Aloha From Hawaii, televised live via satellite 42 years ago today, remains one of Elvis Presley’s most iconic moments and is a perennial fan favorite. Just after midnight on January 14, 1973, Elvis took the stage in the Honolulu International Center Arena, before a live audience of about 6,000 fans and gave them, more or less, the standard show he had been doing on tour and in Las Vegas for the past year. The King drifted effortlessly from rockers to ballads and looked terrific in his blazing white jump suit. Although he did his best to interact with fans and keep things as informal as possible, it was obvious that he was performing with a one-hour television time limit in mind.
The following excerpt from Channeling Elvis: How Television
Saved the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll describes how different that concert
looked to television viewers around the world, both those who saw it televised live
in the Far East and those who saw it on a delayed basis days or months afterward around the
world. The concert witnessed by those in
the arena and the production aired on television made for very different
experiences.
“Unfortunately, Far East television
viewers saw something quite different from the live performance that audience
members witnessed in the Honolulu International Center Arena, as would
television audiences viewing the special on a delayed basis elsewhere,
particularly in the United States. Instead, they would see Marty Pasetta’s
TV-eye’s-view of Elvis’ performance, and that was quite a different thing. The
result would show that a live concert and a television special were not always
compatible.
“Throughout the televised
broadcast, Pasetta moves the camera around most of the time, using numerous
dissolves, overlaps, and very rapid cuts from one view to another, making full
use of his six cameras, including one hand-held camera at stage side that
offers sometimes clumsy views looking up at Elvis. Most noticeable are the many
split-screen shots that he uses, which divide the screen into four individual
panels, each showing a different shot of the concert from different angles.
These include both close-ups and medium shots of Elvis and his band, long shots
from the audience, and longer ones that take in the entire stage and show off
the flashing ‘Elvis’ signs and the silhouette figure, and shots of the audience
itself. The split-screen views are somewhat trendy, but they often undermine
Elvis’ performance, distracting viewers’ attention away from him and the energy
he brings to his music, and disrupting the concert’s momentum. Pasetta seems to
be trying to create action, or ‘excitement,’ as he put it, with camera moves
and flashy visuals, but they are no substitute for the excitement that Elvis
provides his fans simply by performing. There is a clear disconnect between
that perspective and Pasetta’s television sensibilities.
“The U.S.
telecast the following April 4 suffers even more detrimental tampering. Despite
some minor editing, it retains most of the distracting rapid cuts between
camera shots, flashing lights, and eerie images on the Mylar mirrors, but those
problems are minor compared to the major editing job that was done in order to
fill the expanded 90-minute time slot for NBC-TV. This was achieved by splicing
in four of the five after-concert ‘filler’ numbers that a stationary Elvis,
clearly low on energy, recorded in the wee hours following the live concert.
They bog down the telecast and suck what life there is out of it. Not only is
Elvis shot in perfectly stationary positions, the very thing Marty Pasetta said
he wanted to avoid, but these numbers are all done as multi-panel split-screen
shots in which Elvis shares the screen with images of the Hawaiian countryside
and other outdoor footage that Pasetta shot before Elvis arrived in Hawaii. In
most of these scenes, Elvis appears in the smallest panels, and sometimes not
at all, further drawing attention away from him. Most damaging, these flat
numbers interrupt the flow and momentum of the show. Six commercial
interruptions exacerbate that damage to the point where the U.S. version of the
TV special loses its identity as a televised concert that should focus on
Elvis’ performance. It is neither that, nor anything nearly as appealing as the
1968 special, which creatively combined clearly delineated musical production
numbers and live performance segments, all centered on Elvis. The segments were
skillfully edited to accommodate commercial interruptions without disturbing
the flow of the show. That was simply not possible with Aloha, which clumsily, and unsuccessfully tried to break the
concert into similar segments around commercial breaks.
“For once, TV had undermined Elvis
instead of helping him, as it almost always had done before. The way the concert
appeared on TV was disappointing and lost most of the energy, excitement, and
fun of the actual live concert that the Honolulu audience had witnessed.”
* * *
Allen
J. Wiener's books can be found on Amazon.com at this link:
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