Allan Carr

Allan Carr (born Allan Soloman, May 27, 1937 – June 29, 1999) was an American producer and manager of stage for the screen. Carr was nominated for numerous awards, winning a Tony Award and two People's Choice Awards, and was named Producer of the Year by the National Association of Theatre Owners.[1]

This article is about the American stage and film producer. For the British comedian, see Alan Carr. For other people with a similar name, see Alan Carr (disambiguation).

Allan Carr
Allan Carr at the 1989 Academy Awards
Born
Allan Solomon

(1937-05-27)May 27, 1937
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
DiedJune 29, 1999(1999-06-29) (aged 62)
Beverly Hills, California, U.S.
NationalityAmerican
EducationLake Forest College
Alma materNorthwestern University
OccupationProducer, screenwriter
Years active1969–1999

Early career

Carr was born Allan Solomon[2] to an American Jewish family[3] in Chicago, Illinois. He attended Lake Forest College and Northwestern University, but his interest was always in show business. While at Northwestern, he invested $750 in the Broadway musical Ziegfeld Follies starring Tallulah Bankhead. Though the show was not a hit, he had also invested $1,250 in 1967's The Happiest Millionaire, which gave him the success he needed to leave school and embark upon a career in entertainment.

In Chicago in the 1960s, he opened the Civic Theater and financed The World of Carl Sandburg starring Bette Davis and Gary Merrill, as well as Eva Le Gallienne in Mary Stuart, directed by Sir Tyrone Guthrie, and Tennessee Williams's Garden District, featuring Cathleen Nesbitt and Diana Barrymore. Carr worked behind the scenes at Playboy with Hugh Hefner and was a co-creator of the Playboy Penthouse television series, which in turn launched the Playboy Clubs.

Through the years, he became known as a great planner of promotional events and parties. One such event, a black-tie affair for Truman Capote, took place in an abandoned Los Angeles jail.[4]

Management career

In 1966, Carr founded the talent agency Allan Carr Enterprises, managing the actors Tony Curtis, Peter Sellers,[4] Rosalind Russell, Dyan Cannon, Melina Mercouri, and Marlo Thomas. Some of the other entertainment figures whose careers he managed were Ann-Margret, a string of whose television specials he also produced: Nancy Walker, Marvin Hamlisch, Joan Rivers, Peggy Lee, Cass Elliot,[4] Paul Anka, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, George Maharis and Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.

Carr is also credited for having discovered numerous celebrities, including some such, who also became his clients, as Olivia Newton-John, Mark Hamill, Michelle Pfeiffer,[5] Steve Guttenberg[6] and Lisa Hartman.[1]

Grease and Broadway success

Producer Robert Stigwood hired him in 1975 as marketing and promotion consultant, with his first project being for the film version of the rock opera Tommy.[1] The film was a hit and he expanded his involvement for his next film, re-editing and overdubbing a low-budget foreign film about a real-life disaster. The result was Survive! (The disaster in question was also described in Piers Paul Read's book Alive.) The surprise box office success of Survive! in 1976 made Carr a wealthy man and gave him clout at Paramount Pictures.

In 1977, Stigwood asked him to produce the ad campaign for Saturday Night Fever, and he turned the film's premiere into a star-studded television special. It worked so well that Stigwood gave him Grease (1978). Carr not only helmed the ad campaign and produced the premiere party and television special for Grease, but also co-produced the film for six million dollars, casting his then client Olivia Newton-John.[4] It became the highest-grossing film of the year, and one of the highest-grossing films up until that time, at just under $100 million. The film was nominated for five Golden Globe Awards and won two People's Choice Awards, for Best Picture and Best Musical Picture. That year he even appeared in a role on the final season of the Angie Dickinson television series Police Woman. Stigwood and Carr would work on several other films, including 1978 Oscar-winner The Deer Hunter.

The following year, 1979, he produced the Village People film musical Can't Stop The Music,[4] a production which, while campy, steered clear of addressing the band members' presumed homosexuality in the script. Again he orchestrated a lavish series of premieres and a television special that co-starred his friends Hefner and Cher. But the film was released in 1980, after the crash of the disco craze, and as a result, it was a major flop.[4] Because of this, Carr "won" the first annual Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Picture in 1981. Undaunted, he went on to produce Grease 2 (1982) which, while nowhere near the hit of its predecessor, was not the financial loss that Can't Stop The Music had been.

When Carr was in Paris for the premiere of Grease, a friend took him to see a play about a gay couple, La Cage aux Folles. By this time in his career, Carr was ready to face the gay theme head on. Returning to Broadway he produced a musical version of the 1973 play,[4] which had since been made into a French film, and would later be remade as an American film called The Birdcage. With a book by Harvey Fierstein and music and lyrics by Jerry Herman, the show opened in 1983 and was a huge success, running for five years and 1,761 performances. Nominated in 1984 for eight Drama Desk Awards and eight Tony Awards, the show won three Drama Desks and an impressive six Tonys, including a "Best Musical" win for Carr.

Snow White and the Academy Awards

Carr's reputation for hosting expensive and lavish parties and creating spectacular production numbers led AMPAS to hire him to produce the 61st Academy Awards and create the show based on his promise that he would turn it around from the dry, dull show it had been in previous years. It was inspired by Beach Blanket Babylon, the musical revue show featuring Snow White at Hollywood after the dwarves during the Golden Age of Hollywood.[7] Promising "the antithesis of tacky," and despite the best Nielsen ratings in five years, it proved to be a career disaster for Allan, culminating in the infamous pairing of Snow White (played by Eileen Bowman) and Rob Lowe singing a parody of "Proud Mary."[4] Before that, when Snow White first entered the theater from the rear, she seemed to surprise and even put off the movie stars she was singing to, using a high-pitched imitation (bordering on parody) of the Disney cartoon. During the main number, before Rob Lowe's entrance, a crooning Merv Griffin introduced a procession of once famous Hollywood stars ranging from Alice Faye to Roy Rogers and Dale Evans to Vincent Price, which seemed more forced than natural as the elders were practically guided across the stage by male dancers (some dressed as chairs and tables). Also, there was no host that year. Instead, actors and actresses traded off, ranging from Tom Selleck (who opened) to Bob Hope and Lucille Ball (the latter died three weeks later). His no host theme was centered on "compadres, costars, couples and companions," and his no host theme wouldn't be repeated until the Oscars of 2019.

The telecast also included a production number featuring what was introduced as "The Stars of Tomorrow" doing a number entitled "I Wanna Be An Oscar Winner" with all the participants being actors and actresses ranging from the age group of late teens to mid-20s (including Corey Feldman doing a Michael Jackson impression; Christian Slater sword fighting with Tyrone Power Jr.; Chad Lowe shouting "I am a Thespian"; Tracy Nelson ballet dancing; Patrick Dempsey tap dancing along the central set stairwell).[8] Due largely to the show's opening number, and despite the show’s stellar Nielsen ratings, the show became a laughing-stock and went down in history as one of the worst moments in awards show and television history. The Walt Disney Company sued for allegedly illegal use of Snow White's image.[9] Meanwhile, Gregory Peck (a personal friend of Carr's) and a number of actors wrote and signed a letter of protest, demanding there never be a show like that again; Peck, in fact, threatened to return his past Oscar if it was ever repeated, which it wasn't.

Carr's reputation in Hollywood never fully recovered from this setback, although his decision to change the award announcement from "And the winner is..." to "And the Oscar goes to..."[10] became the norm for awards shows in general, not just for the Oscars. Carr also first hired comedian Bruce Vilanch as head comedy writer of the show, a job Vilanch still held as of 2015 (Vilanch was redeemed the following year since his old friend Billy Crystal hosted for his first of many times: with Vilanch as his head writer).

Later work

That same year Carr helmed the project Goya: A Life in Song with Freddie Gershon and CBS Records, a concept album and, later, an off-Broadway musical theater production written by Maury Yeston (Nine) and featuring Plácido Domingo as artist Francisco Goya. Still in development for a full Broadway production, the music has been recorded by Domingo with Dionne Warwick in English and Gloria Estefan in Spanish, and a version of the duet "Till I Loved You" was a top 40 single for Barbra Streisand and Don Johnson.

Carr continued his work in theater, sponsoring the 1984-85 Royal Shakespeare Company productions of Cyrano de Bergerac and Much Ado About Nothing at Washington's Kennedy Center and Broadway's Gershwin Theatre,[11] earning 10 Tony nominations between them including one more for Carr.[12] Carr had returned to Paramount Pictures to handle the re-release of Grease in 1998, which included producing a VH1 television special of the twentieth anniversary Hollywood "premiere" screening and party, and special edition re-releases of the video, DVD, and soundtrack album.

Production career

Carr was a film producer for numerous movies, including:

Personal life and death

Carr died on June 29, 1999, in Beverly Hills, California from liver cancer.[4] At the time of his death, he split his time between his homes in Beverly Hills and Palm Springs, and was working on bringing Ken Ludwig's Tony-winning comedy Lend Me a Tenor to Australia and the UK, and was preparing a new Broadway show, The New Musical Adventures of Tom Sawyer.[6] His ashes were scattered at sea by Ann-Margret, Roger Smith and Martin Menard in front of his former Diamond Head estate on the island of Oahu, Hawaii.

Legacy

In 2017 a documentary about Carr's life was released entitled The Fabulous Allan Carr. The director of The Fabulous Allan Carr Jeffrey Schwarz said, "Although it was no secret that Allan Carr was gay, he never formally acknowledged it publicly. The word 'flamboyant' was used to describe him, a code word."[4]

References
  1. "Allan Carr, Producer, Impresario, Manager and Showman, Dies at 62". Business Wire. June 30, 1999.
  2. People Magazine: "Producer Allan Carr Waxes Fat and Fortyish on the Gross of Grease" By Sue Reilly August 06, 1979
  3. Hofler, Robert (December 28, 2012). Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock N Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr. p. 95. ISBN 9781459600072.
  4. Taggart, Frankie (May 17, 2018). "Allan Carr: The rise and fall of a Hollywood hedonist". Yahoo!.
  5. Allan Carr – Britannica Online Encyclopedia
  6. "Allan Carr, 62, the Producer Of 'Grease' and 'La Cage'". The New York Times. July 1, 1999. Retrieved April 23, 2010.
  7. Bruce Vilanch on "The 1989 Oscars" with Rob Lowe and Snow White - FoundationINTERVIEWS on YouTube
  8. The Stars of Tomorrow: 1989 Oscars
  9. Looking back at Oscar's biggest goof|Hollywood Reporter
  10. Why the 1989 Oscars Are the Worst Ever - Metaflix on YouTube
  11. Allan Carr; Producer of 'Grease' and 'La Cage aux Folles' - Los Angeles Times
  12. Obituary: Allan Carr|The Independent
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