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Director John Carpenter is perhaps best known for his sci-fi and horror movies, which have taken up the bulk of his directorial career. The man’s fans know, however, that he is also an old-school rocker, fond of 1950s and ’60s hard rock music. He played in a band called the Coupe de Villes<\/a>, and now spends his time touring concert halls playing guitar and keyboards, churning out dreamy synth-pop<\/a>. In that light, it comes as no surprise that Carpenter penned a frothy, light 1978 TV movie called “Zuma Beach,” all about a fading rock star (Suzanne Sommers) and her involvement in the love lives of some local teens.<\/p>\n It’s also not so out-of-character for Carpenter to have directed “Elvis” in 1979, a TV-movie biopic of Elvis Presley starring Kurt Russell. Carpenter wasn’t the world’s biggest Elvis fan, but he was a music guy, and “Elvis” seemed like just the right project to push his career forward. He wanted to move away from his genre films like “Halloween” and make a real drama with, in his words, “real actors.”<\/p>\n It was right for Russell, too, as he aimed to move away from the squeaky-clean decade he had just had for Disney as a teenager and move into more adult roles. Playing Elvis was also fitting, as Russell had acted opposite the real Elvis Presley when he was only 12 in the movie “It Happened at the World’s Fair.”<\/a> It didn’t matter that Russell couldn’t sing. In musicals, actors are dubbed all the time by more talented vocalists. It seems, though, that Russell still needed a notable piece of makeup to look more like the King. In particular, he needed to have his ears pinned back. Carpenter talked about Russell’s painful makeup in a vintage video interview, handily transcribed by FandomWire<\/a>.<\/p>\n