tells us much about the distance that historians, fans, cultural commentators, and people with connections to Hollywood see between Elvis’s actual 1960s film career and the “1960s” as a metonym for significant socio-cultural changes in the United States.