Strictly Ballroom or Elvis? Which Baz Luhrmann blockbuster movie does it best

The cinema's projectionist has started work early today. He's laced up the newly arrived reels of a new Australian film that's coming soon. The movie is not one I know much about and it's not due to be released for a few weeks but as a journalist at the local newspaper I'm being treated to a preview before I interview the director, a first-time film-maker I've never heard of.

It's 1992 and in those pre-internet days all I know about the movie is that it has reportedly earned a standing ovation at the recent Cannes Film Festival in France.

That's hardly enough to get my hopes up - after all, the movie is set in, of all places, the world of competitive ballroom dancing.

With the silhouette of a thumbs up from the projection room window, the footlights dim, the curtains part and Strictly Ballroom begins.

Ninety-four gaudy, giddy, heartwarming minutes later, as the triumphal joy of John Paul Young's Love Is In The Air fades and the closing credits begin to roll, I wipe the last bits of dust from my eyes and compose myself to face the reality of the day outside.

From his tiny window at the back of the empty cavernous cinema, the projectionist mimes the inevitable question in silhouette: a thumbs up or a thumbs down?

As I silently respond with my one-man ovation - a vigorous thumbs up - I'm already secretly counting down the days until I'm back here at the pictures sharing this exuberant and endearing movie with 499 other bums on seats.

It's been 30 years since Bill Hunter, resplendent in tragic hairpiece as Strictly Ballroom's tyrannical dance federation president Barry Fife, first glared down in cartoonish close-up at Paul Mercurio's rogue dancer Scott Hastings and sneered: "Well, you can dance any steps you like ... that doesn't mean you'll win".

Director Baz Luhrmann has, of course, been bending the rules and resorting to "his own flashy, crowd-pleasing steps" ever since his Strictly Ballroom swept the film world off its feet to become Australia's favourite home-made romantic comedy. This year he's done it again with Elvis, the extravagant Elvis Presley biopic starring Austin Butler as the king of rock 'n roll and Tom Hanks as his scheming manager Colonel Tom Parker.

After four months in Aussie cinemas, Elvis has moved to streaming services and digital home viewing formats having earned $33.4 million at the box office.

Shot in Queensland with the backing of Hollywood studio Warner Bros and federal and state government film production incentives, Elvis now ranks fourth among Australia's highest grossing movies - the all-time box office hit list led since 1986 by Crocodile Dundee.

Worldwide, it has taken $500 million, making it Lurhmann's biggest global success after 2013's The Great Gatsby. It sits behind only his Hugh Jackman-Nicole Kidman romance epic Australia ($37.6 million) as the biggest hit he's had in this country, having karate-kicked into the top 10 ahead of Strictly Ballroom ($21.7 million), Gatsby ($27.4 million) and 2001 musical whirligig Moulin Rouge! ($27.8 million).

As modern box office hits go, Elvis has been a marvel, with an iconic pop culture subject seemingly beyond biography, no superheroes (not counting a few rhinestone-spangled capes), an older target audience, an unknown in the lead role, COVID-disrupted production and some scathing early reviews.

Of course, while Luhrmann's films have long polarised critics, they have been astonishingly successful at the box office and Elvis, thanks to Butler's star-making performance, drew younger audiences to the cinema as well as previously COVID-shy older movie-goers.

The National Film and Sound Archive is certainly hoping the rock star lustre of the movie lures people out to its Australians & Hollywood exhibition in Canberra.

Next week, with the cooperation of the Bazmark production company founded by Luhrmann and his partner in life and film Catherine Martin, the archive will add Elvis costumes and props to the display.

An important tourist drawcard for the NFSA, the exhibition already includes items from Strictly Ballroom, as well as Martin's spectacular costumes from Moulin Rouge! plus art concept books she and Luhrmann did for their 1996 version of Romeo + Juliet, which made Leonardo DiCaprio a star.

The Elvis costumes, designed by Martin who has won four Oscars for her eye-popping work bringing her husband's cinematic visions to life, include outfits worn by Butler, Olivia DeJonge as Priscilla and David Wenham as Hank Snow.

The impressive Australians & Hollywood exhibition features dozens of previously unseen props, costumes, footage and documents from the NFSA collection, as well as treasured items on loan from the private collections of some of our most celebrated actors and filmmakers.

As a major fundraiser for the archive's ongoing preservation work, it will continue throughout 2023.

NFSA chief curator Gayle Lake says having Elvis in the building will be a magnet for movie fans and a boost for the exhibition, but what makes her especially proud is having items from Lurhmann's latest lavish opus entering the archive's permanent national collection.

"As one of Australia's best known and most wildly creative storytelling teams, it's wonderful to have the support of Baz and Catherine to ensure these examples of their extraordinary artistry are preserved as part of Australia's film heritage," she says.

The NFSA has already done much in that area this year with a digital restoration of Strictly Ballroom, which will give the film a future in the streaming era and ensure it can be discovered by new audiences.

"In years to come there will be PhDs on Bazmark and its place among Australia's great cinematic storytellers," Lakes says. Just don't ask her to pick her favourite Baz movie: "They all form part of our country's rich cinematic story. The scale of the spectacle always seems to expand but every film provides its own experience and represents an Australian perspective and celebrates our creative talent in different ways."

Acknowledging the grand, almost Luhrmann-esque symmetry of box office triumph for Elvis in the year that Ballroom turns 30, Lake describes the films as "beautiful bookends to the Bazmark story so far".

That symmetry might also extend to the Australian Academy of Cinema Television Arts Awards to be presented in Sydney in December. Elvis is up for 15 AACTA Awards - more than any other movie - including for best film, best director, Martin for best production design and Butler for best actor.

Back in 1992, when the AACTAs were known as the AFI Awards, Strictly Ballroom tangoed away with eight awards from its 13 nominations, including for best film and best director. It would go on to be nominated for best picture (musical or comedy) at the Golden Globes and win three BAFTAs.

Scott Seddon, president of Independent Cinemas Australia, says that like Strictly Ballroom in its day, Elvis has been a godsend for cinemas in 2022, luring COVID-cautious older audiences away from Netflix and back out to picture theatres.

"That it's about Elvis Presley got them in but what's impressive about the movie is that people came away having really embraced the elaborate and sophisticated way the story was told," Seddon says.

Along with Tom Cruise's Top Gun: Maverick, Elvis had reminded lapsed movie-goers of the communal joys of the cinema, and that not every spectacle needs superheroes.

"For many Australians and Australian film generally, Strictly Ballroom will always be a landmark, but Elvis is the kind of movie we needed this year," Seddon says.

When I ask Cris Kennedy, film critic for The Canberra Times and the ACM network, if he's in the Elvis or Strictly Ballroom camp, he recounts his time at independent film company Ronin Films and its Canberra arthouse cinema, Electric Shadows.

"Our boss had some small successes releasing films like Dogs in Space but we weren't in the big leagues and so when producer Tristram Miall came in for a pitch meeting with a young director in a blue singlet and flannie, it probably meant they'd been turned down by the big film companies, and they had," he recalls.

The young unknown was Baz - "as passionate and full of vision then as he is now".

"We had a small open-plan office so we all pretended to be busy and that we weren't listening to this pitch for a film about two kids dancing their own style in a ballroom dance competition," Kennedy remembers. "We were quietly wondering if our boss Andrew Pike was crazy for agreeing to distribute the film - an agreement necessary to secure the film's funding."

How delighted Kennedy and colleagues were to see their doubts proved wrong as Strictly Ballroom become a hit. Electric Shadows would show it for 18 months. "It not only made the careers of Baz and Catherine, it paid thousands of wages, including mine, it gave the industry confidence in funding Aussie stories," he says. "Muriel and Priscilla would benefit from this confidence, and what would Aussie cinema be without that troika of camp goodness?"

After watching the NFSA's new remastered Strictly Ballroom, Kennedy reckons it still "feels timeless and current". "It's a piece of cinema perfection, not a second wasted, not a flat performance," he says. "I enjoyed Elvis. Yes, it might be a more ambitious and layered work, but nothing makes me happy as Larry like Ballroom does."

It's 1992 and I'm on the phone to Luhrmann before Strictly Ballroom finally explodes on Australian screens. The film will end up waltzing away at No.1 at the Aussie box office for a remarkable eight weeks, its run interrupted only by Mel Gibson's return in Lethal Weapon 3.

By year's end, it would be by far Australia's most-watched movie ahead of Mel and other star-spangled Hollywood films like Basic Instinct, Wayne's World, Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns and Disney's Beauty & The Beast.

In the Marvel Comics movie era of mega marketing hype, it's easy to forget how strange it was for a camp, kitsch little Aussie film to have so many Australians swooning.

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Luhrmann is laughing down the landline about the role Bill Hunter's dodgy hairpiece plays in underlining the film's message - "a life lived in fear is a life half lived" - and he's chronicling the project's against-the-odds journey from 30-minute student play to movie to Cannes ovation and global distribution deal. All for a daffy slapstick fairytale mash-up of David and Goliath, Cinderella and the Ugly Duckling.

Yes, Luhrmann confides, even tired old cliches can be made to sparkle all over again with a bit of gumption and glitz. "All films and all stories are really based on only a few classics and it's just the way you tell a story that makes it individual," he says.

Newcastle's Tower Cinema, the picture theatre where I first fell in love with Strictly Ballroom, has long since closed. But the memory still shimmers of that first introduction to Pat Thompson as stage-mum-from-hell Shirley Hastings ("I've got my happy face on today, Les"). Watching it for the umpeenth time this year, I still get dust in my eye seeing Barry Otto's henpecked husband Doug dancing alone in the dark, swerving in and out of the spotlight with only his regrets and memories as a partner.

Yes, Elvis is fabulous. Butler's evocation of Presley is superb. With its rhinestone rebel and disavowed gyrations, the plot echoes Ballroom too. Both tell the story of a talented artist whose sense of musicality, movement and drama compels him to break rules and express his creativity in audacious displays of passion - a narrative that, come to think of it, reads a lot like Luhrmann's trajectory. Plus there's Hanks in the Barry Fife role of pantomime villain and hunky Butler smouldering in all the right places like Mercurio did in his sequinned Matador jacket.

But Strictly Ballroom - hilarious, heartfelt, irrepressible, irresistible - still stands as Luhrmann's most genuinely emotional movie and its aesthetic tells the origin story of one of today's most recognisable and bankable film brands. If you haven't watched it in 30 years - or if you've never actually seen it - what the heck are you still doing reading this?