It was the Hindenburg of Oscar telecasts, only more flaming.
The year was 1989. The place was LA’s Shrine Auditorium. And heading into the 61st Academy Awards, not unlike tonight’s telecast, ratings had been on a downward trend.
The academy needed to shake things up and grab a younger generation — work up some heat, dammit! So they hired Allan Carr, a 51-year-old Beverly Hills party boy and Broadway producer riding high on the hit movie version of “Grease.”
Carr was also the fearlessly flamboyant host of some of ’70s Hollywood’s most debauched after-parties, rife with cocaine, kimonos and pool boys. He was Truman Capote with a suntan.
The academy gave Carr a mandate to breathe life into the stodgy, black-tie Oscars. But Carr had recently been enthralled by theatrical camp, intentionally over-the-top, sequiny spoof revues that made John Waters seem tame. His bright idea was an opening number so gloriously edgy and fabulous that Hollywood would be talking about it for years.
Which they did. But not in a good way. Not at all.
COMPLETE LIST OF THIS YEAR’S OSCAR NOMINEES
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“And now, ladies and gentlemen, here’s one of the great legends of Hollywood. She’s back with us tonight — Miss Snow White!”
So begins the mother of all flops, the infamously off-the-mark opening number at the 61st Oscars, inspired by the long-running San Francisco revue “Beach Blanket Babylon.” The campy musical featured a send-up of “Snow White” and Carr hired “Babylon” director Steve Silver to craft a version for the Oscars.
“It is so exciting to be here tonight,” squeaks Snow White, played by Eileen Bowman, an unknown actress who’d had the role in a traveling production of “Babylon.” Skipping down the aisle, she awkwardly attempts to shake hands with baffled stars such as Jack Nicholson, Kevin Kline, Tom Hanks and Sigourney Weaver. Meanwhile, she’s singing an altered version of “Memories” that goes, “Memories . . . of my Hollywood.”
It’s weird. No one gets it.
Snow White gets on stage and joins an Old Tinseltown tribute — a song-and-dance homage to the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, a famed hangout of Golden Age stars and site of the 1940 Oscars. Merv Griffin sings, “I’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts” while Carmen Miranda-inspired dancers jiggle.
“Isn’t it exciting, Snow? Isn’t it thrilling?” asks Griffin. “It gets better. Meet your date — Rob Lowe.”
Screeeech! What? The Oscars had just flown off the rails.
As the Brat Pack star enters stage left, Snow White gasps, “Oh, Mr. Lowe. I’m such a fan.”
Suddenly, Snow White and her “date” are singing a duet to the tune of Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary.”
“Used to work a lot for Walt Disney,” she sings, “starring in cartoons every night and day.”
“But you said goodbye to Grumpy and Sleepy,” Lowe croons, “left the dwarves behind, came to town and stayed.”
Then they harmonize: “Klieg lights keep on burning, cameras keep on turning. Rolling, wooo, rolling, wooo, keep the cameras rolling.”
We’re now at the eight-minute mark. There’s polite applause, and the cameras pan a crowd of shocked faces: Bob Hope, Cybil Shepard and a young Robert Downey Jr.
But there’s four more minutes: A chorus line of high-kicking Grauman’s Chinese Theater ushers precede a “Hooray for Hollywood” number and Lily Tomlin emerging from a giant box of popcorn.
“More than a billion and a half people just watched that,” Tomlin says. “And at this very moment, they’re trying to make sense of it.”
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Twenty-one years later, it’s still hard to make sense of Carr’s creation. Brought in to liven up a tired broadcast, he went so far overboard that scathing reviews were the best thing that happened to him.
Days after the show, a group of cinema elites, including Gregory Peck, Julie Andrews and Paul Newman, sent a petition to the academy lambasting the show as trashy, tacky and beneath the integrity of Oscar. They sought to ban Carr from any future association with the show.
Then, Disney and its army of lawyers prepared a lawsuit based on proprietary misuse of Snow White. The studio was only appeased when the academy, like Stalin erasing a rival from the archives, agreed to never release any images of the fiasco and strike the entire opening act from its official history of the 61st Oscars.
As atrocious as the Snow White opening was, some say it was only the second-most horrendous number in the show. Later, a nine-minute “Break-Out Superstars of Tomorrow” song-and-dance included such “up-and-comers” as Holly Robinson, Keith Coogan, Tyrone Power Jr. and Corey Parker. (In fairness, Blair Underwood, Patrick Dempsey and a sword-fighting Christian Slater were also in the bit, but they probably wouldn’t admit it.)
Carr never acknowledged that his opening was a bad idea. He merely conceded that 12 minutes might have been a bit long, and that the showy numbers maybe didn’t translate well on TV.
His Hollywood career never recovered, though he went on to produce Tony-nominated takes on “Cyrano de Bergerac” and “Much Ado About Nothing.” At 62, Carr died of liver cancer, 10 years after the Oscar mess.
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Carr’s production may have gone halfway past what a conservative Hollywood crowd could stomach. But it was also half ahead of its time. At last year’s Oscars, host Hugh Jackman sang a medley poking fun at Best Picture nominees. When sending up “Milk,” he took a Carr-esque turn, crooning: “It’s all right to be gay!”
In fact, Carr’s Oscar ceremony innovations are still widely in evidence, according to Robert Hofler’s new book, “Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock ’n’ Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr.”
“Allan was the kind of guy who would have 100 ideas — 50 great and 50 horrible,” says Hofler, also a senior editor at Variety. And Carr did have good ideas. Among them:
* More red carpet. The 1989 show expanded coverage of arriving stars, committing three minutes to Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum, Edward James Olmos, Glenn Close and Dudley Moore. “He led the way for other outlets to do a full hour,” Hofler says. “Allan would love watching that today.”
* More fashion. Working with Fred Hayman, whose store Giorgio was renowned for glamour in Beverly Hills, Carr reached out to designers such as Karl Lagerfeld. “This idea of borrowing gowns to wear, that all started with Allan,” Hofler says. “I mean, the guy walked around wearing caftans and women’s jewelry. Of course he wanted more fashion.”
* More drama. He was the first to send presenters out in pairs and spread out Best Picture nominees so that each film gets its own moment. Both practices are now standard.
* More laughs. He hired comedy writer Bruce Vilanch, who worked on a dozen more Oscar shows.
* More sportsmanlike. Carr changed the announcement from “And the winner is . . .” to “And the Oscar goes to . . .” because it’s not really about “losing” an Oscar, after all.
Ratings actually did go up for the ’89 Oscars, due in large part to Carr’s work promoting the show in advance. Still, the academy asked a commission to study what went wrong. Its main finding: No production number should go over three or four minutes. We thank them for that.
Meanwhile, though the concensus inside the academy and out is that “Proud Mary” was the low point in Oscar history, Hofler thinks the debacle was later topped.
In 2006, when “Crash” took Best Picture, a melodramatic production number spotlighted the film’s car-wreck scene.
“There was ash coming down around burning cars, and people singing and dancing and raising their arms to the sky,” Hofler says. “I thought, OK, now that’s embarrassing. At least Allan wasn’t trying to be serious.”