[MIA Vietnam veterans – Lorrien Finley – Steve Binder]

This video shows three different interviews. The first is with a street artist who is painting a mural in honor of the MIA veterans of the Vietnam War in order to attract support to find them. The second is with a woman named Lorrien Finley, who talks about reproductive rights, selective sterilization, and injustice in universal health care systems in the UK in the '60s. The final interview is with Steve Binder, who directed/produced the Elvis' 68 Comeback Special, as well as the 1968 Petula Clark special (which had the first televised touch between a white woman, Clark, and a black man, Harry Belafonte) and the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special. He mainly talks about his experiences with Elvis.

0:00Copy video clip URL Open on a wall with the names of unaccounted Vietnam veterans. This is to raise awareness both about homeless veterans and also to release some of the people who are still prisoners in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Allegedly the government is covering up and ignoring the people they left behind in order to not look bad.

8:12Copy video clip URL Binder enters a building labeled “Brown for President.” We learn about the failure of Jerry Brown in the primaries and how the woman Binder is talking to is working to influence the platform. She claims to be the only person in the world who is registered as “reproductively disabled” and is hoping to go to both party national conventions in order to get the word out about her issue, which she says is a human rights issue.

13:43Copy video clip URL She introduces herself as Lorrien Finley and says she got an abortion and then was forcibly brutally sterilized while in London. She passed out of the statute of limitations in England and eventually found out that she had been sterilized and then tried to get an operation to correct this and the British healthcare provider who could perform the operation refused to give it to her. She goes on for quite some time, talking about the details of her situation, such as that the British system makes it difficult to find alternative options, in addition to more nebulous speculations, such as the possibility that she may have been denied her rights because her family was involved in Sinn Féin (the oldest organization in the Irish liberation movement, who Finley describes as the Irish liberation “aristocracy”).

23:41Copy video clip URL After being interrupted by a phone call, Finley says America needs to pay attention to her story if they want to nationalize the American healthcare system, to make sure that situations like this cannot happen, where patients cannot make choices about their own healthcare.

38:27Copy video clip URL Binder leaves and begins driving down the highway. There are some shots of the streets of L.A. Video cuts out for a bit.

40:43Copy video clip URL Binder goes into a house with a man who is currently on the telephone; she tours the house while he talks. He seems to have an Oscar on his desk. The man speaks with a woman who seems like his assistant. He is working on a tribute to Sam Kinison. This man is producer/director Steve Binder.

43:25Copy video clip URL Judith begins talking to Steve and asks how he got involved with Elvis. He talks about Petula Clark and Harry Belafonte and how he was part of that controversy. He talks about how he was introduced to Elvis and talks about how he was asked to work on a holiday special with Elvis. This turned into the 1968 Comeback Special, as it came to be called later. Steve talks about Elvis’ fear of performing on television. At this point Steve told Elvis to just make a music album and he’d worry about the pictures.

53:02Copy video clip URL Steve says that despite the edict to do a Christmas special, he felt from the get-go that it would be different, and he and his team decided that they wanted to make a program that would be “tailor-made to Elvis and Elvis only.” Steve starts talking about how he and his team became great friends with Elvis while they rehearsed for this special; they were rehearsing when Bobby Kennedy was shot. Steve talks about how he learned about Elvis, his early life, and his perceptions of the public. He tells a brief anecdote about taking Elvis down to Sunset Boulevard and Elvis not being noticed, which changed Elvis’ perception of the public’s perception of him. He then talks about his own relationship with the Colonel Parker, and the Colonel’s relationship with Elvis.

1:13:21Copy video clip URL After a brief cut, Steve begins talking about the Bordello sequence, its development, and its eventual cut from the original aired program. It was included in the first cut of the film which was later released after Elvis’ death. He tells a brief anecdote about how normal people treat fame and how there isn’t spontaneity to this. Steve then talks about how he feels that Elvis was weak and that larger men pushed him around which led to his downfall. He also comments that he thought that Elvis was perfectly healthy and not on any drugs while they were rehearsing and filming in ’68.

1:25:25Copy video clip URL Video ends.