New film imagines what happened when Elvis met Nixon

By 12:30 p.m., he was in the Oval Office, telling Nixon about his Tennessee youth, how the Beatles were anti-American and his decade long study of Communist brainwashing and drug culture.

The suit that Shannon wears is cut from the same pattern as Presley's was, and the car that his aid Jerry Schilling (Alex Pettyfer) drives is the same model Cadillac El Dorado, right down to the red leather interior.

According to the archives, photos were taken at the start of the meeting, for example.

For Johnson and her actors, the fun was getting to the emotional truth of the encounter, rather than a beat by beat, court-transcript style reenactment.

The story tries to take those characters seriously and really think about what they both actually wanted out of the situation, but also acknowledge the kind of energy that comes from the absurdity of them being together.