On the afternoon of October 20, 1955, a 20-year-old Elvis Presley walked onto the stage of the Brooklyn High School auditorium in Brooklyn, Ohio, a small town just outside Cleveland. He had his guitar player Scotty Moore and his bass player Bill Black with him. Elvis wasn’t famous yet. He was still months away from “Heartbreak Hotel.”
What made that day different was the camera. A film crew was there, pointed right at him. It’s believed to be the first time Elvis was ever filmed.
The man behind it was Bill Randle, a Cleveland radio DJ who was one of the first big disc jockeys to play Elvis for a northern crowd. Randle had hired a crew to shoot a short movie about his own life and work, called “The Pied Piper of Cleveland: A Day in the Life of a Famous Disc Jockey.” Elvis was just one of several acts on the bill that afternoon. Bill Haley and His Comets were there, along with Pat Boone, the clean-cut young singer who was huge at the time, the vocal group The Four Lads, and singer Priscilla Wright.
The kids in that auditorium had no idea what they were about to see.
Students who were there still talk about it. Richard Esper said that once Elvis got going, “everybody kind of went, you know, ‘Holy moly.'” Another student, Mike McCormick, said the crowd kept itself in check for one simple reason. If “we started acting up, it wouldn’t make the film.”
Even Pat Boone noticed the shift in the room. “It took me a long time to win that crowd,” he said.
So where’s the film? That’s the mystery. It got shelved after a union dispute and was never released. Over the years it turned into a kind of holy grail for Elvis fans. There were reports it changed hands for $1.9 million back in 1992, but that was never proven.
Here’s where the story gets strange. In the 1990s a British producer named Ray Santilli went digging for that lost Elvis footage. He found a man who claimed he’d been the cameraman that day. But the man didn’t hand over any film of Elvis. He offered Santilli something else completely: so-called “alien autopsy” footage, film that supposedly showed people examining a body from a crashed flying saucer. That alien film was later exposed as a hoax, start to finish. One researcher put the whole Elvis search plainly: “Nobody had the film. It really turned out to be a big nothing.”
NPR told the story of that strange hunt back in 2005.
One of the songs Elvis sang on that Ohio stage was “Mystery Train,” one of his early Sun recordings. Give it a listen and picture that room hearing it live before most of America ever had.
Hear the Elvis song he performed that lost afternoon
In 1998 the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame made the old school a rock and roll landmark. Bill Randle passed away in 2004 with the film still missing. So somewhere, maybe in a basement or a forgotten vault, a reel of the first footage ever shot of Elvis could be sitting in a box, waiting for somebody to open it.