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Earlier this year on the hit television show “American Idol,” a young, tanned Elvis Presley walked onto the stage and performed a roughly three-minute duet with Celine Dion.

The stunning performance, which left viewers across the world asking “How did they do that?” could be routine once Robert F.X. Sillerman is finished recreating Graceland.

“People will actually think Elvis is there,” said Sillerman, chief executive of Graceland parent corporation CKX Inc. “It’s going to be ‘Oh, wow,’ I can tell you that.”

While the thought of being able to see a lifelike Elvis perform may seem remarkable, Elvis Presley Enterprises officials said that is just the tip of the Graceland redevelopment iceberg.

“I can’t ever remember a Bob Sillerman idea getting smaller,” said EPE president and CEO Jack Soden. “His ideas always get bigger.”

Repackaging the Graceland experience, which will take years and $250 million, will include razing the cramped visitor center — located in a former strip mall across the street from the white-columned mansion — and replacing it with a facility roughly seven times the size of the King’s home.

Sillerman also plans to build new hotels, improve the public spaces around Graceland and create more convention and exhibition space to showcase the King’s memorabilia.

The project — especially the parts that involve retooling Elvis Presley Boulevard — will forever change the face of Graceland’s Whitehaven neighborhood and one of the city’s most important tourist sites.

“We’re a major tourist attraction known all over the world, with a busy, ugly street running through the middle of it,” said Soden. “I always say that people are getting off the highway and they’re driving down Elvis Presley Boulevard, and the first-timers, they’re looking for Tara. … They’re going, ‘We’re lost. Graceland can’t be around there.’

“We’ll have really achieved something if they’re driving down Elvis Presley Boulevard, getting closer to this island, this campus, and they’re going, ‘We’re here. We can tell we’re here,’ ” he said. “And that’s going to take a lot of green space, and a lot of investment in the infrastructure of the street, the neighborhood.”

Today, as Sillerman, who acquired an 85 percent stake in EPE in 2005, works on plans to transform Graceland, EPE and its affiliates own or control about 105 acres around the mansion. (For perspective, the Memphis Zoo sits on roughly 70 acres.)

Since January 2006, EPE companies have spent at least $13.4 million acquiring property, according to Shelby County Register Tom Leatherwood’s office, including a 182-unit apartment complex on Craft Road behind Graceland Plaza, and a former auto dealership at 3674 Elvis Presley Blvd.

One of the first major changes to Graceland will be the closing and relocation of the current visitors’ center to the mansion side of Elvis Presley Boulevard, eliminating the noisy shuttle system that has been carrying fans across the busy street for years.

“The whole new visitor complex will be next to Graceland, but separated by the woods that are already there,” said Soden. “There will be new parking, walking into a gorgeous multi-functional building, then walking out of it and kind of a walk through the woods, and suddenly there is Graceland — and then touring Graceland, restored to exactly the way it was the way when Elvis lived there.”

After visitors tour the mansion, they will be led to a new facility housing high-tech Elvis exhibits, like the digital wizardry that allowed Elvis and Dion to perform together.

There’ll be “another walk through the woods to all-new exhibits — 4D entertainment experience, which is basically taking advantage of every audio-visual technology,” said Soden.

The existing 128-room Heartbreak Hotel will be razed and replaced by a much larger convention hotel, also on the mansion side of Elvis Presley Boulevard.

The side of the street that is currently home to the visitor center and Heartbreak Hotel would see “more hotels, more entertainment, food and beverage, retail, kind of a village,” Soden said.

Sillerman and Graceland officials have been working on the transformation plan for over a year.

CKX is seeking a “mutual cooperation agreement” with local government for highway and utility improvements and renovation help for other businesses in the area, particularly along Elvis Presley Boulevard, the commercial strip that slices through Whitehaven’s middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods.

John Moore, president and CEO of the Memphis Regional Chamber, said the retooling of Graceland will have a profound impact on the city, especially Whitehaven.

“If all the stars line up and things come to fruition, this will be the greatest thing to happen to Whitehaven,” he said. “It could provide a lasting impact beyond just what the company is doing.”

- Amos Maki: 529-2351

The Associated Press contributed to this story.