It was a memorable moment in my long career as a journalist, when we traveled to Memphis, Tennessee in June 1989, for the premiere of the movie Great Balls of Fire and press interviews with director Jim McBride, Dennis Quaid, and Jerry Lee Lewis himself, the legendary musician who recently passed away at the age of 87. On that occasion, we also visited Sun Studios where local artists like Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, B.B. King, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others recorded their hit songs, as well as Graceland, Elvis Presley’s home/museum.

The film focused on a short period of Jerry Lee Lewis’s life, between 1956 and 1958, when his first hit records, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Great Balls of Fire,” challenged Elvis Presley’s status as the king of rock and roll. His career would come to a halt, when he married his 13-year-old cousin Myra (played by Winona Ryder) at age 22, without being divorced from his second wife. Director Jim McBride explained: “The whole story of Jerry Lee Lewis’s entire life is too big to fit into one movie, so we decided to focus on the two most important elements, his early musical success and the touching love story with Myra.”

The screenplay is based on Myra’s 1982 autobiographical book Great Balls of Fire: The Uncensored Story of Jerry Lee Lewis, McBride said: “Myra’s book may not be a literary masterpiece but is full of really interesting details; you’re experiencing the story through the eyes of a person who was there.  It is a truthful account of her life with Jerry, where a lot of awful things happened, but she goes out of her way to help us understand him, she looks at him through a prism of love and caring.”

McBride said of his movie, which is not a realistic documentary, but more like a fantasy musical. “I started out in documentaries, and I know that, no matter how truthful you try to be, you always end up betraying your subject. So, we had the idea of making a stylized movie, not a naturalistic historical documentary, where everything was a little simpler, bolder, more dramatic, and bigger than life.  The music is driving the whole movie, is not just decorative, it’s a dramatic and narrative device, totally integrated into the film.”

Dennis Quaid said he was excited about playing such an extraordinary musician, who was still alive and active: “I jumped at the chance of playing Jerry Lee Lewis, you can’t make up a character like him. He is a virtuoso, he would hold his own against any pianist of the twentieth century, he can play anything.  Playing him was like climbing a mountain, you’re halfway through, you look up, and the mountain has grown twice its size.  I never worked so hard in playing a role, nor have I ever had more fun.” 

Quaid explained why Jerry Lee Lewis marrying a 13-year-old in 1958 caused such controversy, when later that year a 23-year-old Elvis Presley met the 14-year-old Priscilla, while he was in the Army, and she moved in with him at Graceland: “Elvis hadn’t married Priscilla, she was going to a catholic high school in Memphis, and he did a great P. R.  job so he got good press. Jerry Lee thought he was untouchable, and they had warned him before he went to England on tour, so when the reporters asked him at the airport, he could have denied it, but he said ‘Yes, this is my little bride.’  His actions show that he really and truly loved Myra, he was more forward about his love story, and he didn’t see anything wrong with it, so he stood up for what he believed in and was nailed for it.  People were afraid of rock and roll back then, they called it the devil’s music, and they were looking for somebody to crucify.”

After he was crucified by the press in England, Jerry Lee Lewis’s career plummeted, but he was happy because he still loved playing the piano and singing. Quaid said: “For Jerry, the period depicted in the film was the happiest time of his life. He was a boy from Louisiana who got to do what he loved best; he was a twenty-year-old kid having the time of his life.  All the bad things, the drugs, and alcohol came later, after the heartbreak of his English tour.  The problem is that it’s tough to get success when you’re young, it corrupts you I guess, and it has nothing to do with playing music.  After his debacle he went from making $10,000 a night to $100, split four ways; but the great thing about him is that he didn’t stop playing, he just loves to play, he’s an entertainer, whether there’s one person in the room or 10,000.”

It was amazing to meet Jerry Lee Lewis himself, at age 53, and see him play the piano and sing “Great Balls of Fire” in the hotel ballroom where the interviews took place.  Still, at the top of his game, he had re-recorded all his songs for the movie soundtrack. This is how he said he earned his nickname The Killer: “That name goes back to my grammar school days when I was a child, a friend of mine started to call me that, a very common nickname in our parts, I call everybody Killer too.  When I recorded “Chantilly Lace” (in 1972) I said, ‘This is the Killer speaking,’ so I’ve been identified with that in my career.  As far as being a killer, I never actually killed anybody.”

Lewis addressed an incident in the film where he had to go on stage before Chuck Berry, while he would have preferred to close the show, so after he finished performing, he set the piano on fire: “That really did happen. It’s probably the stupidest mistake I’ve ever made in my life.  The sheriff didn’t like it at all, it was the closest I ever came in my young days to being locked up in jail and that really scared me.  I wanted to upstage Chuck Berry, but I found myself in a bad situation.”

He talked about his relationship with Elvis Presley during his early years in Memphis: “He was probably jealous of me and I was jealous of him at first, but that didn’t do us any good, because we were both good singers.  He was two or three years ahead of me and opened a lot of doors for my career.  Eventually, he became a close friend, we had some great times together, and I really miss him.  There was no doubt that he was very successful at what he did, he had worked very hard to make it.  Elvis is one of the greatest entertainers I’ve ever known, for me to be jealous of him, it would be very ignorant.”