Photograph by Stephanie Eley
It only took 45 minutes to change Robert Kim’s life. Hoping to salvage an unsuccessful overnight fishing trip in Peachtree City, he took a karaoke machine and his schnauzer, Roscoe, to the nearby Kroger. Kim—a retired actor, Elvis impersonator, and headshot photographer—usually croons at the Brookhaven Kroger closer to his house; he didn’t know how the Peachtree City suburbanites would react to, as he puts it, “a 74-year-old Asian guy singing Frank Sinatra in the parking lot.” But the audience stuffed his tip jar in less than an hour.
That night at his motel, a British woman approached Kim and asked if he would sing for her friend, who had heard him earlier during his grocery run. “There was an older guy with a beard sitting in a cheap plastic lawn chair, and I asked what he wanted to hear,” Kim recalls. “He said, ‘I’m easy, whatever you like.’” So for the rest of the night, Kim serenaded the group with Sinatra.
The “guy with the beard” was, in fact, the legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola. Kim could barely believe the auteur was at such a “fleabag motel,” but as it turned out, Coppola had just bought the place to convert into his new All-Movie Hotel. As Kim was leaving the next day, Coppola pulled up in a golf cart and asked where he usually sang. Kim replied that he sang in front of supermarkets for tips. “Francis said, ‘You know, we’re very much alike, because I work for tips too.’” Of course, Coppola’s tips include 23 feature films. The five-time Oscar winner was in Atlanta to film his $120 million (famously self-funded) futuristic epic Megalopolis.
Kim figured the extraordinary encounter would simply be a story he’d recount for people who hardly believed him: his weekend entertaining Francis Ford Coppola and his crew of Megalopolis, like Game of Thrones star Nathalie Emmanuel—the Brit who invited him to sing. But the next day, Kim awoke to an email inviting him to audition for the film. Just bring Roscoe and the karaoke machine, the email instructed; they’d send a limo. “Francis gives me a big hug and says, ‘Robert, I’d like you to sing for my entire cast.’” Kim recalls. “It was terrifying.”
He got the part: an Elvis impersonator in full regalia (costume to be provided by Kim), who sings “America the Beautiful.” Then he didn’t hear from anyone for three months, until one night when he got the call that his scene was shooting. “I dig through mothballs to find the Elvis costume—all wrinkled and full of coffee stains,” Kim says.
He sang at 3:30 a.m. in the rain for what only amounted to a few frames of screentime. “But after I finished, Francis came up to me and said, ‘I told you you’d be in the movie, didn’t I?”’
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This article appears in our February 2025 issue.
