The Sam Raimi Prank Call That Cast Bruce Campbell

We absolutely love that a prank phone caller is responsible for Don Coscarelli casting Bruce Campbell in Bubba Ho-tep!

Bubba Ho-Tep, our heartwarming cult film in which an elderly Elvis and a Black JFK battle a soul-sucking mummy in an East Texas nursing home … exists in the form we know it because someone decided to prank call Don Coscarelli as Sam Raimi.

The origin of Bubba Ho-tep started with a prank phone call.

By the late 1990s, Coscarelli had optioned Joe R. Lansdale's novella and written a screenplay, but every studio passed. Then came the phone call. As Coscarelli recounted in his memoir True Indie, Raimi left him a voicemail inviting him to a screening of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. When Don called back, the two realized it was a prank .. there was no screening. But since they were talking anyway, Raimi asked what he was working on, and when Coscarelli described Bubba Ho-Tep, Raimi told him to talk to Bruce Campbell. Roughly ten minutes later, Coscarelli's phone rang again …Campbell himself, announcing he'd heard about the Elvis picture.

Campbell signed on to play both old and young Elvis …but first, per the film's trivia lore, he had exactly one question for his director: whether the movie would actually show the growth-afflicted royal anatomy that drives so much of the story. Pure Bruce.

Don Coscarelli and Bruce Campbell made a great team!

Becoming the King took some doing. The production hired Tim Welch, billed as Las Vegas's top Elvis tribute artist, to coach Campbell and as Campbell tells it, a few minutes in, the frustrated tutor packed up and declared he was on his own. Bruce figured it out anyway: Roger Ebert wrote that Campbell sounded uncannily like an aged Elvis and looked more like him than anyone else who'd played the part. He never fully left the role, either …the 2004 DVD includes a commentary track recorded entirely in character.