“Barry Diller and Allan Carr hated each other’s guts,” says Robert Hofler, Carr’s biographer. The studio sniffed at the idea as lowbrow even as it green-lighted it. Film rights had already been sold to Ralph Bakshi (the animator who made the X-rated Fritz the Cat), but when they lapsed, Carr snapped them up for $200,000 and took the project to Paramount. When it arrived in New York a year later, playing Off Broadway at the Eden Theatre, Carr caught it one night with composer Marvin Hamlisch and director-choreographer Michael Bennett and instantly saw its potential as a film. The gritty, profanity-laced, raunchy story of teenage attitude-for which Jacobs and Casey collaborated on the book, the lyrics, and the music-opened on February 5, 1971, in a former trolley barn in Chicago. They would call it Grease, an homage to the era’s greasy hair, greasy engines, and greasy food. Hearing Led Zeppelin records playing at a late-night cast party, they both lamented the passing of the great doo-wop songs of the 1950s, which turned into an idea of writing a stage musical about a bunch of ne’er-do-well high-schoolers with that music as the backbone of its score. Jacobs had been a greaser himself in high school Casey had been bookish and studious. The two had met through an amateur theater group in Chicago in the early 1960s. Grease was the brainchild of an advertising copywriter, Jim Jacobs, and a high-school art teacher, Warren Casey. He was really the star of Grease.” Casting and Crow’s-Feet “Allan would come in standing on the dolly cart in his caftan, with his arms outstretched like Moses, and he would say, ‘Children, children, gather round,’ and then give us the reports on the dailies and how they were being received,” recalls Dinah Manoff, who played Marty, one of the Pink Ladies, in the movie. Its supporting cast was made up largely of a ragtag cluster of 1950s has-beens, and its second lead actor was a wild child who would later die of complications from drug abuse. 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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