Party Animals

by Robert Hofler

  On at least one occasion, the Bronte free-for-all spirit surfaced on the set of Discoland. Instead of re-creating a disco on the MGM soundstage, Allan took over Studio One for one scene, and dressed up the West Hollywood club with several towers of light so that it resembled Studio 54. In the scene, the Jack Morell character gets his big break when he convinces the local DJ to break the Village People’s first single. It was a simple scene between Steve Guttenberg and Don Blanton, Allan’s real-life DJ, who, two years earlier had actually debuted the Village People’s song “San Francisco” at the Odyssey. Blanton wasn’t the only bit of typecasting. Allan also larded the background with several of his ex-boyfriends, whose on-set behavior drastically delayed the filming. “It got out of control,” says Blanton. “Everyone was having sex with one another. Guys would come by your dressing room and ask, ‘Can I give you a blow job?’ Allan got angry because it was costing him money because they weren’t able to find the people to do the scene.”

  Allan had no choice but to issue a warning: “Anyone caught having sex will be thrown off the set!”

  A modicum of order returned when the production moved back to MGM; unfortunately, the nostalgia of filming where Esther Williams and Judy Garland once cavorted brought little cohesion to the production. “Everyone had ideas for that movie,” says Bill Butler, who, in effect, became the de facto helmer on Discoland. While he had never directed a film, the cinematographer had worked with some of the best: Milos Forman on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Steven Spielberg on Jaws, Francis Ford Coppola on Rain People. “You learn tons from these people,” says Butler. And what he learned that came in most handy on Discoland was how to direct actors who can’t act.

  “When you have actors like the Village People who are not actors but performers, they tend to go over the top. They throw their emotions in, and it looks unreal,” says Butler.

  Nancy Walker, who had trained on Broadway and was, in essence, a theater actor, didn’t know how to coax natural line readings from her six nonprofessional performers. Which left it to Butler to take each of them aside to advise, “Say your lines with absolutely no emphasis, just read them flat.” According to the cinematographer, “That’s how we got through the scenes.”

  Amidst such ineptitude, Belolo and Morali’s enthusiasm for their movie receded along with Walker’s control of her actors. In the beginning, Belolo chose to take the philosophical route. “This is Hollywood,” he said. “Perhaps it is going to be big.” Good, of course, was another story. But even an eccentric Parisian knew there was no way to salvage the “Milkshake” number, a musical extravaganza that shot on Stage 28 at MGM and required no fewer than fifty-seven camera setups.

  The scene begins with the taping of a TV commercial in which Perrine’s supermodel character serves milk to six children dressed up as the Village People. The camera then segues from the kitchen to an all-white soundstage, where the adult Village People replace the kids. Perrine, now dripping in hand-sewn beads and perched atop a large Plexiglas champagne glass, listens to them sing the joys of having a milk shake with lyrics that could not have been more nutritious: “When you’re at work today, and it’s time for your coffee break, why don’t you treat yourself to a big thick and frosty shake. . . . Just get a glass of milk. It’s not very hard to do.”

  The Village People complained about the wholesome song and their glitzy all-white costumes, and Belolo and Morali were there to back them up. “We had imagined the film would be more street,” says Belolo. “Suddenly it became a kind of nightmare, it became burlesque.”

  Allan could only shrug his shoulders. “The Milk and Dairy Association has paid $2 million to have a milk shake number in the film,” explained the master of product placement.

  Nancy Walker cared even less about the film’s musical sequences than about the dialogue scenes. “She left it to Bill Butler and me to direct most of those numbers,” says Phillips. “She wasn’t on the set.” But since the “Milkshake” number involved Valerie Perrine, the director made an exception. Slumped in a king-size champagne glass, the actress spoke only one line. “One more time!” she told the Village People. But no matter how she delivered those three words, Walker cried, “Again!”

  After twenty takes, Perrine fired back, “How many fucking ways are there to say, ‘One more time!’?”

  Something had to be done about Walker, and Perrine put it to Allan in so many words: “Either she goes or I go.” Allan made his choice. After the “Milkshake” number wrapped, any scene featuring Perrine found Walker offset watching All My Children.

  It didn’t matter if Discoland was good, bad, or indifferent as a movie. Of greater concern to the powers behind Discoland was the January 23 Variety headline that declared, “Disco No Longer a Priority Item with Diskeries.”

  Belolo and Morali heard the death knell even before the editors of Variety. “The radio stations were dropping the disco format,” says Belolo. “Suddenly, in the middle of filming, everyone was predicting the end of disco, and here we had a $20-million movie about disco.”

  They couldn’t reshoot their movie, which was almost in the can. Instead, they did what they always do in Hollywood when a movie runs into trouble. “We had a creative meeting,” says Belolo. Discoland, everyone knew, was a lousy title in light of the music industry’s turnaround. “We need to find a new name,” Allan decreed. Since Can’t Stop the Music was the name of Belolo and Morali’s American company, Belolo wondered aloud. “Why not Can’t Stop the Music?”

  “That’s fabulous!” said Allan. End of discussion. Meeting adjourned.

  Allan continued to be a constant presence on the set, and on those days he didn’t make a pilgrimage to MGM, he busied himself scouting weight lifters, swimmers, wrestlers, gymnasts, and other athletes to populate the big “Y.M.C.A.” number. Allan allocated days, not hours, to searching every gym and athletic field in the Los Angeles area to find just the right 1,000 or so male contestants who could be whittled down to no fewer than 250 specimens of absolute masculine perfection. In essence, the musical number was a parody of a parody, ripped from Howard Hawks’s 1953 film, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, starring Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe as two gold diggers en route to Europe aboard a luxury ocean liner. The classic film features one deliciously improbable scene in which Russell wanders into a gym filled with male athletes who pay absolutely no attention to her as she sings Hoagy Carmichael’s “Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love?” Allan envisioned something similar for the “Y.M.C.A.” production number, only he jettisoned the lead female and radically multiplied the number of men, using split screens to cram as many glutes, pecs, and abs as possible into each frame.

  If Butler had become the de facto director of the movie, he essentially went back to his cinematography duties on “Y.M.C.A.” Allan Carr sat in charge at the Glendale YMCA, where filming ensued for a luxurious four-day shoot for approximately four minutes of film.

  “If we did it once, we did it a hundred times,” Phillips says of the choreography. Every dive, every jump, every squat press was never quite good enough. “Do it again!” Allan cried from his director’s chair. “Boys, let’s see your muscles, let’s see your body!”

  Belolo used to tease his producer friend, “So tell me, Allan. Exactly how do you have sex? You can’t screw because of your gut. Do you take it?”

  Allan laughed. He would have strangled another gay man for saying such a thing. But he liked to trade sex talk with the straight guys. Allan bonded with Belolo, but now that Allan surrounded himself with attractive young men for the “Y.M.C.A.” number, he and fellow homosexual Jacques Morali grew wary of one another.

  “I want that boy,” said Allan.

  “No, I want that one,” said Morali. And so it went guy after guy after guy.

  “They had very similar taste in men, and if one wanted one guy, then the other wanted that guy, too,” Belolo says.

  Except for their vocals, the Village People made only a cameo appearance in the “Y.M.C.A.” fle
sh-a-thon as their hit song blared over multitudes of ripped, pumped, hairless, young male bodies. “Allan essentially made two movies,” says Don Blanton. Bill Butler shot the PG-version, while set photographer Roger LeClaire presided over the X-rated one. “There was nudity in the showers and steam room and pool,” Blanton says of the latter film, which Allan made for his own private amusement. The assignment won LeClaire a special mention on the end credit roll, which read, “consultant: YMCA.”

  To cap Can’t Stop the Music, Allan flew the entire cast and crew to San Francisco to shoot the film’s conclusion in the city’s largest gay disco, La Galleria. “That was out of sight!” says Butler. “The place was four stories. It was ideal for the finale.”

  The Village People, along with the principal cast members, were to perform the movie’s title song on a Broadway-size stage in front of a few hundred adoring fans. To prepare for the spectacular number, Allan sent advance people to promote the filming throughout the streets of San Francisco. It would take a lot of extras to fill up the gargantuan Galleria, and it wasn’t in Allan’s nature to pay retail when he could get a discount—or, better yet, charge these nonprofessionals fifteen dollars a pop to be in his movie.

  “Allan puts out this letter, inviting people to a fantasy party with the Village People,” Jenner recalls. “It read: ‘Come in your wildest outfit!’”

  And that they did.

  On the first day of shooting, Neil Machlis stood with Allan on the fourth tier of the disco and looked down at the multitudes below. The mass of throbbing flesh, pulsing to the same tribal beat, looked very theatrical. La Galleria, in addition to its four levels, featured a roof that retracted to expose a festive spaceship out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which slowly descended over the dance floor to give off a dazzling light display. Machlis believed the crowded dance palace would make a great final reel for their movie, but he felt compelled to put one question to Allan. Screaming above the din, he asked, “Where are the women?”

  The movie’s production manager watched as Allan stared at him, then broke out laughing. “He loved to shock me,” says Machlis. He wasn’t the only family man to be disarmed by the scene at La Galleria. “It was the first time I saw truck-driver types dancing with other truck-driver types. Mostly it was men,” observed Warren Cowan, whose firm, Rogers & Cowan, handled publicity chores on the film.

  When Allan stopped being convulsed with laughter, he looked back at the dance floor below and realized that his hetero production manager had a point. Within the minute, Allan issued a most urgent edict: “Find females!”

  Machlis dispatched every available crew member—grips, gofers, and costumers alike—to round up any woman they could find. Allan didn’t care. Young or old, pretty or not. He would forgo the fifteen dollars a head to fill La Galleria with members of the opposite sex.

  Despite the crew’s efforts, “It was just this whole group of sexy, seething, dancing men,” says Arlene Phillips. “There were a few girls down front in the first five rows, but not very many.”

  Amidst the four-day shoot in San Francisco, Allan petitioned the mayor to give the Village People the keys to the city. Which meant more promotion, more fliers, more newspaper ads.

  “But boys, you won’t have to sing,” Allan told his headliners, who complained repeatedly of being tired, exhausted, burnt out. “Just pick up the goddamn key and then go home to your hotel.” Of course, this extra duty was planned after a full, hard day of shooting at La Galleria.

  The always-docile Village People once again did as they were told and limoed themselves over to city hall to pick up the keys to San Francisco. And Allan, once again, did not disappoint. The square in front of city hall bulged with fans as the songs “Y.M.C.A.” and “In the Navy” blared over loudspeakers. Otherwise, it was a fairly ordinary press event: One of the mayor’s assistants presented the Village People with a gold plastic key to the city. The boys smiled. Photos were taken, and with a quick wave to the assembled masses, the six pop stars climbed into their respective limousines for a well-deserved night at the Fairmont Hotel.

  “But the crowd had it in their head that we were there to sing, to perform a whole show,” says David Hodo. “When they saw us get into our limousines, they started to boo and carry on. Boy, were they pissed off!” Fliers were wadded up and pelted the performers as they made their quick escape.

  The real dramatic fireworks that night, however, took place not in front of city hall but back at La Galleria. Filming had ended hours before when Belolo returned to the Fairmount for a room-service dinner with his wife, Daniele. At 10 p.m., the phone rang in his hotel suite. It was Morali, who yelled into the receiver, “You’ve got to come over here. Now!” Belolo asked what was wrong. In the background, he could hear Allan screaming.

  “I can’t tell you what’s the matter,” cried Morali. “You just have to come right over here. Allan has gone mad.”

  Belolo left his wife and jumped into a taxi to return to La Galleria, where Allan had set up his office in the basement. It was there that Belolo found Allan and Morali in full battle mode. For one very tense moment, neither man seemed to be aware that Belolo had made an across-town dash to play mediator at a moment’s notice.

  “That fucking boy is not going to be in the movie!” Allan screamed at Morali.

  “If Dennis isn’t in the movie, then I’m leaving as producer!” Morali threatened, “and you can’t use any of my music!”

  “I’ll sue you, you fucker! I’ll sue! We’ve got a contract!”

  As Belolo quickly deciphered the situation, Allan refused to put Morali’s newest boyfriend, Dennis Parker, in the movie. Morali insisted on the casting, and was ready to use his leverage as owner of the Village People franchise to get his way. Belolo understood the problem. “Allan and Jacques shared a similar taste in men,” he says, and in this case, Morali had won out with Dennis Parker. In one of his rare moments of piety, Allan claimed that he didn’t want Parker in the movie because the twenty-year-old was “that porno actor!” The adjective “porno” had never before been uttered with such abject disgust by Allan Carr. But it was the truth. Dennis Parker possessed an impressive X-rated résumé, cranking out several gay porn movies per year under the nom de cinema Wade Nichols. Playing matchmaker, Belolo eventually succeeded in convincing the two warring parties that “le boyfriend” could be cast—but only as an extra.

  The next day on the set, back at La Galleria, Allan thanked Belolo. “You are the Henry Kissinger of this movie!” he said, giving him a big kiss.

  As Randy Jones observed, “Parker’s wasn’t a very big part.” In the finished film, “You can see Dennis standing there with Bruce Jenner and Valerie Perrine on a balcony.” It was only five seconds of screen time and no lines, but lots of on-the-set peace as Allan’s big blowout in San Francisco finally came to an end. His movie now rested in the can, ready for the editor. Standing there on the La Galleria balcony, he looked down as his crew began to dismantle the stage and move their equipment from the building. “I remember him at the end of it,” says Steve Guttenberg. “He was higher than God. And tired, just exhausted.”

  Back in Los Angeles, the film spawned two, not just one, wrap parties. The official one, under Allan’s careful supervision, took place at the MGM studios in Culver City, and Allan implored his cast and crew “to savor the moment. Do you realize this is the very sound stage that used to house Esther Williams’s pool?”

  The following night there was to be a more intimate farewell party at Jacques Morali’s rented house in the Hollywood Hills. Still smarting from their catfight at La Galleria, Allan took a dig at Morali when he told the assembled cast and crew, “Don’t forget to take these centerpieces for tomorrow night’s party.”

  If Allan thought that Morali didn’t have the clout, or cash, to throw a memorable party, he guessed wrong. For his event, the Frenchman got the Ritchie Family to perform, but the highlight of the party came when the Village People presented Allan with a life-size doll of
himself. “It looked like Allan,” says Felipe Rose, “right down to the glasses, the muumuu, the necklaces, the little sneakers.”

  Allan recoiled at the sight of it. “What is that?” he groused.

  “It’s you!” said Rose.

  Allan was not pleased.

  “It looked like a big Muppet,” says Belolo.

  “Actually, it looked like a very old Muppet,” says Rose.

  For the most part, “The party was fun and wild,” says Arlene Phillips. At least, while it lasted. “But there was a strange feeling at that party. It was over. It was like somehow disco had soured.”

  fifteen

  Mike Todd Jr.

  Allan had been nearly a constant presence on the Can’t Stop the Music set, given a stop or two at Cedars-Sinai. Now it was time to indulge his real expertise: promotion. Much of it was planned, but some of the press attention even Allan didn’t want. When word came down that ABC’s 20/20 planned to air an exposé of the Village People, one that would reveal the true sexual orientation of its members and their fan base, the producers were genuinely worried. Allan cautioned Belolo, “You better take care of Jacques.”

  Belolo put it delicately to his effeminate partner. “Don’t act like a woman,” he cautioned. To assuage Morali’s ego, Belolo advised the ABC producers that they introduce Morali as “the man who created the Village People,” and that they call him, simply, “the money man.”

  “But Jacques couldn’t contain himself,” says Belolo, and five minutes into the TV interview, his wrists went limp and his hands started flying as he went from sounding like a pseudobasso to a castrato. Otherwise, it was a tame profile by even 1979 standards, and hardly qualified as an exposé.