We met Joni Mabe while filming our documentary on baseball hall-of-famer Johnny “Big Cat” Mize. We heard that she was a third cousin of the big slugger and lived down the highway from his hometown in Demorest, Ga.
Within minutes of meeting her and walking into her “Everything Elvis” museum in Cornelia, Ga., we realized we had the subject of our next film.
She’s as southern as Waffle House.
If she hadn’t gone to UGA Art School (undergraduate & graduate) she’d be considered one of those precious “outsider artists” with yards and walls covered in their own private obsessions.
Elvis became her canvas. Her artistic north star. Her Tom Thumb. Her Campbell’s soup can.
But there’s more to the story than that.
For over 40 years, she’s channeled her deep Georgia roots into work that explores pop culture and southern ephemera. In 2024, she was a finalist for the Hudgens Art Prize with her sculptural installations using found objects. Her book art and glitter portraits can be found in leading museums and private collections.
Her obsession with The King started with his death in 1977 while she was an art student at UGA, leading to a collection of over 30,000 items related to Elvis.
In 2025, she hosted her 20th annual Big E celebration featuring 24 Elvis tribute artists performing live in Cornelia, Ga.
The film details her journey from thumbing her nose at art faculty to appearances on the Howard Stern Show and becoming a darling of 1990s MTV spots to returning home to save her great-grandparents boarding house, then refashioning her career to become a hotspot on the Southern Oddities Circuit.
She owns a wart that once upon a time lived on Elvis’s right hand, also a toenail that she dug out of the shag carpet in Elvis’s Graceland Jungle Room. (Who else would be clipping their toenails in the Jungle Room?)
PREMIERES FALL 2026
DIRECTOR/EDITOR: Hal Jacobs
PRODUCERS: Hal Jacobs & Joe Boris
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: Dave Kirkpatrick & Alicia Macbeth Jacobs
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: Joe Boris