{Photograph} by Stephanie Eley
It solely took 45 minutes to alter Robert Kim’s life. Hoping to salvage an unsuccessful in a single day fishing journey in Peachtree Metropolis, he took a karaoke machine and his schnauzer, Roscoe, to the close by Kroger. Kim—a retired actor, Elvis impersonator, and headshot photographer—normally croons on the Brookhaven Kroger nearer to his home; he didn’t know the way the Peachtree Metropolis suburbanites would react to, as he places it, “a 74-year-old Asian man singing Frank Sinatra within the parking zone.” However the viewers stuffed his tip jar in lower than an hour.
That evening at his motel, a British lady approached Kim and requested if he would sing for her good friend, who had heard him earlier throughout his grocery run. “There was an older man with a beard sitting in an affordable plastic garden chair, and I requested what he needed to listen to,” Kim recollects. “He mentioned, ‘I’m simple, no matter you want.’” So for the remainder of the evening, Kim serenaded the group with Sinatra.
The “man with the beard” was, in truth, the legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola. Kim may barely consider the auteur was at such a “fleabag motel,” however because it turned out, Coppola had simply purchased the place to transform into his new All-Film Resort. As Kim was leaving the subsequent day, Coppola pulled up in a golf cart and requested the place he normally sang. Kim replied that he sang in entrance of supermarkets for ideas. “Francis mentioned, ‘You realize, we’re very a lot alike, as a result of I work for ideas too.’” In fact, Coppola’s ideas embrace 23 function movies. The five-time Oscar winner was in Atlanta to movie his $120 million (famously self-funded) futuristic epic Megalopolis.
Kim figured the extraordinary encounter would merely be a narrative he’d recount for individuals who hardly believed him: his weekend entertaining Francis Ford Coppola and his crew of Megalopolis, like Sport of Thrones star Nathalie Emmanuel—the Brit who invited him to sing. However the subsequent day, Kim awoke to an e mail inviting him to audition for the movie. Simply convey Roscoe and the karaoke machine, the e-mail instructed; they’d ship a limo. “Francis offers me a giant hug and says, ‘Robert, I’d such as you to sing for my total solid.’” Kim recollects. “It was terrifying.”
He acquired the half: an Elvis impersonator in full regalia (costume to be supplied by Kim), who sings “America the Stunning.” Then he didn’t hear from anybody for 3 months, till one evening when he acquired the decision that his scene was capturing. “I dig by means of mothballs to search out the Elvis costume—all wrinkled and stuffed with espresso stains,” Kim says.
He sang at 3:30 a.m. within the rain for what solely amounted to a couple frames of screentime. “However after I completed, Francis got here as much as me and mentioned, ‘I advised you you’d be within the film, didn’t I?”’
Again to 21 Causes We Love Atlanta.
This text seems in our February 2025 subject.
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