Party Animals

by Robert Hofler

  A woman on her knees looked up, her fingers braided with holy beads. “Survivors,” she said. “Survivors de los Andes.” Rather than drop to the sidewalk, Allan bought a ticket to see the movie, which left him both appalled and exhilarated. Later that night, he could hardly sleep as his mind raced to find a way to sell his idea to Stigwood. The next day he placed a phone call to his friend at the Robert Stigwood Organization, Freddie Gershon, who had recently been promoted to president of the company.

  “Freddie, you’re not going to believe this,” Allan began. “I just saw a movie called Supervivientes de los Andes!”

  “Supervive what?” asked Gershon.

  “You know that John Schlesinger movie Alive! about these rugby players who resorted to cannibalism when their airplane crashed over the Andes in 1972?”

  Gershon knew of the project, vaguely.

  Allan informed his friend that Schlesinger was working on that same story, after he finished the Dustin Hoffman picture The Marathon Man, but that Alive! would never get made because they—Allan and Gershon—would beat him to it by acquiring this Mexican movie. Best of all, they could pick it up cheap. As Allan explained, Roman Catholics south of the border loved the story because, even though it was ghoulish, it was blessedly not immoral. The pope himself had declared the real-life rugby players not guilty of mortal sin since they restricted themselves to eating only dead meat. Allan believed that American moviegoers would eat it up too.

  The subject matter of Survive!—cannibalism—bothered Gershon, but as Allan insisted, audiences love to be disgusted. And besides, “they eat the dead ones to stay alive, they don’t kill anybody,” he kept saying.

  The quality of the film also concerned Gershon. A hit in Mexico did not automatically translate into a hit north of the border, especially a Spanish-language film that would have to be dubbed, not subtitled, in English to score at the U.S. box office. Allan had to level with his RSO friend there: “It is so badly made it looks hideous. But I think it will work.”

  Despite Allan’s assurances, Gershon continued to worry about the dubbing.

  “It will work because the actors have scarves around their faces,” Allan said. “It’s cold in the Andes, so we don’t have to worry much about synching. That’s a good part of the movie.”

  Allan tinkered with the economics of transforming Supervivientes de los Andes into Survive! It would work if they could acquire the film for under half a million, with another $350,000 to be spent on editing and the licensing of stock footage of avalanches and snowstorms. If they could bring it in for under a million, Allan believed, how could they not clear at least a million in profits?

  To sell the idea to Stigwood, Gershon knew Allan had to present his full economic plan, as well as his ideas on how to market the movie, because it was there—as a marketing person—that Stigwood considered Allan an unqualified genius. And if anyone knew how to sell cannibalism to the American masses, it was Allan Carr. His pitch to Stigwood went like this. “The audience for Survive! is the boys who want to have the girls grab them because they’re so revolted by it all. The girls have to look away and scream, and so they grab their boyfriend’s arm. It’s a makeout movie!” he insisted. “It’s not a horror movie. It’s a makeout movie!”

  Allan also detailed his marketing campaign: “You know how they’ve been talking about this ratings systems and how mothers have been complaining about the need for there to be a ratings system not just for sex but violence? We’ll have our own rating for violence, and it will be a giant box on the poster and it says . . . ‘Caution: the scenes of cannibalism in this film may be too strong for some audience members.’”

  For Allan, Survive! meant no more mortgage on Hilhaven Lodge, no more parties catered by Chicago Pizza Works, no more returned Civic Hondas, and it gave him his dream to be a real Hollywood player with a place in Malibu, one in Hawaii, and maybe even another in Manhattan.

  To Gershon’s mild surprise, Stigwood liked the idea of picking up a grade-C Mexican movie about rugby cannibals stranded in the Andes during a blizzard. “If we can pick it up for half a million,” Stigwood cautioned. He would put up all the money but be 50-50 partners with Allan since Allan found the film and would be responsible for re-creating and marketing it.

  With that low price tag as his compass, John Breglio, the same young lawyer who repped Michael Bennett’s A Chorus Line, flew to Los Angeles. “It was the first thing I did for Stigwood,” says Breglio, “who was then the most successful independent mogul in the entertainment business.” Allan’s idea of picking up Supervivientes made economic sense to Breglio, because the John Schlesinger- optioned book Alive! had been hugely popular. “It was a great way of telling the story without having to buy the best seller.”

  Breglio met with Rene Cardona Jr, who not only produced Supervivientes but directed it and adapted the script from the book Survive! which, unlike the book Alive! was something less than a best seller. The lawyer offered Cordona $100,000 up front plus a piece of the action. “It was a real deal. If the picture made money, they stood to make a million or three or four million,” Breglio says.

  Although their meeting lasted three days, no deal materialized since the Mexican filmmaker and his lawyer had no interest in being taken to the cleaners by a bunch of Hollywood gringos. Unable to make them budge, Breglio phoned Allan and Stigwood with an alternate plan. “Just give me half a million dollars. Let’s just buy them out. Let’s forget the back end,” he advised.

  Cardona liked his money up front, and for a half million dollars, Breglio acquired worldwide rights, excluding several Spanish-language countries, and paid for the rights to the Mexican negative on a twenty-year lease paid over a period of five months. Stigwood and Allan had their movie.

  “But don’t look at it just yet,” Allan warned. “Let me fiddle with it first.”

  As he worked on Survive! Allan needed a quick cash infusion to keep his party lifestyle on track. For a brief interlude, he switched back to wearing his promoter hat and put together a movie campaign for producer David Picker, who paid him a quarter million dollars for his marketing services. “Allan had done a brilliant job on Tommy,” says Picker, who wanted him to do the same for his new movie, Won Ton Ton: The Dog That Saved Hollywood.

  Again, it was the unexpected outrageousness of the party on April 26, 1976, that distinguished Allan’s campaign for Won Ton Ton, set in 1920s Hollywood and featuring star cameos of Joan Blondell, Phil Silvers, Milton Berle, and Edgar Bergen, among other movie legends.

  As part of his manufactured hoopla, Allan “signed” the film’s star, a tan-and-black German shepherd named Augustus Von Schulmacher (aka Won Ton Ton), as a client and conceived a party that required everyone to bring a pet cur to the Paramount lot. Actually, “We hired thirty dogs,” says the studio’s then-VP of marketing, Laurence Mark, “and most of the celebs were handed the dog on their way into the party.”

  Which may have been the reason why actress Marisa Berenson held Paramount responsible for her rented dog’s pissing on her in the limousine and sent the studio a dry-cleaning bill.

  Allan got his friend Merv Griffin to cover the premiere on his TV talk show, but the coup de théâtre was the appearance of Paramount founder Adolf Zukor, age 102, together with 1930s Paramount queen Mae West, age 83, who claimed that her back-to-back hits, She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel, saved the studio from bankruptcy in 1933. For Mae West, it was as if those movies had un-spooled yesterday. Zukor, for his part, reserved his remarks for Won Ton Ton when he demanded, “I want your chair!” The 102-year-old man got what he wanted, but not before the canine star left a puddle of pee where Zukor was about to sit.

  Adolf Zukor and Mae West. “Only Allan Carr would have thought of that duo!” quips Mark. “The whole thing was utter bliss.”

  More problematic was Won Ton Ton, who found himself aroused every time he posed for photographs. After careful inspection, Allan pinpointed the camera lights as the erotic stimulant, and not Mae West, who p
aid inordinate interest in the dog’s inflated appendage, and he recommended that a rubber band be strategically placed around the dog’s genitals to prevent him from getting an erection.

  “It was an amazing event, devised by Allan,” says Picker. “Unfortunately, no one went to see the movie.” Like Tommy, the Won Ton Ton party generated lots of press. Unlike Tommy, the Won Ton Ton movie generated no heat at the box office.

  Pocketing his quarter of a million for marketing Won Ton Ton, Allan returned to work on Survive! which he knew would bring him the big money. He bought footage of avalanches from Disney. He rephotographed portions of the film through various gradations of netting to disguise the snow as something other than painted cornflakes. Most important, he whacked a few reels out of the film to bring its playing time down to an easily digestible ninety minutes. And he dubbed it into English—all for under $300,000. True to his word, he didn’t stray from the budget.

  Only then did Allan let Stigwood, Gershon, and Breglio look at the movie, which had now cost about $850,000. Stigwood told Allan, “It’s terrible, but it’s everything you promised.” Stigwood especially liked that it ran an hour and a half, which made it possible to cram in more screenings in its first weekend before the bad word got out. Also, Allan was right. Survive! was a young person’s movie. Anyone under thirty would definitely be revolted—but in a good way.

  Screening rooms in Los Angeles were booked for Allan to sell his surefire hit movie to the town’s studios. He started with the big guns: Warners, Fox, Columbia, Universal.

  The reaction was uniform:

  “Whoa! What kind of crap is this?”

  At least, that’s what various studio chiefs told Freddie Gershon.

  “We were vilified,” he recalls. Allan and Stigwood received not one offer for Survive! until, far down on their list of studios, Sam Arkoff of American-International saw it and came up with a deal. Arkoff, known as king of the B movies, had founded A-I with director Roger Corman, and often bragged that he personally created two movie genres of little repute: beach-party and outlaw-biker pictures.

  “I’ll give you a $1-million advance against 50 percent of the profits,” said Arkoff.

  Or, as Gershon explains it, “‘Against fifty percent of the profits’ is like saying ‘You’ll never see another dime.’”

  Stigwood wanted to take Arkoff’s offer. At least his RSO would clear $150,000 and not lose the entire $850,000 investment.

  Allan balked. “This movie can make us millions!” he believed. “We’re throwing it away!” He insisted on at least one more screening, in this case, for Paramount Pictures. One of the glorious, legendary studios, Paramount had experienced serious economic fallout by the time RSO set up a Survive! screening for Barry Diller and Allan’s new Won Ton Ton chum David Picker. Having recently relinquished his VP slot at ABC, where he’d pioneered the movie-of-the-week genre, Diller came to Paramount just as the studio receded from its Godfather I and II glory days. By early 1976, the new chairman and CEO of Paramount was no longer so new, having been unable to deliver a box-office winner. Worse, “Paramount had nothing for the summer” of that year, says Picker, whom Diller had recently made president of production.

  The two Paramount chiefs took one look at Survive! and Diller said he hated it.

  Picker thought it was a piece of crap too. But he disagreed with Diller on the movie’s box-office potential. “We can make money from this,” Picker said. “And besides, we don’t have anything else for the summer.” As Picker explained his strategy, “If we strike only 400 prints, we can move it from theater to theater on word of mouth.” Diller shrugged and said OK. “We don’t have anything else,” Picker repeated.

  Allan pushed for the Paramount deal. “Let’s go for broke,” he told Stigwood.

  Unlike Arkoff, the guys at Paramount weren’t giving Allan and RSO a dime. Instead, Picker promised to match, in prints and media, the $850,000 that had already been spent on Survive! They would be 60-40 partners, with the studio getting the larger percentage of the gross until the movie broke the $4-million mark at the box office, at which point the split would be 40-60, with RSO and Allan now getting the larger percentage.

  “Between that and the 400 prints,” Allan said, “I’ll get a house in Malibu out of this movie!” He had never been more confident of anything in his life.

  Allan’s cannibalism film opened well on August 4, bringing in a quarter million dollars on only twenty-six screens—good enough to deliver the astoundingly ominous No. 13 slot on Variety’s box office chart. Then it exploded. For the next three weeks, by adding only a few more screens, Survive! grossed well over $1 million in each of those sessions, bringing it to the No. 2 position, right after Mel Brooks’s Silent Movie and right ahead of the big-budget thriller The Omen, starring Gregory Peck.

  On the strength of those numbers, Allan purchased his Malibu house, one that sat high on a bluff over Trancas Beach. He bought it for $1 million when he was thin, because otherwise he could never travel the forty steps that separated it from the Pacific Ocean. He dubbed it Seahaven. “I’m the Elizabeth Taylor of houses. I marry every house I go to,” he said.

  Allan knew Survive! would continue to live up to its title in the coming weeks when he read reviews like Frank Rich’s diatribe in the New York Post, which labeled the movie “a patently false snuff film that simulated the disembowelment of a woman for an audience’s erotic pleasure” and “the experience of sitting through it is so degrading it makes you want to rush home and take a shower.” Halfway through the pan, Allan ordered his assistant to send Rich a bouquet of roses.

  He enjoyed the fact that people were calling Survive! “that Mexican delicatessen movie,” and knew precisely how to work those bad reviews to his advantage. “The only thing most people know about Mexican movies is Buñuel and Tijuana porno,” Allan told Variety. “This is something in between. Buñuel it is not, but it is a very entertaining picture that the public really likes.” Allan knew how to work a quote, and took special pleasure in the “Tijuana porno” comment, which he repeated ad nauseam. He gave it a sanitized spin when speaking to reporters at family newspapers like the Los Angeles Times. “The eating sequences are brilliantly done,” he noted.

  When occasionally reporters pressed him too hard, Allan claimed marginal responsibility. “Hey, I didn’t ask the plane to crash and I didn’t ask them to eat their friends!” he said.

  Not everyone in Hollywood found pleasure in the lucrative bad reviews for Survive! Pissed as hell were the makers of the competing Andes cannibalism film, Alive!

  “We’re not terribly happy about [their] jumping up and down saying they broke ground for us,” said Mike Medavoy, West Coast production chief at United Artists. Two years earlier, UA had bought the rights to Alive! written by two survivors of the airplane crash.

  Allan never missed an opportunity to retort to a retort. “There was no other project,” since UA had not yet announced a start date, he told reporters.

  Medavoy shot back. “Ours will be a class-A movie with a class-A director and a class-A budget. I don’t think they’ve taken the steam out of our film. It will stand on its own.”

  As Allan predicted, UA soon pulled the life support on Alive! and John Schlesinger never invited Allan to have dinner at his house again. Then again, Allan could take solace in the deed to his new Malibu house.

  No sooner did he own Seahaven, however, than Allan feared he might have to put it back on the market. That unlikely premonition came in the form of Variety’s Labor Day 1976 report on weekend grosses. Allan alerted Gershon. Suddenly Survive! was no longer in the top ten. It was sinking and sinking fast at the box office. Everybody on the RSO side of the project wanted to know what had happened.

  As the powers at Paramount explained it, once Survive! hit the $4-million mark, it no longer made sense for the company to make media buys now that they were getting only forty cents on the dollar.

  “Are you crazy?” Gershon told Picker. “Go ahead and revers
e it, we’ll go back to 60-40 in your favor.” Telegrams were exchanged, and “that was the whole agreement,” says Gershon. The next week Survive! was once again the No. 1 movie in America, taking in $1.4 million—and it stayed in the top ten for several weeks. Allan called it one of those “strange deals,” in which he made as much money as the studio. “And that just never happens. It’s a textbook case of just how you sometimes get lucky in Hollywood.”

  Allan was happy. RSO was happy. Paramount was happy. “We all had a bonding relationship over this demented movie,” says Gershon, “and Allan got us that relationship. Without it, Stigwood would probably not have brought them Saturday Night Fever. It was Allan Carr who started that chain of events.”

  Tacky as it was twisted, Survive! brought Allan his first million dollars—plus a few more. “It’s a fabulous day,” he said of the accomplishment. “I do all this because it is creative fun.”

  Only later, when he was really rich did he develop a modicum of discreet bravado. “After $10 million, you shouldn’t talk about how much money you have. It’s major bad taste,” he believed. “You’d just be astounded at how different people treat you when they know you have more than $10 million.”

  Regarding his new enemies at United Artists, Allan blew them off with a one-line joke. Since he’d just bought the screen rights to the Broadway musical Grease, he offered the wounded party a novel revenge, suggesting, “Maybe they will make a film called Vaseline.”

  seven

  B’way’s Bastard Child

  Marvin Hamlisch, luxuriating in his hypersuccess with A Chorus Line, couldn’t stop talking up this new Broadway musical he’d just seen. “If ever you’re going to make a motion picture, Grease is it,” he told his manager-friend. Allan eventually agreed to see the show, despite its “unpleasant” title, because Hamlisch made it a threesome, inviting his Chorus Line collaborator, Michael Bennett; that Allan couldn’t resist. Grease had already been running for over two years even though its story of a bunch of horny 1950s high school students had been eschewed by the Tony Awards and the usual geriatric Broadway crowd. Grease attracted, instead, theatergoing neophytes who were dismissed as “the bridge-and-tunnel crowd” from New Jersey and Long Island. Cutting-edge musical theater it was not, and such an illustrious legit combo as Hamlisch and Bennett looked more than a little out of place among the Jersey youngsters as they all walked through the lobby of the Royale Theater to take their seats. Allan was the third wheel that evening, and while his expectations were low, he respected Hamlisch’s opinion. Perhaps, too, a paparazzo would catch him with the Chorus Line duo and he’d get his photo in the New York Post.