BiteSize Planning Elvis Presley Movie 'Growing Up Graceland'

BiteSize Entertainment has optioned the rights to David E. Stanley and Dr. David Gruder’s Conversations With the King: Journals of a Young Apprentice and plan to adapt it into a movie about Elvis Presley called Growing Up Graceland.

our editor recommends

All Shook Up: Elvis Presley's Granddaughter Riley Keough Is Having a Moment

SXSW 2012: Bruce Springsteen Cites Barack Obama, Elvis Presley, Lester Bangs in Poetic Keynote Address

The film will be produced through BiteSize’s feature film production arm, led by Gene Kirkwood and Ross Elliot. The movie will focus on Stanley’s 17-year relationship with Presley, his stepbrother and mentor. Stanley moved into Presley’s home at Graceland when he was 4 years old, and Presley quickly became his father figure. He grew up to become of one Presley’s aides, and Presley is aid to have confided in him his spiritual search for meaning during the final years of his life.

PHOTOS: Elvis Presley's Life and Career in Pictures

“After meeting David Stanley, reading his book and listening to his stories, I realized there is another side to the Elvis phenomenon, a bigger story, and one that has never been told," Kirkwood said. "If Elvis was alive today, in this time of revolution in mass communication, I believe he would be one of the most inspirational individuals in the world."     

STORY: The Race to Make an Elvis Movie Heats Up

Growing Up Graceland is the latest in a slate of feature films in development at BiteSize, the new company run by Ron Bloom that was launched this year in Cannes. BiteSize also is working with director Rob Cohen to develop a new action franchise based on the life of Isaac Newton.

Cohen is writing an original screenplay as well as guiding the design of a graphic novel based on the Renaissance-era physicist, mathematician and alchemist. Additional film projects in the works include the dramedy Mad Dogs and Englishmen – the story of Noel Coward’s two weeks at The Desert Inn in Las Vegas in 1955, which will star Colin Firth, and a feature film on former News International CEO Rebekah Brooks, based on the Vanity Fair article “Untangling Rebekah Brooks” by Suzanna Andrews.