By 1968 a lot of people had quietly written Elvis Presley off. He’d spent most of the decade making movies instead of playing live, and the music world had moved on to the Beatles and a dozen younger acts. The question hanging over him was simple and a little cruel. Did anyone still care?
NBC was betting that they did. The network hired a young director named Steve Binder to put Elvis back on television in a special that fans now call the ’68 Comeback. Binder liked Elvis and believed in him, but he didn’t sugarcoat things. He told him straight that the days of girls screaming and grabbing at him were over, that in 1968 nobody was going to tear his clothes off anymore.
Elvis didn’t argue. He wanted to find out if it was true.
So one afternoon he decided to run a little test. He told the rest of his guys to stay upstairs and watch from the window. “No, no. Only Steve and I are going down there,” he said. Then he and Binder went down to Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles and just stood on the sidewalk, right outside Binder’s office, next to a busy Tower Records, in the thick of late-afternoon traffic.
Binder has told this story a few times over the years. Here’s the director himself on how he brought Elvis back.
Steve Binder on making the 1968 comeback special
Here’s what happened on that sidewalk. Nothing.
For about ten minutes the King of Rock and Roll stood in plain sight on one of the busiest streets in the country, and not a single person stopped. Cars rolled past. Shoppers kept walking. Binder later called it “10, almost embarrassing minutes.” Elvis got antsy and started waving at the cars, trying to get somebody, anybody, to notice him. A few kids came out of Tower Records carrying their records and bumped right into him, and didn’t even lift their heads to see who it was.
Graceland’s own team went back through that special and the strange little moment on the street.
Graceland’s archivists revisit the ’68 comeback
You’d think ten minutes of being ignored would crush a man who used to stop traffic for real. It did the opposite. Something in Elvis loosened right up. Binder said that once it was over he could see a real change in him: “He was loose, he was really fun, and he really trusted me.”
That trust is a big part of why the ’68 special turned out the way it did. Elvis quit trying to be the polished movie version of himself and let the hungry young performer back out.
Binder did keep one thing to himself, though. He said later that if they’d put up a sign telling folks it really was Elvis standing out there, the crowd would’ve mobbed them in seconds. “But he never knew that and I never mentioned it to him.”