
Orion Still - H 2015
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Is that you, Elvis Presley?
That was the thought whenever Sun Records recording artist Jimmy “Orion” Ellis hit the stage to convincingly croon and sway, repeatedly fooling many into believing that The King of Rock and Roll was indeed alive and well — a phenomenon chronicled in the documentary Orion: The Man Who Would Be King.
“Twelve years ago I was at a car boot sale with my husband in our hometown of Nottingham in England — on a stall filled with cheap ornaments and dog-eared paperbacks, standing proudly at the front of a box of faded vinyl records, we found an album with an intriguing man on the cover,” director Jeanie Finlay says of the feature, making its world premiere at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival.
“I took the record home, put it on and within seconds, the mystery deepened. Whoever this guy was, he sounded exactly — and I mean exactly — like Elvis. Except these weren’t songs that Elvis ever recorded, and there was no mention of the King on the record. But there was the fact of Sun Records and this odd story on the back sleeve about this guy called Orion Eckley Darnell and something about a coffin, and a book,” she continued. “The story I uncovered was one of the strangest I’ve ever encountered and one that could only have existed in a time before Google.”
Watch the exclusive teaser below.
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