“They say you can’t make it cos you sound like Elvis. But Elvis sounded like Elvis, and he made it…” Having previously dealt with pop fakery in The Great Hip Hop Hoax, director Jeanie Finlay strikes gold with this wonderfully weird and affectingly melancholy account of how singer Jimmy Ellis found himself at the centre of the strangest chapter of rock’n’roll apocrypha. Dismissed as a Presley soundalike during Elvis’s lifetime, Ellis resurfaced in the late 1970s as the masked Orion, taking his name from Gail Brewer-Giorgio’s fictional tale of a superstar who fakes his own death. Fruitcake conspiracy theories, the emergence of “new” duet recordings with Jerry Lee, and the Sun Records release of Reborn (initially pressed with a lurid coffin-escape cover) convinced fans that Orion was Elvis, bringing Ellis fame but – with bitter irony – only at the price of anonymity. Blending audiovisual archive with new on-camera interviews, Finlay picks apart this real-life Bubba Ho-Tep tale, offering a dizzying analysis of the madness of the Orion myth alongside a movingly sympathetic account of Ellis’s unsung talent.
