Elvis, Rocky & Me: The Carol Connors Story Review – Tribute to a Hit-Maker

Elvis, Rocky & Me: The Carol Connors Story
(USA, 75 min.)
Dir. Alex Rotaru
Prod. Chip Rosenbloom, Dahlia Heyman, Brendan Crane, Alex Rotaru, Matthew Einstein, Julian Warshaw

 

Carol Connors has made a career writing love songs, but romance itself doesn’t really do it for. She tells director Alex Rotaru that she could never stand seeing a man she loved brush his teeth. It just breaks the spell.

This current of die-hard romanticism jolts throughout Connors’ energetic story. Her tale is one of many love songs both literal and figurative, and a great Hollywood legacy long overdue for a documentary treatment. Elvis, Rocky & Me: The Carol Connors Story, produced alongside Connors’ Grammy-nominated memoir of the same name, touches all the right notes that one hopes to find in a biopic. The great loves of her life include Elvis Presley and actor Robert Culp, while her contributions to music include a record-setting number one at age 16, the Oscar-nominated theme from Rocky, and countless songs from movies, series, and even car commercials.

There’s a sense of discovery even if one has heard Connors’ many iconic songs dozens of times. The film unfolds layers of the voice behind these songs, as well as facets of the industry that shape their place in pop culture. There’s also a compelling reality that, as Connors notes during one powerful moment in the film, she’s the only one left from a period of music history.

This weight brings an unexpected punch to the light touch with which director Alex Rotaru shares Connors’ story. Elvis, Rocky & Me takes a straightforward talking heads approach to Connors’ biography, but the direct effect suits the subject best. Connors is a huge character and a terrific raconteur, so one can hardly imagine a better vehicle to tell her story than her own voice. She’s a delight who clearly appreciates the opportunity to get her flowers.

Connors shares in interviews how coming from a family of Polish Jews, many of whom didn’t survive the Holocaust, shaped the work ethic and personality that guided her path. These traits include a dad who warned her about smoking, booze, drugs, and boys, but also a dad who knew a lot about the value of a boxer named “Rocky.”

As Connors unfolds her story, she speaks with a palpable sense of amazement that she got this far. She tells how her piano teacher instructed her class to try “Für Elise” and wrote her off when she reworked the tune because she didn’t think Beethoven got it right. Cut to a few years later, and her voice is a signature prize. It’s so good, in fact, that young Phil Spector writes a song to showcase the 16-year-old singer’s voice. That song, “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” shot to number one on the Billboard charts. It made Connors’ an historic first for a young singer. But it also created a formative piece in music historic, as Connors opens up about Spector’s controlling nature, which became increasingly cruel as their work progressed and, particularly, Connors’ path diverged with his.

This path includes refusing Spector oral sex while seeking a partner to navigate the music industry. Connors’ story adds an important entry in the canon of #MeToo stories as she reflects upon the challenges of making it as a teenage ingénue. There’s a moment late in the film when she addresses the number of men who’ve been accused amid the reckoning: besides Spector, there’s Plácido Domingo, Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby, and even O.J. Simpson, whom she encountered the night before he (allegedly) killed his wife. She says they talked about cats, and the perspective from an avowed cat lover is downright chilling. Rotaru doesn’t make Connors apologize for these men, nor explain their behavior, but through Connors, the documentary provides a notable snapshot of the pervasiveness of misconduct in showbusiness. Connors simply addresses the allegations about Domingo with a distressed, “Why, Plácido?” and tells her director that she can’t say more. But her perspective on Spector’s volatile behaviour are frank accounts from which one can extrapolate the perils of powerful men.

However, the circumstances in which Connors’ excelled make her story even more compelling. After the hopeless place of Phil Spector, she found love with two men: Elvis Presley and Rocky Balboa. The documentary quickly recaps Connors’ whirlwind romance with Elvis Presley, but takes in the songwriter’s career high when producer Irwin Winkler agrees to hire her for the Rocky theme simply because she’s cheap. Connors conveys the flash of genius she found in the shower while exploring Rocky’s story in song. The film gives fair credit to the legacy of “Gonna Fly Now” with clips of performances from around the world nearly fifty years after the song’s recording.

Rotaru includes an impressive range of talking heads to illuminate Connors story. Interviewees include Irwin Winkler, Bill Conti, Dionne Warwick, Diane Warren, Talia Shire, and Mike Tyson. Rotaru also appears somewhat randomly as one of the talking heads, credited simply as “Director/Friend and seemingly filling some soundbites that nobody else could provide. He does, however, have a great deal of archival material to interpret, including a great stream of Connors’ appearances on late night TV in which hosts constantly ask about love stories rather than love songs.

Elvis, Rocky & Me contains a real prize, however, that isn’t in the archives. It’s a song that Connors wrote for Elvis Presley the night he died. She recalls hearing the news of his passing at a restaurant, going home in shock, and sitting down at her piano. Connors tells Rotaru that she penned the song “You Loved My Night Away” in tribute to her late lover and left it at the piano. It sat there since that fateful night in 1977 until Connors decided to record it for the documentary and the audio version of her book. The song is a heartfelt hidden gem of pop history. It’s a touching tribute to love from an expert on the subject.

Elvis, Rocky & Me: The Carol Connors Story had its world premiere at the Palm Springs International Film Festival.

 

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