“He was mad,” she recalls. “Allan didn’t talk to me for two years.”
He did, however, talk to Olivia’s agent, screaming at him, “I made her a movie star!”
Just as the Village People movie was conceived under the influence, the development of the script also had much to do with consumption—or lack thereof. “Bronte Woodard and I went to a fat farm in Durham, North Carolina, to lose weight and write the movie Discoland,” says Bruce Vilanch. Allan planned to join them, but business kept him fat and occupied in Los Angeles.
It was not a typical diet, this Durham regimen. “You ate nothing but rice for a month and lost thirty pounds,” says Vilanch. Allan believed in the diet, having done it a number of times with spectacular results—until the weight returned in a month or two. That he didn’t accompany Woodard and Vilanch to North Carolina came as something of a pleasant surprise to the two writers, who preferred that their temperamental third wheel stay behind on the West Coast.
The two writers were at slightly different points in their respective careers. Vilanch had just come off writing a Broadway bomb called Platinum, in which Alexis Smith played a stage actress who reinvents herself as a recording artist. It was billed as “the musical with a flip-side,” and ran thirty-three performances.
Woodard, on the other hand, had written Grease, now the top-grossing movie musical of all time, and he’d gotten good reviews for his first (and only) novel, Meet Me at the Melba, a southern tale of romance that was based on his parents’ courtship. It was a very personal project. “And Bronte’s sole mission in life was to get that novel made into a movie,” says Vilanch. Allan optioned it and kept announcing everyone from Meryl Streep to Jill Clayburgh to play the female leads. “So here Bronte was writing Discoland with hopes that Allan would eventually produce Melba.” His intentions were admirable. “But Bronte’s property didn’t really appeal to Allan’s sensibilities,” says Vilanch.
While Allan never made it to North Carolina to help write the Discoland script, his long-distance phone calls were a constant in Durham. When Olivia Newton-John refused the project, Allan phoned Woodard and Vilanch. “Now it’s Cher! Rewrite for Cher!” he ordered.
The next day, their editor from Hilhaven Lodge instructed them, “We’re writing for Henry Fonda!” Shirlee Fonda, the actor’s wife, had been a recent guest of Allan’s, and she promised to show her husband the finished script. Allan thought Henry Fonda would be perfect to play the cameo of a stuffy law-firm executive in the film.
There was also input from the Village People’s lead singer, who was the sole hetero of the group. “Victor Willis didn’t want people to perceive him as being gay,” says Vilanch, “so he insisted we write the role of a girlfriend, to be played by his wife, Phylicia Rashad,” aka the future Mrs. Huxtable of The Cosby Show fame.
Equally problematic was the continuing debate over how to cast the movie’s leading lady. After Woodard and Vilanch wrote the supermodel role for Cher, Allan phoned to tell them, “Cher is out! Now it’s Raquel Welch. She will be the supermodel in the movie. Write for Raquel Welch. Think Raquel!”
Screenwriter contracts are complex affairs written on many pieces of paper. Myriad situations are covered in minute detail, more than a few of which are open to interpretation by any number of parties. In this instance, it was the opinion of Vilanch that “step two of the deal had kicked in.” He had been put through numerous rewrites as various actresses came and went in the imagination of Allan Carr. According to the contract, each rewrite necessitates more money, and at this point in the leading-lady marathon, Allan had asked his screenwriters to embark on at least their third rewrite, by Vilanch’s calculation.
“I need more money,” he told Allan.
Allan’s response: “Bronte will write it!”
Thirty pounds lighter but not much richer in the pocketbook, Vilanch returned to Los Angeles.
If any piece of the casting puzzle didn’t get shuffled, it was a hunk who’d never acted before. Allan invited Bruce Jenner, the Olympics 1976 triathlon champion, to one his Hilhaven parties in the mid-1970s, and listened with sympathy as the former athlete and current Wheaties box cover boy mused about the on-again, off-again negotiations for his starring in the new Superman movie, a role that eventually went to Christopher Reeve. After one such bitch session, Allan told his new athlete-friend, “I want to do a movie with you.”
“Great,” said Jenner.
“I just don’t know what it is, but I will find the right vehicle.”
“Great,” said Jenner.
And then, as with the Superman project, the waiting began. There were more parties at Hilhaven, but no movie deal. Then, six months later, Allan phoned to inform Jenner, “I’ve been thinking about this project. I’ve finally got the idea. I was with the Village People the other day. There’s a story there. You could play their lawyer. To put you together with them is brilliant casting. It’s Mutt and Jeff.”
Jenner harbored a few reservations when he heard the words “the Village People.” As the Wheaties model, he couldn’t afford to blow his all-American image. “And at that point in time, people didn’t know how to take the Village People,” he recalls. The six singers occupied an odd, amorphous place in pop culture. “They were promoted as a disco group.” But were they gay? Were they macho men? Were they gay macho men? Only later did Jenner get the picture: “In the casting, boy, you learned quickly, this is a gay group!”
When Cher nixed the idea of making a film called Discoland, the next head on the chopping block belonged to Raquel Welch. The ultimate arbiters here, however, were neither Allan Carr nor Raquel Welch but rather the Village People.
David Hodo, the group’s construction worker, began his career in show business in a Broadway bomb called Doctor Jazz, and had already heard too many horror stories about La Welch. And while she did display the courage to strap on a dildo ten years earlier in Myra Breckinridge, the six men insisted, “No Raquel.”
The news came to Allan during one of his many sojourns in Cedars-Sinai. Valerie Perrine happened to be visiting him in the hospital after the Village People’s edict came down. Five years earlier, the former Vegas showgirl had created much hoopla with her Oscar-nominated portrayal of Lenny Bruce’s drugged-out bimbo wife in Lenny. In more recent years, her star slipped a bit with below-the-title roles in The Electric Horseman and Superman, in which she played Lex Luthor’s paramour. Allan and Perrine were old friends, and in the midst of their usual gossip treadmill of extramarital affairs, career misfortunes, and plastic surgery mishaps, the blond actress noticed something about Allan that had previously escaped her attention. “Allan kept looking at my legs,” she recalls. And there was plenty of leg to check out under Perrine’s microminiskirt. Considering her friend’s sexual orientation, “I thought that strange.” His fixation on the lower part of her anatomy continued until, finally, he announced, “You can play a supermodel!”
Allan’s impromptu choice to play the supermodel—sometimes referred to as “a woman,” as Janet Maslin described the role in her New York Times review of the film—impressed the Village People. The actress’s mildly risqué screen persona preceded her and she certainly seemed like a fun, good-old party girl that five, if not six, gay men could relate to.
How much fun the Village People did not know until they performed at Madison Square Garden, a venue of 17,000 seats, which, to Allan’s promoter eyes, made it the ideal place to announce his Discoland cast. Before entering the Garden, Allan saw a sign for the new Broadway play The Elephant Man. He scrunched up his face. “What’s that about?” he asked Bruce Vilanch.
“It’s a play about the ugliest man in the world” came the reply.
Allan let out a whiff of disgust. “Good, I won’t turn it into a movie.”
He entertained more attractive plans.
The Garden gig came near the end of the Village People’s 1979 national tour—one that had already taken them to forty-six cities in a fast, if not numbing, fifty-four days. T
he Village People looked dead on arrival at Madison Square Garden, but nonetheless anticipated with excitement their first movie, even if it left them only a short two-week break between their tour schedule and the first day of filming. Backstage at the Garden, Allan took the opportunity not only to introduce them to Valerie Perrine and Bruce Jenner but to hand each of the six men his own copy of the long-awaited Discoland script. The words “By Allan Carr and Bronte Woodard” were nearly as large as the title itself.
The Village People collectively dropped their scripts when Allan introduced Perrine. “Valerie turned around, bent over, and mooned us,” Hodo says. “She had on a g-string.” Yes, this would be a fun shoot.
“Valerie scared the shit out of Bruce Jenner,” says his then-publicist, Kathy Berlin. “Bruce had never kissed anyone onscreen. He hadn’t spent any time around gays. This movie was really out of his element.”
The plan that evening was for Allan to introduce his Discoland cast during the intermission at the Garden. If Allan was the showman, Perrine was the showgirl, who, once again, did not disappoint. Just before she took the stage to greet the Village People’s many adoring fans, “She tweaked her nipples so that they stood up through her dress,” says Hodo. The effect may have been lost on many in the crowd that night, but not on those who mattered most. “It was driving our roadies crazy,” says Hodo.
Crazy, too, was Allan, who genuinely loved the Village People. He couldn’t believe the audience’s ovation for each and every number they performed. “Wow!” he exclaimed afterward. “You guys are more popular than Farrah Fawcett!”
More than ready to unwind, the Village People took to their respective hotel suites after the show, ready to hunker down with a good script, in this case, Allan Carr and Bronte Woodard’s Discoland screenplay. They couldn’t wait to see what the genius behind Grease had wrought this time. During their many, many evenings on the road, the six men had often dreamed about the kind of movie they wanted to headline. They batted around various story lines, but the concept they liked best was to play vampires—vampires who would perform their disco show in a different town every night, and when they left the next morning, a dozen dead bodies trailed their tour bus. They even had thought about what they’d wear: “Red, white, and blue costumes with lots of stars and stripes,” says Hodo.
The costumes were the least of it.
On Saturday, June 9, 1979, with a few more weeks left on their national tour, the Village People opened in Los Angeles at the Greek Theater, an open-air venue plunked down among the chaparral and pine trees in one of the most spectacularly scenic ravines of Griffith Park. If Henri Belolo and Jacques Morali had traveled to Griffith Park rather than Fire Island Pines, it might have been “the bushes” of this wooded glen that inspired them to write an ode to the splendiferous dangers of cruising al fresco.
Just as Allan used the Madison Garden gig to introduce Discoland to the Village People’s fans, he worked the Greek Theater engagement to advertise it to his closest hundred friends in the Hollywood press corps. Allan was in L.A. The Village People were in L.A. What did it matter that the movie’s release date loomed a year away? From a publicity point of view, Allan wanted to celebrate Discoland’s “pre-first-anniversary,” as he put it, with a series of bashes that would effectively promote the film’s new tag line, “Where the Music Never Ends.” Those words were the theme of his West Coast kickoff, as duly noted in the Los Angeles Times, which obliged with a headline, “Hollywood’s Party Champion Defends His Crown,” that Allan himself could not have bettered.
The local journalists’ biggest query was whether Hollywood’s ultimate party-giver had planned four or five fetes that evening or just one long affair, which took them from a 6:30 p.m. cocktail party at the Bistro Garden to the Greek Theater concert to Hilhaven Lodge, where festivities ended at around 1 a.m. for the heterosexual crowd and about 3 a.m. for everybody else. That was three parties right there. And that didn’t count the party on wheels (complete with box dinners and the ubiquitous Cristal) that whisked dozens of reporters on two buses (one marked “Y.M.C.A.,” the other “In the Navy”) between the Bistro, the Greek, and Hilhaven. Entertainment journalists are always in search of a hook, an angle, or a twist to help make their breathless words coalesce into a cogent thought. Allan was there, ready as ever, with his “where the party never ends” line.
For his Discoland launch, he played it casual—blue jeans, blue blazer, and white shirt with an AC monogrammed on the breast pocket. His only ostentatious touch was a rather humongous diamond pin on his lapel. “A gift from Ann-Margret,” he said whenever asked—or not asked. There would be no theatrical changes of his outfit tonight. It was 6:30 p.m., and he wasn’t getting home before midnight. He also sported a beard, which prompted him to proclaim, repeatedly, “I’m in my Francis Coppola period!” The Godfather director was very much on everyone’s mind as he readied his much-anticipated Apocalypse Now for release later that summer.
At the evening’s first party, at the Bistro, Allan described his Discoland as, alternately, “Singin’ in the Rain for the disco crowd” and “It’s a 1950s musical. It’s My Sister Eileen. It’s New York the way you wish it were. No dog do-do, no garbage, no killings.” He also billed Discoland as the first in an ongoing musical trilogy, which would soon put Goldie Hawn in Chicago and Diana Ross in a Josephine Baker biopic.
Was it any wonder Allan got quoted more than, say, Robert De Niro or Diane Keaton? On the red-tile patio of the Bistro, shaded by a dozen colorful umbrellas, Allan repeated his comments with minor variations. Two tuxedoed violinists serenaded, and a hundred reporters wrote down what he said as they were catered to by no fewer than ten waiters, six press agents, and ten security types, led by Gavin de Becker, who liked to flaunt his business card, which advertised the “International Terrorist Research Center in El Paso, Tex.”
Beyond the overabundance of liquor and hors d’oeuvres, Allan plied his reporter friends with other goodies as well. He especially prided himself in the makeover he’d achieved with newcomer Steve Guttenberg, who’d been cast in the Morali/Morell role. While some of the movie’s participants would call his attention to the twenty-year-old actor’s body “obsessive,” Allan made no apologies. “I worked with Steve for two months to prepare him physically and mentally for playing a starring role. He’s lost a lot of baby fat, and his face now, it lights up the screen.”
Guttenberg was but the first of many young actors whom Allan, as a producer, lusted after. “He had a lot of little crushes,” says Kathy Berlin, who did publicity chores on every Allan Carr film. “‘I’m going to make you a star, boy!’”
At the Bistro Garden, Allan lavished only a little less hyperbole on his director, Nancy Walker, calling her “the next Alfred Hitchcock,” and his choreographer, Arlene Phillips, who he claimed would be “the next Michael Bennett,” which left it to Bruce Jenner to give the reporters the only other line worth reprinting.
“Bruce, why are you making this movie?” asked one journalist.
“You can’t live on Wheaties alone,” said Jenner.
Even before the cameras rolled on Discoland, a slight freeze had already chilled the working relationship between male star and producer. Jenner had recently received a script from producer Howard Koch, who was making a new comedy. “You’d be perfect to play the pilot,” Koch told him.
“I love the script,” said Jenner.
But before he committed, Jenner wanted to inform Allan that this other film would be coming out next summer at about the same time as Discoland. It was such a small request. Jenner thought that Allan wouldn’t mind.
“Fuck no!” Allan screamed. “I don’t want you in another movie! You can’t do that!”
Jenner felt he had no choice, “out of loyalty” to Allan, but to refuse the other offer. Disappointed, Koch cast another athlete-turned-actor, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Still, Jenner had to wonder as he did press chores for Discoland at the Bistro, “Did I make the right choice? Would this other film—Ai
rplane!—be a big success?”
As the revelers left the Bistro to go to the Greek Theater, each of them received either a blue lapel dot or a yellow lapel dot. Yellow meant they were relegated to the “Y.M.C.A.” bus; blue translated into a seat on the “In the Navy” bus. The latter bus qualified as the preferred mode of transportation since it carried Allan, who, after renditions of “Red River Valley” and “The Irish Washer Woman,” gave the assembled reporters even more grist for their newspapers when he brayed at the lone violinist onboard to play something else. “Could we please have some Strauss waltzes?” he insisted, pointing a diamond-encrusted finger at the offending fiddler.
When the two buses unloaded their cargo in front of the Greek Theater, more alcohol and more hors d’oeuvres awaited everyone in yet another hospitality suite. In concert, the Village People were the Village People, singing the same rotation of “Best of Hits,” from “San Francisco” to “Fire Island,” that they had performed in forty-five other cities. Then it was back on the buses to the night’s final party, at Allan’s house.
A few partygoers—Robin Williams, Candy Clark, and Sam Bottoms, among others—chose to forgo the live entertainment in favor of a late-night dip in Allan’s disco basement. The Village People were thrilled nonetheless that the movie celebs made at least one appearance in their honor that evening.
Party Animals Page 14