Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'N' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr (10 page)

Allan never missed an opportunity to retort to a retort. “There was no other project,” since UA had not yet announced a start date, he told reporters.

Medavoy shot back. “Ours will be a class-A movie with a class-A director and a class-A budget. I don’t think they’ve taken the steam out of our film. It will stand on its own.”

As Allan predicted, UA soon pulled the life support on
Alive!
and John Schlesinger never invited Allan to have dinner at his house again. Then again, Allan could take solace in the deed to his new Malibu house.

No sooner did he own Seahaven, however, than Allan feared he might have to put it back on the market. That unlikely premonition came in the form of
Variety
’s Labor Day 1976 report on weekend grosses. Allan alerted Gershon. Suddenly
Survive!
was no longer in the top ten. It was sinking and sinking fast at the box office. Everybody on the RSO side of the project wanted to know what had happened.

As the powers at Paramount explained it, once
Survive!
hit the $4-million mark, it no longer made sense for the company to make media buys now that they were getting only forty cents on the dollar.

“Are you crazy?” Gershon told Picker. “Go ahead and reverse it, we’ll go back to 60-40 in your favor.” Telegrams were exchanged, and “that was the whole agreement,” says Gershon. The next week
Survive!
was once again the No. 1 movie in America, taking in $1.4 million—and it stayed in the top ten for several weeks. Allan called it one of those “strange deals,” in which he made as much money as the studio. “And that just never happens. It’s a textbook case of just how you sometimes get lucky in Hollywood.”

Allan was happy. RSO was happy. Paramount was happy. “We all had a bonding relationship over this demented movie,” says Gershon, “and Allan got us that relationship. Without it, Stigwood would probably not have brought them
Saturday Night Fever
. It was Allan Carr who started that chain of events.”

Tacky as it was twisted,
Survive!
brought Allan his first million dollars—plus a few more. “It’s a fabulous day,” he said of the accomplishment. “I do all this because it is creative fun.”

Only later, when he was really rich did he develop a modicum of discreet bravado. “After $10 million, you shouldn’t talk about how much money you have. It’s major bad taste,” he believed. “You’d just be astounded at how different people treat you when they know you have more than $10 million.”

Regarding his new enemies at United Artists, Allan blew them off with a one-line joke. Since he’d just bought the screen rights to the Broadway musical
Grease,
he offered the wounded party a novel revenge, suggesting, “Maybe they will make a film called
Vaseline
.”

Marvin Hamlisch, luxuriating in his hypersuccess with
A Chorus Line,
couldn’t stop talking up this new Broadway musical he’d just seen. “If ever you’re going to make a motion picture,
Grease
is it,” he told his manager-friend. Allan eventually agreed to see the show, despite its “unpleasant” title, because Hamlisch made it a threesome, inviting his
Chorus Line
collaborator, Michael Bennett; that Allan couldn’t resist.
Grease
had already been running for over two years even though its story of a bunch of horny 1950s high school students had been eschewed by the Tony Awards and the usual geriatric Broadway crowd.
Grease
attracted, instead, theatergoing neophytes who were dismissed as “the bridge-and-tunnel crowd” from New Jersey and Long Island. Cutting-edge musical theater it was not, and such an illustrious legit combo as Hamlisch and Bennett looked more than a little out of place among the Jersey youngsters as they all walked through the lobby of the Royale Theater to take their seats. Allan was the third wheel that evening, and while his expectations were low, he respected Hamlisch’s opinion. Perhaps, too, a paparazzo would catch him with the
Chorus Line
duo and he’d get his photo in the
New York Post
.

Sometime between “Greased Lightning” and “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee,” Allan forgot about camera angles and instead experienced a
Grease
epiphany. This musical was his high school story, or, at least, his high school story as he would like to rewrite it. The plot about hip leather greasers versus the plaid-covered nerds reverberated for him, especially the love angle that had the
square girl Sandy (i.e., Allan) turning into a floozy to get the sexy guy Danny. “God, it’s even set in Chicago in the 1950s!” Allan gushed.

After the show, he took Hamlisch and Bennett to a late dinner at Joe Allen restaurant, a theater hangout best known not for food but its exposed brick walls, which showcase posters from flop tuners—
Dude, Via Galactica,
among them—that are legendary for all the wrong reasons. Over his chicken pot pie, Allan let his two companions know his plan: “I have to make this into a movie.”

Let others go broke with sophisticated, avant-garde theater. Allan had the proud taste of a wealthy adolescent; and the very next day, he inquired into the stage rights. Unfortunately, the option to bring
Grease
to the movies was held by Ralph Bakshi, a filmmaker who had recently scored with some edgy, almost X-rated, animated films. As he’d done with
Heavy Traffic
and
Fritz the Cat,
Bakshi planned to turn
Grease
into a long-format cartoon.

“Which is all wrong,” Allan said when he got the bad news. Then he forgot about
Grease,
only to remember it at precisely the right moment.

Lunching at Sardi’s restaurant one day, Allan spotted Kenneth Waissman and Maxine Fox across the crowded dining room. He winked at the two
Grease
producers, and on his way out of the famed theater eatery, he decided to make nice. “So when’s your movie coming out?” he asked.

“It’s not,” said Waissman. “The rights came back to us.”

“Really?” said Allan. “I’m doing a picture deal with Paramount and I’d really be interested in producing the movie version of
Grease
.”

“Call me after lunch,” said Waissman, who never expected to hear another word from Allan Carr, since “Allan was waving and talking to everybody else in Sardi’s that day.” After his own
Grease
/Bakshi turnabout, the Broadway producer tended to discount these Hollywood types.

Forty-five minutes later, Allan made good on his promise to phone. “I
really
am interested in producing the movie version of
Grease
,” he began. More than ready to sell their musical, Waissman and Fox sold the option for $200,000, which Allan considered quite a bargain for such a long-running show. At that time, Allan didn’t have $200,000 in quick change, so he “bought it on the installment plan,” as he described it, giving the Broadway producers a few thousand dollars every month.

It was the era of tuner sophisticates like Stephen Sondheim and Bob Fosse, and many on Shubert Alley considered
Grease,
with its easy pop-rock melodies and bare-bones staging, “the bastard child of Broadway,” as Allan dubbed it.
The theater may have been his first love, but even on this turf, he considered himself the outsider. Allan could relate to
Grease
’s interloper status, especially when he learned that young people (“under thirty” in theater parlance) were going to see
Grease
again and again. Repeat business, as Allan knew, is what turns a hit movie into a blockbuster movie.

Grease
began as a community theater production in Chicago, scheduled to run only four performances over two weekends in February 1971. But the show, written by two local guys—Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey—caught on with the Windy City audiences, and one year later, it opened on Broadway at a bargain-basement cost of only $100,000, compared to the then-record $750,000 spent on the Stephen Sondheim extravaganza
Follies
a few months earlier.

When Allan began his rights negotiations, both
Follies
and the 1972 Tony winner for best musical,
Two Gentlemen of Verona,
had shuttered, while Tony loser
Grease
continued to pack them in, albeit at discounted prices for its young audiences. In negotiations, he and Waissman enjoyed a good working relationship before reality fouled everything by week’s end. Allan wanted the earliest possible movie release date for his investment while Waissman, fearing that the movie would cut into his stage-show ticket sales, wanted that date postponed. These talks caused a major freeze between the two parties, and when they bumped into each other at industry events, Allan indulged in this habit of looking through Waissman to say clever things like, “Who are you?”

Their deal went to arbitration with the Dramatists Guild, which settled in Waissman’s favor with a 1978 release date. “It seemed like a long time into the future,” says Waissman. Allan knew how to hold a grudge. Since he didn’t win that battle, he thought he could waive the option money. “It forced him to bring in Stigwood,” says Waissman, who also thought it would be a good deal if his percentage was based on gross after break-even rather than a back-end deal. “My feeling was at that point $500,000 or $250,000—what is the difference?”

In its wisdom, Paramount Pictures jumped at the savings, because “while Michael Eisner thought the movie could be a success, Barry Diller didn’t have great faith,” says Waissman. In Allan’s opinion, everyone at Paramount was “nervous,” and that included Eisner, who had been brought on by Diller to revitalize the studio. (And Eisner did with
Saturday Night Fever, Happy Days, Cheers,
the
Star Trek
franchise, and, of course,
Grease
.)

Allan’s wrangling and perseverance paid off. He also secured one major caveat from the stage producers, and that was the rarely won interpolation
clause. In essence, Waissman agreed “that if some of the music from the stage musical wasn’t quite right for the movie, [Carr and Stigwood] had the right to add additional songs to the picture.”

Both Stigwood and Allan wanted there to be a
Grease
title song, something the stage show lacked. To add new songs by new songwriters—it was a major, if not outrageous, concession. “Something that composers for the legitimate theater never agree to,” said Allan, who knew full well that Casey and Jacobs were not Lerner and Loewe. In this case, Allan asked for Camelot, and he got Camelot.

However, before he and Stigwood could commission composers Barry Gibb, John Farrar, and Louis St. Louis to write new songs, before John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John were cast as high school sweethearts Danny Zuko and Sandy Olsson (née Dumbrowski), Allan needed to get Stigwood’s attention. It was Stigwood, after all, who was looking for properties to fulfill his three-picture deal with Paramount.

The Aussie producer wasn’t averse to putting his money into a movie musical, but as he continually pointed out to Allan, movie musicals weren’t making money. In fact, there had been few box-office winners since Barbra Streisand made her film debut in 1968’s
Funny Girl
. Then again, Stigwood was banking on his
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
to make him a ton of money at the box office. But unlike
Grease,
“
Sgt. Pepper
has the Beatles. It can’t lose,” said Stigwood.

Allan didn’t quite know how to convince Stigwood of
Grease
’s commercial validity until he contacted a mild-mannered cinematographer named Bill Butler, who was extraordinarily busy with two back-to-back projects:
Jaws,
directed by a young director named Steven Spielberg
,
and
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, directed by a new Czech director named Milos Forman.

Butler and Allan made an unlikely partnership, but like so many family men, the avuncular cinematographer, who rarely raised his voice above a whisper, took an immediate liking to Hollywood’s loudest, most “flamboyant” producer-manager, and vice versa. Back in the 1970s, when Hollywood was enjoying the golden age of
The Godfather
and
Taxi Driver
and
American Graffiti,
many producers considered their next picture a work of art beyond reproach. “Allan’s attitude was different,” says Butler. “He was ‘Hey, let’s have fun making a movie.’” That playful approach to the job even carried over to his personal life. “Allan was gay as could be, and that’s part of what I liked about him. He wasn’t trying
to hide anything,” adds Butler, who remembers one meeting at Seahaven in Malibu. Allan had just gotten back from Hawaii. “And there was this young boyfriend Allan had picked up there. There was a surfboard in the back of his convertible. I loved him for that.”

Since the cinematographer had never seen
Grease,
Allan flew Butler to New York City to see it onstage. Later, the two men met at an Italian restaurant in Philadelphia to work out how they could “make it not a Broadway thing but a movie.” Stigwood was coming to town, and had set aside a small window of time for their
Grease
sales pitch. With the help of some colored crayons and a paper tablecloth, Butler laid out his vision of
Grease:
Because young audiences preferred realism to musical fantasy,
Grease
would be a realistic musical. “Let’s put it in a real high school and make it as real as possible,” Butler told Allan. He started with the show’s song “Greased Lightning,” in which the Kenickie character fantasizes about his dream car. Butler scribbled a few frames of celluloid on the paper tablecloth, then explained, “We’ll have the character slide under a real car and then ‘transition’ to a musical dream sequence in which he sings.” It was Allan’s job to sell that concept to Stigwood.

Rather than meet his potential
Grease
collaborators in a restaurant or hotel room, Stigwood chose a more convenient location for the confab. “We met in Stigwood’s limousine,” Butler recalls. “Allan was the greatest salesman you could ever imagine. Stigwood was cold and distant, he didn’t want to deal with me. I was just a cameraman.” Allan presented his “realistic musical” to Stigwood, who bought the concept in about ten minutes.