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In the movie Forrest Gump, Elvis Presley role present but was never shown properly:

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Why was Elvis Presley's face not shown properly?

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    too small to make an edit myself, but did you mean do mean "was present" instead of "role present" or did you have another word/phrase in mind? i kind of tripped on the sentence the first time i read it...
    – Michael
    Commented Jun 17, 2023 at 23:44
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    In this frame, Forrest is in focus, not Elvis.
    – RonJohn
    Commented Jun 18, 2023 at 0:40
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    Perhaps there were issues with licensing Elvis' likeness for use in the movie which precluded using CGI or other methods to merge historical footage with the live action. Elvis' estate can be pretty aggressive about protecting their IP.
    – Llaves
    Commented Jun 19, 2023 at 4:21
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    Perhaps the focus issue had the additional benefit of allowing someone who looks like Elvis to do the scene without anyone complaining it's not Elvis.
    – WGroleau
    Commented Jun 19, 2023 at 16:05

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When the director/producers were able to use real footage of historical events, they did an impressive job with CGI to integrate and meld younger Forrest into the footage. But I don't think there's any official record of Elvis being at Forrest's house :) so they had to create this encounter.

As Forrest is always the main character, in this case, Elvis (not even close to being "The King" at that time) is just a 'second-tier player'. I think that him being in the background/blurred is just normal. If you want to extrapolate, only after Elvis has met with Forrest (and get that pelvis move from Forrest) he'll become famous and be brought into the foreground.

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    Or, they just used an extra who generally looks like Elvis, but not enough to be in focus, then used a shallow depth of field to make the extra blurry so you can't tell how much different he looks.
    – FreeMan
    Commented Jun 19, 2023 at 17:58
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    @FreeMan or they got the real Elvis, but had to keep him from looking old.
    – candied_orange
    Commented Jun 20, 2023 at 1:10
  • Until they see (the real) EP on TV using FG's move of the legs/hips/pelvis, you must only guess it's him. Many folks with little American culture didn't catch it right away :)
    – OldPadawan
    Commented Jun 20, 2023 at 8:06

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