Variety‘s Matt Donnelly is reporting that September ’22, the late Lisa Marie Presley sent a pair of scathing, straight-from-the-shoulder emails to directior-writer Sofia Coppola about the not-yet-shot Priscilla, which she’d read a script for.
“My father only comes across as a predator and manipulative,” Lisa Marie wrote. “As his daughter, I don’t read this and see any of my father in this character. I don’t read this and see my mother’s perspective of my father. I read this and see your shockingly vengeful and contemptuous perspective, and I don’t understand why.”
Presley told Coppola that she would speak out against the project and her mother, Priscilla Presley, whose semi-imprisoned existence under the thumb of Elvis Presley between ’59 and sometime in the late ’60s is the subject of the film.
I won’t be seeing Priscilla until tomorrow. Has anyone seen it, and what’s your take? Was Elvis really as malevolent and fucked up as the film allegedly maintains? Coppola’s film also depicts the king of rock ‘n’ roll as Paul Bunyan-sized.
Jordan Ruimy: “Sadly, Priscilla does make Elvis look like a real jerk. Elvis is portrayed as an arrogant womanizer; soft at one moment, turbulent hound dog the next.”