Party Animals

by Robert Hofler

  Allan was gracious as he remained seated in his plush throne of pillows. He extended a hand.

  “I’ve come to call in a favor,” Spikings began.

  “That’s fine. What is it?” Allan asked.

  Spikings proceeded to tell him about his hard-hitting film, directed by Michael Cimino and starring Robert De Niro as a Vietnam War vet who returns home to despair and the suicide of a fellow soldier, played by newcomer Christopher Walken. Called The Deer Hunter, the film previewed in Detroit. “But it didn’t go well,” Spikings said. “We need someone to market the film, someone like you, Allan.”

  Allan listened. He liked having his ego stroked as he drank champagne. “You want me to sell a long movie about poor people who go to war and get killed? No thank you,” he said, and promptly finished off the Cristal.

  “I’ve got a car waiting,” said Spikings.

  With a heavy shrug, Allan slowly lifted himself up out of the pillows, slipped into flip-flops, and let himself be sped away to the Universal Pictures lot in the San Fernando Valley, where Spikings had taken the liberty of reserving a screening room.

  The next day, Allan sat in Sid Sheinberg’s office, telling the CEO, “This is an important movie, and I want to run the marketing campaign. I know exactly how to sell this movie. It is an incredible movie.” Allan Carr may well have been the only person to have seen The Deer Hunter who actually believed it could be a hit. After the previous day’s private screening, Allan had embraced Spikings and wept. He even shed tears when he spoke to Sheinberg. Much to Spikings’s surprise, Sheinberg called in Universal’s marketing and distribution department, and introduced them to Allan on the spot. He told them, “This is the man who is going to market The Deer Hunter.”

  It was well known at Universal that the legendary Lew Wasserman viewed cable TV as the death of the movie business. Both Sheinberg and Mount repeated that edict, but Allan dismissed Wasserman’s assessment of cable as if it were so much gnat dung. “The way to get this film the Academy Award attention it deserves is to play it on the Z Channel. I don’t care what Lew thinks,” he said. The blasphemy of his statement nearly leveled the walls of Wasserman’s palace.

  Allan’s concept was not only revolutionary. In 1978, it was considered box office suicide to release a movie on cable before its initial theatrical release. Allan, however, didn’t care about the negligible cut in ticket sales that the tiny Z Channel viewership would take from the film’s overall receipts. He considered it “nothing!” Allan wanted to give the film a heavy, media-doused patina of prestige. Only three years old, the Z Channel in Los Angeles showed an eclectic lineup of foreign-language and independent films, and often showcased them with letter-box and rare director cuts long before those terms were known to the general moviegoing audience.

  “We will cultivate the right audience,” said Allan. He had his gaze fixed not on the box office. “The Deer Hunter is an Oscar winner!”

  It baffled him why Universal would preview a quality film like The Deer Hunter in Detroit. In his opinion, a more agreeable environment would have been the Little Carnegie Cinema in New York City, where the audiences, as Allan described them, “were edgy and sophisticated.” He also insisted that the film must open in only two theaters—one in New York, the other in Los Angeles—for a mere two weeks at the end of the year. Then rerelease it wider after the Oscar nominations were announced. “It’s definitely a gamble,” Allan cautioned.

  “I’d never seen that before,” says Mount. “It’s a common pattern today. But it was unheard of in 1978.”

  According to Mount, “Allan’s campaign for The Deer Hunter was the beginning of Oscar consultants. Now everybody does it.”

  If Mount and Spikings gave Allan full credit for their turnaround success, they weren’t the only ones. “I saved The Deer Hunter,” Allan believed. “Universal would have buried it in Iowa last fall if I hadn’t seen it and hollered that this is a masterpiece and then fought for it.”

  Cimino’s Vietnam War picture went on to be nominated for nine Academy Awards and won five, including best picture. On Oscar night at Spago, Christopher Walken, who won for his featured performance, dedicated his statuette to Allan, saying, “I want you to keep this six months out of the year because if it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have it.”

  Spikings also wanted to give Allan something special, and thought a trip to the Rolls-Royce dealership in Beverly Hills would be an appropriate way to show his gratitude in the days following the Academy Awards. There in the showroom on Olympic and Robertson, the stylish Deer Hunter producer pointed to a black Bentley. Allan smiled in appreciation, but his eyes kept darting to an older Rolls in the window—a white convertible with royal blue upholstery.

  Spikings spoke glowingly of the black Bentley when his wife, Dot, took him aside to whisper, “Allan doesn’t want the black one, dear. That’s your taste. He wants the blue-and-white convertible.”

  The Deer Hunter’s Oscar campaign so impressed Universal’s Thom Mount that he wanted to make Allan head of marketing at the studio. But flush from Grease, Allan declined. He was determined to make more movies, movies as good as Cimino’s Vietnam War picture.

  Allan’s Deer Hunter miracle turned him into a marketing legend in Hollywood. It was, however, not a hat he cared to wear again for just any old film. A movie executive once made the mistake of approaching him at Le Dome to ask a favor: “Would you market this new film Ishtar?”

  Allan had already been to an early screening of the Elaine May-directed comedy starring Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty as a couple of third-rate lounge singers, and he wanted nothing to do with the film. He didn’t whisper back his reply. He shouted his nay vote so that everyone in the restaurant could hear: “Ishtar is ‘rat shit’ spelled backwards!”

  The Deer Hunter remained Allan’s last foray into movie marketing. “Allan always dreamed of producing a movie that would be recognized around the world as quality,” says Mount. “He had commercial success. He lived nicely and made money. But the desire to do something that was culturally transcendent was a big issue for him.”

  Of all his Deer Hunter cohorts, Allan remained closest to Mount. They bonded over Cimino’s movie, as well as an article in New West magazine that coined a fresh term for Hollywood’s newest breed of movers and shakers. The Maureen Orth piece, “The Baby Moguls,” listed a group of successful and preternaturally young Hollywood players (Mount, Paula Wagner, John Landis, and Don Simpson, among them), who eschewed the old status symbols—Beverly Hills mansions, Le Dome dinners, Jaguars and Porsches—in favor of a round-the-clock work ethic that left little time for hanging out with Bob Evans and Sue Mengers. At age twenty-nine, Mount had already occupied the president’s slot at Universal for a couple of years, and he took much pride in having developed the studio’s Youth Unit, which put out movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and the defining Brat Pack film, The Breakfast Club. Grease fit into that youth mold, but in 1978, Allan had already passed the forty mark, even if he judiciously shaved off a few years. Orth’s article profiled people who were at least ten years younger than Allan and who saw his houses, cars, and jewelry as antistatus symbols.

  Allan didn’t care. He clung to his youth hit Grease as admittance to the club. “I’m a baby mogul!” he said. “The baby moguls will be important. We will take over this town!” Allan knew a great press ploy when he saw one, and indeed, profiles of the baby moguls were suddenly everywhere: Time, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times. Whether he rightfully belonged in that company, he glommed on to Orth’s rubric, if not the credo of her article.

  “I hit California at just the right time,” Allan said. “Right after The Graduate changed everybody’s life. Before that movie, they thought everybody old was brilliant. Afterward, anyone who was young was smart. I rode in on the youth movement.”

  Allan believed that his friendship with Mount, plus Grease, made him a baby mogul, and as a result, he and the young Universal president shared conversations that Allan could nev
er enjoy with men of an older generation. “Allan obviously had a healthy attitude about being gay at a time when that healthy attitude got you a lot of raised eyebrows,” says Mount. Many in Hollywood were shocked by Allan’s openness, but those people of a younger, more liberal bent found Allan to be “immense fun,” says Mount.

  Allan turned his homosexuality into a calling card and, for those who wanted to play along, a game of one-upmanship. First, there were the caftans. Then the gender-bending parties. And if Allan really liked someone, he launched into a no-holds-barred brand of gossip.

  “OK, did you sleep with so and so?” Allan asked Mount.

  “Allan, leave me alone!”

  “I’ll tell you who I slept with!” And so Allan did. In graphic detail.

  On other occasions, he could be extremely cautious about giving offense, and it was not unusual for him to ask permission to indulge himself if he were traveling on a friend’s yacht or private jet. “Do you mind if I make out with my boyfriend?” Allan would ask his straight hosts.

  He idolized straight men like Mount, Marvin Hamlisch, and his Grease cinematographer, Bill Butler, and afforded them a respect that he didn’t always extend to people who shared his sexual orientation. For many heterosexuals, Allan played a quasi-paternal role that didn’t stop with the 1 percent of Grease grosses that he bestowed upon Butler. “There was a long list of people Allan liked in Hollywood who were down on their luck,” says Mount. “I’d seen him write out $20,000- to $50,000-checks and send them in the mail.”

  thirteen

  His Second Biggest Mistake

  While Allan’s motives for bringing Survive! to America were purely cash-driven, Grease emerged as the more personal project, playing as it did off his outsider status in school and his overweening need to belong. But now that he was “rich, rich, rich,” as he let people know, he wanted to bring the sexual derring-do of his parties to the big screen. Although Roger Smith would claim that his friend was “completely apolitical,” Allan’s desire to push the erotic envelope played off the sexual politics of the late 1970s and led him to make Hollywood’s first, and only, big-budget gay musical. He was, in his own festive way, an accidental activist, and the idea to make a big-budget gay musical got its start, says Bruce Vilanch, “with everyone being heavily soused.”

  The alcohol started flowing at a dinner party given in the Beverly Hills home of actress Jacqueline Bisset and her current boyfriend, a garment-businessman-turned-realtor named Victor Drai. It was Allan who personally took credit for making the thirty-four-year-old actress an international sensation by convincing the producers of her latest film, The Deep, to use a poster that featured her in a sopping wet T-shirt. He didn’t care that Bisset herself surmised that the poster reduced her breasts to “something like two fried eggs on a platter.” (Or that the producer of The Deep, Peter Guber, denies categorically—“1000 percent no”—that he took Allan’s advice.) With or without Allan’s help, The Deep became one of the top-grossing films of 1977.

  After too much booze and food, Allan convinced everyone at Bisset’s dinner party to accompany him to the Palladium in Hollywood to check out a taping of the weekly syndicated TV show Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert. The Village People were to perform, and Allan’s keen interest in the group had grown in tandem with their record sales, which were a few million more than those of his own gay group, the Cycle Sluts. Also, it was a happy coincidence that, shortly before the Bisset/Drai dinner, he’d met Jacques Morali, who conceived and literally “cast” the cop, the American Indian chief, the construction worker, the cowboy, the biker, and the soldier who were the Village People. Since Morali and his business partner, Henri Belolo, were traveling from Paris to Los Angeles to attend the Kirshner show, Allan looked forward to a follow-up meeting. Morali was also primed. Shortly before the Palladium engagement, he told Belolo, “I met this guy who did Grease. He’s in love with what we’re doing. He wants to meet us.” It was everything two starstruck boys from France needed to know. “Allan Carr wants to make a movie with us!”

  Allan and Morali had much in common: They were gay, they made no bones about being gay, they liked things gay, and if they really loved something gay, their enthusiasm knew no bounds. There at the Palladium on Sunset Boulevard, Allan didn’t just love the Village People. “He wanted to represent the Village People,” says his Hollywood Reporter friend Richard Hach, who was part of the entourage that night, along with Bruce Vilanch and Bounty-paper-towels spokesperson Nancy Walker, whom Allan repped as a client. The overall camp sleaze of the Village People concert so moved Allan that he found himself dancing in the aisle with The Deep’s poster girl to the songs “Y.M.C.A.,” “San Francisco,” and “In the Navy.” Then Allan got hit in the head with one of his epiphanies. “Instantly, I see a film. I want to do a movie musical with the Village People!” he told his friends.

  These revelations came often to Allan. “It was typical of the thing he did,” says Hach. “He would see something and turn it into a production whether that be a live stage show, a TV show, or a movie.”

  The Village People, Allan decided, were a movie. They were big. Disco was big. He had to look no further than a recent Hollywood Reporter headline to put it all in perspective: “No Cooling of Disco Fever as Operators Eye $5 Billion Year.” Allan believed, “A Village People movie could be bigger than Grease.” The dollar signs danced somewhere between his big brown eyes and his even bigger aviator glasses.

  The world of Moroccan showbiz is not a vast one, and as it turned out, Belolo, who hailed from Paris by way of Casablanca, knew Drai, and over the next few weeks there were more dinner parties at Bisset’s house. Allan listened to Belolo and Morali, who told their story of how they literally assembled the Village People. Morali, whom Belolo referred to as being “very openly gay and a crazy cruiser,” frequented an S&M bar in the meatpacking district of Manhattan called the Anvil, which featured a young dancer, Felipe Rose, who worked as a go-go boy for fifty dollars a week.

  Rose’s gimmick was to dress up as an Indian (to call his act “Native American” might do grave offense to those proud people) in a costume of bright feathers and flapping loin cloth right out of Central Costume. It was quite an act, but then again, it had to be exceptional to keep the customers liquored at the bar instead of spending all night in the Dungeon (i.e., the basement), where everything from blow jobs to fist fucking was de rigueur. Popping up from the Dungeon one night, Morali spotted Felipe and the idea struck him: American icons of masculinity. “We’ll make a group of macho American men!” he told Belolo.

  In fact, Morali, who wrote the music, and Belolo, who wrote the lyrics in French and then had them translated into English, hired Victor Willis and a few anonymous studio singers to record their first album, Village People, in spring 1977. They didn’t get around to “casting” the cop, the construction worker, the soldier, et al., until the following autumn, at which time the Village People had already sold 100,000 copies of “their” first LP. Then six months later, almost as an afterthought, the release of “Macho Man” made the airwaves and the album went on to sell 2 million copies.

  Belolo’s heterosexuality didn’t deter him from helping to mastermind a gay group, and he harbored few qualms when it came to following Morali’s lead in researching the homosexual lifestyle in Greenwich Village and Fire Island Pines. He chalked it up to his openness as a Frenchman, or at least, his not being American. Plus, he adored his baby-faced business partner. “Morali was openly gay and he had no shyness about it,” says Belolo. “His dream was to bring some of the gay life to the mainstream,” with the operative word being “some.”

  The same could be said of Allan, who bought the Frenchmen’s spiel and found the Village People’s gayness a singular plus for movie audiences. “The girls want to take the members of the group home and their boyfriends aren’t resentful, and that’s what makes movie stars,” he reasoned.

  When Morali and Belolo told their story of inventing the Village People, right dow
n to the leather chaps and red back-pocket kerchiefs, Allan exclaimed, “That could be a fantastic movie! I want to make this movie!” Some of the group’s gayer aspects would have to be adjusted or disguised or obliterated. But those were minor details, he let them know.

  The topic of how gay was open for debate—for a few days, anyway. Allan did talk about it with his faithful Grease cinematographer. “There were many discussions on how gay the movie would be, whether the Village People would be gay or like they were on their tour,” says Bill Butler. “Onstage in their tour, they were just kind of there and you made up your own mind.” Which is the way their creators preferred it. “Belolo and Morali were more interested in their possession of their enterprise than anything else.” Indeed, even the Village People took it upon themselves to warn journalists not to bring up the subject of the group’s gay genesis when they interviewed Morali.

  In the beginning, Morali and Belolo liked the way Allan “adapted” their gay-rags to a semi-straight-riches story. Says Belolo, “Morali became an American guy named Morell, and my role was divided into three: the head of a record company, a lawyer, and a supermodel.”

  Jacqueline Bisset would play the supermodel. “That’s how Hollywood works,” says Belolo.

  Only she didn’t. When Bisset bailed, much to Allan’s disappointment, he offered the role to Olivia Newton-John.

  “Allan liked the combination of Olivia with the Village People,” says Bruce Vilanch. “He thought it was milk toast and sleaze.”

  “Maybe if Allan had said that to me it would have worked,” Olivia Newton-John jokes.

  But he didn’t. And in the end, she didn’t. “I just didn’t like the script,” she says. And there was the other matter: the music: The pop singer wanted John Farrar, her “Hopelessly Devoted to You” composer, to rework his magic and write her songs for the Village People project. Morali and Belolo, who had no interest in sharing a piece of their recording profits, nixed that idea, which led Allan to launch into one of his more spectacular hissy fits. Not against Morali or Belolo—after Grease, he understood profit points better than anyone—but Olivia Newton-John. Since he had fought the Paramount executives to cast her as Sandy, he took personal credit for making the singer an international movie star. For Chrissakes, he’d even named a bedroom in his house after her! And this is how she repaid him?! It especially hurt that the project she took instead was another disco musical, Xanadu. “In which she plays a fucking Greek muse on roller skates!” he screamed. Allan called her, among many other things, “ungrateful.”