“I feel the 1970s is a very misinterpreted period. Particularly in gay history because we always think that everything was very repressed and then there’s the 1970s where everything all happened. That it was all party time but if you went to the office; politically it was nowhere. But certainly in Hollywood [Carr] was the only powerbroker who was out of the closet.”
In the history of filmmaking Allan Carr is not an instantly recognizable household name.
Yet, this openly gay man (when it was so not fashionable to be out) produced one of the top- grossing musicals of all time known as Grease starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. His marketing savvy and astoundingly over-the-top parties are well known and still remembered within the ranks of the Hollywood elite and the pretty people of a decade from 1975 to 1985. Overweight, insecure and following his dream of being an important force to be reckoned with in the film and the- atre business, Carr also was the producing force behind the ground breaking Broadway musical called La Cage aux Folles. More notoriously, Carr also produced the devastatingly bad 1979 musical starring The Village People called Can’t Stop the Music. His thumbprint also as a producer is on the 1989 Academy Award ceremony. One that will go down in the history books, as one of the most innovative for it’s time and most repulsive to those in the industry. Enter Robert Hofler, Variety Senior Editor in L.A. and author of The Man
Who Invented Rock Hudson. His creative skill to document Allan Carr’s life and his wild ride of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, which swirled around Carr and a generation, is a fascinating read in his latest book Party Animals. The Rage Monthly spoke with Hofler to discover how the book came to be, what intrigued the author most and why Carr deserves a resurrec- tion within the pages of Hofler’s biography. Why a biography on Allan Carr? Hofler elaborates, “It kind of came
out of The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson in that I was very interested in Henry Willson [a notorious closeted gay man and talent agent of the 1940s and 1950s]. That book was also an exploration of what it meant to be gay in Hollywood from the 1930s through the 1960s. So, I was thinking that would be interesting to continue through the 1970s and 1980s. I find it interesting to be gay in Hollywood because I think it’s a very homophobic town. I mean now…a lot of agents and directors, screenwriters and producers are out. But, they certainly weren’t in the 1970s and 1980s. Still to this day we don’t have that really out movie star. Some people in TV have been able to do it. So it was really kind of this picture of ‘Why do
(above) Carr in his basement disco, Beverly Hills 1978 (below) Carr with Maxwell Caulfield at Grease 2 premiere, Hollywood 1982.
MAY 2010 | RAGE monthly 41
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