In the summer of 1970, MGM sent a film crew to follow Elvis Presley in Las Vegas. The documentary became Elvis: That’s the Way It Is, and it caught something almost no other footage of him does — the hours before the audience arrived.
This was a nervous moment in his career. He had come back to live performing only a year earlier after eight years away making films. Now he was preparing his third season at the International Hotel, and the cameras wanted to see what the work actually looked like.
So they filmed rehearsals. And in some of that footage, Elvis is on stage in front of rows of empty seats.
Elvis: That’s the Way It Is: The Rehearsals DVD
Here’s what makes people stop and watch it twice. He did not hold back.
No crowd to impress, no reviewer in the room, nothing at stake. He could have walked through it, marked the steps, saved his voice. Instead, he threw himself at the songs with the same force he gave a sold-out showroom — the full voice, the full movement, the full intent.
His band has described the same thing. Bassist Jerry Scheff said rehearsals felt less like rehearsals and more like jamming, because Elvis was always switched on. Guitarist James Burton said he never took his eyes off him, because you never knew what was coming next.
Opening Night Show – August 10, 1970 | Elvis: That’s The Way It Is Outtakes
Then the doors opened.
The film cuts from those empty rooms to opening night — the showroom packed, the noise enormous, the man on stage exactly as intense as he had been hours earlier when nobody was watching.
That is the real point of the footage, and it cuts against a common idea about performers. People tend to assume a crowd creates the energy — that a great performer feeds off the screaming and rises to meet it.
The 1970 footage suggests something different about Elvis. The energy was not a reaction to the room. He walked in carrying it. The audience just got to see what was already there.