Its leading lady was foreign and untried, its cast was too old, its score uneven, its choreography and staging more often than not thought up on the fly. Barry Diller, who dismissed the whole thing as so much cinematic cotton candy. The slapdash production, mapped out in five weeks and shot over two months, was given a modest $6 million budget by Paramount C.E.O. It was this last movie, eviscerated by critics but a surprise hit at the box office, that made him a player at Paramount Pictures.Īt Paramount, Carr would single-handedly revive a genre of tinselly filmmaking left for dead, help create superstardom for the era’s most bankable leading man, and oversee the highest-grossing American movie musical of the 20th century: Grease. He drifted into marketing films, first for Robert Stigwood’s 1975 rock opera, Tommy, and a year later for Survive!, a Mexican film about plane-crash survivors who turn to cannibalism. He produced a series of sparkly television specials for Ann-Margret. ![]() In the 1960s, bankrolled by his parents, he dabbled in small-potatoes theatrical producing before branching out as an event planner (he once staged a party in a jail for Truman Capote) and talent manager, at one time or another overseeing the careers of performers from Tony Curtis to Joan Rivers to Mama Cass Elliot. His name was Allan Carr, and he had grown up as Alan Solomon in the suburbs of Chicago, a nice Jewish boy known as Poopsie who had a flashy personality and a stubbornly pudgy physique. His home contained a stainless-steel refrigerator in the master bedroom and a dialysis machine-a testament to both his voracious appetite and the health problems that would plague him his entire life. Many of his after-parties were even spicier-all-gay affairs with actors and moguls mingling with lithe, sinewy young men he called his “twinkies,” their collective sexual exploits watched by the host from his master bedroom on closed-circuit television. He threw outrageous parties accented with Petrossian caviar and Cristal champagne, their invitations so coveted in Hollywood that he split them up into “Rolodex parties,” hosting the A-L guest list one night, the M-Z one the next. ![]() The décor inside his Benedict Canyon mansion was gaudy, lacquered, and more than a tad narcissistic: there were several gilt-framed portraits of himself on the walls. ![]() He drove a yellow Mercedes with a personalized license plate that read CAFTANS, a nod to the more than 100 flowing muumuus hanging in his closet.
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