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. They are going to get introduced to "Grease" in a way that their world looks today.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. I could be one of the first African‑American people that are ever a part of this musical and I love that my little brother and sister get to watch this show, and they get to actually see the world that is around them. All I can say is that there was hashtag historical‑type vibes. (The producer and director) took everything that you like, everything that you love, and flipped it on its head. lot, the feeling that we all had is when we knew we were doing something that was truly innovative. Keke: I remember when we first went to the Warner Bros.It’s like going to a concert where you can't fully replicate the experience, and that's why people go. And I think the format of "Grease" allows people to feel immersed in the experience that we are having because we are essentially having a party. And I think the beautiful thing that I love about television is that, as opposed to film, you can grow with and love characters that are in your home every week. Jordan: I love this question for a lot of reasons because I grew up doing theater and then kind of fell into TV and film.Q: Any of you, what is it about television and maybe this production in particular that is making the musical format so popular right now? There have been a few musicals done live on TV lately. They are going to be singing along and dancing, I hope. So when people our families, our friends, are introducing their kids for the first time to "Grease," they are going to feel really involved as well. I'm excited for people to watch it at home, too, because that's how we are creating it. I always say that we can be in rehearsal or on stage and give a hundred percent, but when there's an audience, there's this, like, reserve tank, this extra little umph and that's where magic happens, and that's why I think we are so excited that we have the live audience element. I feel like when you are on stage performing, that live audience element helps so much. And this kind of combines all of that in a fun and exciting way for us, and we don't have to keep it separate like we usually do. Aaron: I think it's something we've talked about a lot, just the different venues of live performance, whether it be on stage or Julianne doing "Dancing with the Stars" but, at the same time, doing television and film.
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