Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (17 page)

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 never 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.”

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.