The Worst Oscars Ever?? with Michael Schulman
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Let me perhaps remind us of the theme you have stated earlier of Icarus. Welcome to You're Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall, and we are talking today about the worst Oscars ever. Or were they?

Our guest today is Michael Schulman, author of Oscar Wars, A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat and Tears. He came on last year to talk about the Oscar streaker, and he has returned to tell us about the alleged worst Oscars ever. We're now in the 80s, and we are telling a story with cameos from everybody from Alice Cooper to Gregory Peck to Bruce Valanche to everybody in between, which is pretty much everybody.

And it is a story of folly. It's a story of saying yes to too many ideas. And it's also a story of how the most over-the-top ideas can sometimes bring us the innovation that we need, even if we don't ever really admit it.

This was such a fun episode to do. I loved returning to the Oscars this way. And thank you again to Michael for coming on. Check out Oscar Wars, why don't you? Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. Thank you for continuing into this year with us. Take care of yourself this week. And here is your episode.

Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where your host has not watched the Oscars since the year Crash won. But boy, do I still love to talk about them. And with me today is our Oscars correspondent, Michael Schulman. Hello. Hi, Sarah. It's great to be back. It's so great to have you back. You were here last year to talk about the Oscars streaker and in a shocking way.

We are having another Academy Award ceremony this year at about the same time. So I thought we should talk about them again. Who could have predicted that? Let me clear up something. So are you the Oscar correspondent or the Oscars correspondent? I think the first one does sound better. I tend to try.

Try to just use Oscar, like Oscar night. Nice. Oscar winner. Yeah, you're right. That is better. Right. Is that better? It is better. But, you know, opinions are split on this. Okay. And my book is Oscar Wars, not Oscars Wars. Oscars Wars. Which would have been too plural. Oscars Wars would have been like...

A book about some like long forgotten but very acrimonious producer who worked with Louis B. Mayer and had a lot of feuds, you know? Named Oscar? Yeah, exactly. The other Oscar. That was his subtitle. So, okay. So last time you talked with us about the Oscar streaker, which was the early 70s? 74. Now we're going forward in time to... Well, this is a little tricky too because it's like...

The 2023 Academy Awards happened in 2024. But in terms of the actual calendar, we are in 1988 with this one, right? Yes. We are talking about the 1989 ceremony of the 1988 Academy Awards. The Academy would call them the 1998 awards, but it in fact happened in 1989.

And the pitch for this was worst Oscars ever. And I think that's very intriguing because I feel like a lot of people have different nominations for their own personal worst Oscars. But I feel like within Oscar lore, like this seems like kind of empirically the worst one. Or is it?

This is a true you're wrong about for me because kind of every year there's some article online that says, remember the worst Oscars ever? 1989. It's the Ford Pinto of Oscars. But I digress. And the closer I looked at it, the more I realized that this is actually kind of a tragedy. The reason it's called the worst Oscars ever is.

Yeah. Yeah.

to do not with the winners, as I said, but with the ceremony itself. And in particular, an opening number that lasted 11 long minutes and is so completely bonkers that it just kind of like defies all standards of like sense and good taste. But what actually the story of this Oscars is actually the story of the producer, Alan Carr, and why this happened and

Why him? What became of him? To me, it's a story about ostracization, about hubris, about excess and to some extent homophobia in the 80s. But, you know, I think more than anything else, it's it's an Icarus story. You know, it's about a man who flew too close to the sun. OK. And I am also interested in the ceremony because I.

I think the question of like the line between like terrible and great is often subjective. I'm just very curious. I think the best way to begin before we get to Alan Carr is

would be for me to just describe what happens in this opening number. Now, if people want to find it, it is on YouTube. It's not on the Academy's official YouTube channel. There's a legal reason. But if you want to find it and watch it, just go to Google, you know, search for 1989 Oscars opening number and you can see it in all its glory. But if you want to, if you want it rendered in, you know, in spoken word. So the first thing that we see

is Armie Archer, who was a longtime Variety columnist, and he's standing outside of the Shrine Auditorium with a microphone, and he introduces Snow White, who is a woman dressed like the classic Disney Snow White.

And when she speaks, it's in this very squeaky high voice like the cartoon. And she says, good evening, Mr. Archer. It's so exciting to be here tonight. And then she asks him, how do I get into the theater? And he says, just follow the Hollywood stars. Mixing references. Oh, just you wait. Don't expect like, you know, like world building consistency here. Okay.

At that point, a bunch of dancers show up who are in sparkly like star costumes. Like you can't see their heads. They're just giant stars with legs coming out of the bottom. Oh. And they glide past. They flit into the theater and guide Snow White down the aisle.

So now we're in the theater, the Shrine Auditorium, and this woman dressed as Snow White is walking down the aisle singing a version of I Only Have Eyes For You, except we only have stars for you. And she's greeting people on the aisle like Tom Hanks and Dustin Hoffman and Glenn Close and singing to them and tapping them on the shoulder. And everyone looks very...

startled and uncomfortable like you can just see all these A-list actors from the 80s just trying to avert their gaze that they aren't like I didn't rehearse this but that goes on for quite a while

And then Snow White gets up on stage and we're now at a replica of the Coconut Grove, the classic Hollywood nightclub with palm trees and dancing waiters who are doing like a mambo number. And then out from the wings comes Merv Griffin just saying, I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts. Wow. Okay. I feel like they said yes to all their ideas and brainstorming maybe. Yeah.

And then there are ladies who come out who have like pina colada headdresses and little like half coconuts. There's a row of cocktail tables at the back with sort of like classic...

you know, Hollywood stars and they they Merv starts introducing them and they do little things like Sid Sharice, the classic dancer does a tango and Roy Rogers and Dale Evans are infringed cowboy costumes and like Vincent Price is there and Dorothy L'Amour. And then they kind of each have a moment. And then Merv tells Snow White, meet your blind date, Rob Lowe.

Oh, be careful, Snow White. He's not a safe pair of hands. He's definitely not. And we will also get to that.

So Roblo comes out in All Black and he and Snow White sing a duet of Proud Mary with different lyrics, with new lyrics. Oh my God. One of them is, but you said goodbye to grumpy and sleepy, left the dwarves behind, came to town to stay. I do admire anyone who takes such a big swing, I have to say. Like, have I ever gambled so big in my life? Obviously not. The problem is,

problem here is that Rob Lowe really cannot sing it sounds like dry heaving it's really bad it's not a pretty sound it's a pretty face not a pretty sound coming out of it well the people who are watching it on mute because they're at work right now are probably like oh I bet he's doing good yeah but it's like big wheels keep on it's bad it's like he's crawled through a desert it's not good

Then Snow White says, uno, dos, tres, cuatro, and does a conga line with the dancing waiters. The cocktail tables with the human heads are now fully up and boogieing around. They're doing the up-tempo part of Proud Mary. It's been eight minutes so far that this number has gone on, and it is not over.

You're just sitting. It's not like the Golden Globes where you have a table, right? Like people are just sitting there without the ability to have drinks for hours and hours. Yeah, they're just sitting in sitting in theater rows trapped. The Coconut Grove set rises and we're now at Grauman's Chinese Theater, the famous movie palace. A theater inside a theater. It's a true Turducken situation. And Snow White.

sings to Rob Lowe about how beautiful this theater is and then they pull open the theater doors to reveal a chorus line in red usher costumes and they do a kick line then the set lifts again and we see that the gigantic like pagoda thing from the Chinese theater is actually an enormous hat that Snow White is wearing on her head okay now here's our big finish all the ushers then sing hooray for Hollywood

as a big staircase comes on in front of the Hat Pagoda. And then out of the middle of the pagoda emerges...

Lily Tomlin, who walks down the stairs losing one of her high heels and says, well, I told them I'd be thrilled to do the Oscars if they could just come up with an entrance. And then she says, and think of it, more than a billion and a half people just watch that. And at this very moment, they're trying to make sense of it. Wow. And then a chorus boy climbs down the stairs and

Gets her shoe that's fallen off, throws her the shoe, and she says, welcome to the shoe show. We'll be right back. And they cut to commercial. Wow.

How does Lily Tom, does she seem into it? She seemed like everyone else involved in the situation, just like vaguely mortified to be there. Yeah, just like being a pro getting through it. Truly the last person I would expect to emerge at the end of all this. From a giant pagoda hat? Yeah.

So that's what happens in this notorious opening number. It's as excessive and over the top and nonsensical as it sounds. And now we're going to meet the man behind this extravaganza of terrible taste, Mr. Alan Carr. Hello, Alan. Welcome. Welcome to the show. Who is Alan Carr? Alan Carr was a producer and a former talent manager. First of all, he was the producer of Grease, the movie.

That was kind of the pinnacle of his producing career. That's pretty good. He also produced very bad movies, which I happen to love, like Can't Stop the Music, the movie about the village people starring Steve Guttenberg. Have you seen that? Not so much lately, but at many times in my life when I have needed just like some positive vibes, I will watch The

opening of Can't Stop the Music where Steve Guttenberg is roller skating through New York City. Well, first he's at work and they won't let him leave work to audition or something. And he says, my time is now. It's absolutely great. But he was actually more sort of famous around town for throwing incredible parties at his home. That makes sense. First of all, he had a

A lucite grand piano under a crystal chandelier. There was a gigantic Oscar statue outside and a pool with pink, a pink pool. He had upstairs an honorary bedroom, an honorary Olivia and John bedroom and all the gingham because she was the star of Greece. And in the basement, this is the piece de resistance. He had an Egyptian themed disco.

And a couch that he liked to lie on, like Cleopatra and all the couches and Gold Lame. And a bar called the Bella Darby Bar, which is like an old Hollywood end joke because Bella Darby was the Polish film star who starred in the movie The Egyptian. And I spoke to a lot of people who knew Alan Carr for this part of the book.

One of them was Bruce Valanche, who plays a major role in this story. Oh, wonderful. If you're not picking Bruce Valanche, he was, you know, the one time was he center square on the on the new Hollywood squares? He's just a man. He's a man with a shaggy blonde hair and the gigantic red glasses. Yeah. Hollywood staple. He was just like in. I mean, when I was growing up, kind of watching random sitcoms and whatever was on TV in the 90s, he just felt like.

a supporting character in sort of all culture. He is a very funny man and he was friends with Alan Carr and he'd go to these parties and he told me most everyone was chemically altered so it was a great place to sit and trip meaning the downstairs Egyptian disco. And so part of what Alan Carr loved to do at these parties was sort of mix old Hollywood and

young Hollywood like he had one of the people who was there all the time was Gregory Peck which is going to come this is foreshadowing Gregory Peck was you know an elder statesman of Hollywood by that point kind of a square but he loved to come and say things like you know this is quite a scene and

I just want like a Pirates of the Caribbean, but it's just going through one of these parties. Like the ride, not the movie. I don't care for the movies, but it's a superlative ride. Alice Cooper was at these parties. Here's a quote from Alice Cooper. He said, we'd go to Allen's and it would not be surprising to find Mae West sitting next to Rod Stewart or Salvador Dali or Jack Benny.

I mean, that is one of the things that's so fascinating about this period or really, I guess, any period is that you're always going to have these people who you don't think of as existing in the same universe, but they all live in the same area and they all are in the same industry. And so they just get like tightly packed.

Sometimes. Also, to go back to our last episode we did together, he right after the Oscar streak, he invited the streaker Robert Opal to like come to a party he was throwing and like like streak the party, which he did. So these two characters of ours met at one point. Another thing that Alan was famous for besides during these parties was his acting.

Absolutely breathtaking array of designer caftans. He had like 100 caftans in all different colors. They were all lined up in a closet in his bedroom. And usually these parties included multiple wardrobe changes and a lot of showing off caftans. I don't think that's too many caftans for the record, you know? Too many caftans? I didn't say too many.

Oh, I know. I guess I just want to make sure if anybody is out there, you know, wanting me to get ahead of this issue. You know, if you haven't guessed it by now, Alan Carr was very flamboyantly homosexual. You know, it was the 80s. It was not an easy time to be a gay man in America. As Bruce Valanche, who was also gay, told me he never declared himself like baggage.

You know, he was just openly gay to his friends. In fact, he threw parties where the sort of the underground gay scene in Hollywood could come and sort of be themselves. Like, you know, people talk about how like, you know, like David Geffen and like the sort of power gays of Hollywood would come. And in fact, Bruce Valanche claims that Roy Cohn even came to some of these parties. I believe it. I mean, I...

This is also my moment to lodge my complaint with that Apprentice movie, which is that because of the rules of screenwriting, I guess it ended up being about poor old Roy Cohn couldn't hurt a fly. Feels a little weird.

Yeah. I mean, another thing I should say about Alan Carr is he did struggle his whole life with his weight. He was a large guy and that really accounts for his interest in caftans. Yeah. That kind of brings me back to like, who is this guy? Where did he come from? I'll tell you a little bit about his background. He grew up in Highland Park, the suburb of Chicago. And his sort of origin myth that he would always say is that...

When he was a teenager, the producer Mike Todd came to Chicago to open his big Oscar winning epic Around the World in 80 Days, which starred Mike Todd's bride to be Elizabeth Taylor. And he just he threw like a three day party. And Alan Carr went to it and said, I knew what I wanted to do with my life.

So so picture this just like small gay child in suburban Illinois, just obsessed with the Academy Awards, except with obsessed with like Hollywood glitz. His early his actual name was Alan Solomon, but he changed it because he was angry at his parents for getting divorced. But also he thought Alan Carr would look better on a marquee. And also it rhymes with star. Oh, wow.

I love that. And also because changing your name is a good Hollywood origin story. I also feel like you're kind of you're summarizing 75 percent of my approach to history, which is just let's start by imagining someone as the small gay child that they almost inevitably once were. And part of how he kind of got by as that person was to sort of

make himself the center of attention. Here's a quote from Alan. He said, at home I was secure, but at school I felt I was not physically attractive and this exaggerated my desire for approval, to be amusing, to be liked. That's why I came on so strong. Turning himself into like an old-timey showbiz guy

was kind of his way of coping and kind of even like the way he dressed, the sort of like the caftans and everything. It was a way of like drawing attention and like poking the fun at himself and drawing attention to himself so like no one else could do it on their terms. Right. The Paul Lind school of feeling insecure. Yeah, totally. And

And he had this sort of like whirlwind career right out of college. He got money from his parents to reopen the Civic Theater in Chicago and he booked Betty Davis on a tour she was doing. Wow. Then he hooked up somehow with Hugh Hefner, who was trying to turn his magazine to a TV show called Playboy's Penthouse.

And he became the talent coordinator. So that's how he kind of like established himself in Los Angeles. He became a manager and his big client was Ann Margaret. Is this in the 60s? Like early 70s we're in now. Her post Bye Bye Birdie pre-newsies period of wilderness. Yeah.

Now, here's how he actually became a movie producer. And you're going to like this because this ties back into a previous episode of You're Wrong About. Oh, nice. I have listened to the wonderful episode about the the Uruguayan plane crash in the Andes in 1972. Yeah. Oh, boy. In the 70s, there was a quick like a sort of exploitation movie made in Mexico about it called Supervivientes de los Andes.

And basically, Alan like, oh, boy, snapped up. He found out that someone else was was trying to make a movie about the plane crash. So he basically just acquired the U.S. rights to the Mexican exploitation movie version. And he reopened it in the United States with the title Survive with an exclamation point. Yeah.

That is some good producing, I think. I mean, it's not like ethically the most amazing, but that is not what the job is about as far as I can tell. And that kind of got him into the Academy Awards because he was hired in the late 70s to throw the governor's ball, which is like the on-site party that you go to right after, like the official after party. He...

of course, was like an Academy Awards fanatic. So this was a very exciting job for him. But what he really wanted was to produce the show. Part of the problem was that like the Academy Awards were still kind of stuck in the 70s world of like variety shows.

Right. I love going back and watching all those old variety shows. But like think about it. It's like now 1988 and going to 1989. Yeah. That is a very outdated form. And it's like now the era of MTV and the Oscars are still having these sort of like, you know, opening numbers with like chorus girls and like, you know, dressed as Oscars and stuff like that. And there's something very like schmaltzy about it. And yeah.

And so the Academy Awards had to figure out like what to do. And they had had this string of producers who were basically like movie people like Samuel Goldwyn Jr. or like William Friedkin act as the producer of the awards. Oh, my God. So people who were sort of from the movie world, but not necessarily from like the television world. And the reason they went to Alan Carr is that he had done these like lavish parties and was known for sort of –

throwing these extravaganzas and he promised that he could like bring glamour back to the Oscars and remake them, make them bigger, better, more exciting, more glamorous, more this, more that. It does feel like one of the things they're coping with is like the attention span of the American viewer already starting to get smaller, you know, because like

Yeah. And the MTV years were getting into sort of like the music video era, which is orienting the American attention span more to something that's about four minutes long. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And the Oscars weren't getting any shorter. They never have. It's amazing. So basically, he had lived his whole life.

to be sort of like embraced by old Hollywood. Like when you're in these relationships with like Gregory Peck and all these old stars and like

believing in the glamour of like Mike Todd and Elizabeth Taylor and the Academy Awards and you know even in Greece like he brought in these old stars like Eve Arden to like play the principal you know and then finally he has gotten his Hollywood dream come true sort of right when he needed it in his career and now is the part where it's about to go all horribly horrible oh no gosh darn it um

Okay, so Alan had very big plans for his Academy Awards, and this will help explain, I think, sort of what the job of the Oscars producer is. The average person usually doesn't know who the producer of the Oscars is. Can you recall any other than the one, the couple that I've named? Oh, God, no. No, I only think of it in terms of hosts, which I think is what most people do. Yeah. The producer of the ceremony is,

Has to do a lot. Has to kind of shape the entire evening sort of under the aegis of like the Academy Board of Directors. They're the middlemen between two very demanding groups of people, it also sounds like. And he had a lot of experience like, you know, getting celebrities to do things. One of his plans was that he wanted to do away with the host.

and have the presenters kind of be the stars of the show. And he had something called baton theory, which is that like every pair of presenters could then like

the next pair and keep the show moving. And he also developed something called the four C's compadres, co-stars, couples and companions. So each pair of presenters would have some kind of like, you know, pre-existing relationship, like whether, you know, he wanted like Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine, his brother and sister, like, you know, Gina Davis and Jeff Goldblum, who were a married couple. Which is smart. It's like people who have talked together even once before, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, which they don't always try for, I don't think. So not a bad idea. He also wanted to zhuzh up the fashion for the awards. So like we think of like the red carpet and fashion is like a very central part of the Academy Awards. But back then, like there would basically be a quick two minute clip show of people doing the arrivals on TV. And he actually thought we can expand this. And he hired this guy, Fred Heyman, who was known as the father of Rodeo Drive, to sort of advise people.

the stars on what to wear. Now, there had been a version of this because Edith Head, the famous sort of golden age costume designer, used to help the stars dress for the Academy Awards. But as Fred Heyman, this guy, put it, Edith is dead and it shows. LAUGHTER

I mean, people do need guidance. It is like it's shocking to me that the red carpet ever wasn't a huge part of it, you know, because that's so much of what I remember from when I I did watch them growing up was like, I don't know. And it's not that it was that exciting. Like it was kind of boring, but it was just really great. And it was part of the ceremony. And you got to watch Joan and Melissa Rivers bothering everyone.

Oh, exactly. And like, you know, the Jonah Melissa Rivers phenomenon happened in the 90s. But Alan kind of, you know, planted the seed. Yeah. And here's a quote from this guy, Fred Heyman, the father of Rodeo Drive. He said at some point, the designers weren't eager to loan. This was before all the top designers fought to get an actress to wear their fashions at the Oscars. There's been a whole evolution and it began with Alan Carr. Yeah.

See, there's so many things that we just think of as part of the world, but that like people were so against initially. And that seemed weird. Like what that makes me think of is that, you know, I bet you remember this that like or that you've written about it maybe, but that Disney, I forget this comes up in Disney War, which is a really long, fun book about just internal squabblings at Disney in the Michael Eisner years. But like,

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Oh, when you had like the Disney vault where like, yeah, you couldn't just couldn't access things. Yeah. And that they were just like periodically theatrically re-release movies, but like thought that if people could watch Pinocchio on home video, that it would like harm them as a corporation. And it's just like, okay, you guys, you know, just like these things that seem like very obvious good ideas now, but that people were adamantly against when they were first proposed. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Another thing that Alan instituted as producer was that this was the suggestion of the production designer who thought that maybe instead of

And the winner is, which is what they had always said, they should say, and the Oscar goes to, because then it's not as, you know, winner implies that the rest are losers. And like, also, and the Oscar goes to a sort of subliminal branding. You're hearing Oscar all night, Oscar, Oscar, Oscar. I do like, and the Oscar goes to. It's also, like, I also like to say there's, juries can't find you innocent. They can only find you not guilty, which is not the same thing. Yeah.

Yeah, no, similar. And so those are some of the things that he had in mind. But the really pivotal one is that he decided right away that he didn't want to have performances of the best original song nominations, in part because he thought they were all, and I quote, turds. Yeah.

I like him. With one exception, which is Let the River Run by Carly Simon from Working Girl, which is an amazing song. Yes, it is. But Carly Simon wouldn't agree to sing it herself. So they didn't really have like the one good song. They didn't have an Oscar performance of it. Instead of this song nominees, Carr decided that there would be two big production numbers during the show. One would be this big opening number.

And the second would be a number about young Hollywood that would sort of have, you know, a dozen and a half or so young stars to sort of sing this original song about how they wanted to be famous and win an Oscar someday.

This is not the opening number. This is a different one. It's so fascinating to see like who they found to represent the future of Hollywood to sing the song I Want to Be an Oscar Winner. Like, for instance, Ricky Lake was in it. She had just been in Hairspray. Savion Glover, who was like, you know, a teenage star.

Tap dancing phenomenon. Patrick Dempsey, who was, you know, at the height of his sort of early... Like, just been in Loverboy, I want to say. Right, right. Christian Slater was in it. Corey Feldman. Oh, Blair Underwood. Oh, wow. Yeah, and then... So a lot of people who were, like... Some people who...

their names have resonance today and some of them less so. And then at a certain point, they kind of ran out of people and they needed more. So they found basically what we would now call nepo babies to fill out the rest. Like Carol Burnett's daughter and Ryan O'Neill's son and Tyrone Power Jr. was in it. And there was a headline in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner that was hooray for nepotism. No.

See, we look they've always known. Yeah, but you could you could tell who was filler, which is not a great feeling for anybody. Anyway, and this and this number, the young Hollywood number, it was choreographed by Kenny Ortega, who's a big name now. And he had just he had just director of Newsies, Kenny Ortega. And yes, also Dirty Dancing. It all comes back to Newsies for you, doesn't it? It does.

And Can't Stop the Music, one of the two, yeah. So all these, like, young Gen X-y celebrities or quasi-celebrities or children of celebrities got together, and Kenny Ortega asked each of them if they had some special skill. So if you watch this number, like...

Corey Feldman does a Michael Jackson impression, kind of dark in retrospect. Christian Slater really wanted to swing in on a rope. So you see him swinging on a rope. Patrick Dempsey was kind of like the stud of the group, wanted to swashbuckle. Yeah.

Oh, Chad Lowe was in it. Younger brother of Rob Lowe, who was about to make his entrance. And also famously, you know, life goes on. Anyway, I spoke to him when I was writing this and he said he said about this number instinctively. It just felt like something I shouldn't be doing. Yeah.

But then he said, I mean, you had Alan Carr and Kenny Ortega and the Academy. How could you say no to that? Yeah, it is one of those because you have to assume there are a lot of movies like this, too, where like people just sort of like

affinity fraud in their own minds where they're like, well, I don't know. There's a lot of great people involved. How bad could it be? And then, you know, sometimes it could be bad. Yeah. And Chad Lowe also told me that he later felt like he had dodged a bullet because even though their number is kind of terrible, it got totally overshadowed by the opening number, which his old his brother Rob was in. Yeah. None of none of the none of the fingers got pointed at these young Gen X-y Brat Pack-y stars. Yeah.

That's good. They had enough to deal with. So the opening number, let's talk about it. How did it originate? Yeah, a dream, I assume.

As it turns out, Alan Carr was a big fan of this musical review in San Francisco called Beach Blanket Babylon. Yes, I've heard of this. This was like a legend, right? Yeah, it ran for decades and decades and decades. And it was directed by this guy, Steve Silver, who the first one was an outdoor happening that was a spoof of like old Annette Funicello beach movies. They got their costumes from Rent-A-Freak and did it on a corner. And then they moved into a club and they were kind of like

campy, like draggy spoofs of old Hollywood. And one of the things they became famous for are their very elaborate costumes.

headdresses. So like they had like, you know, like someone would be in a headdress in the shape of Buckingham Palace or like the San Francisco cityscape with like working trolleys running through it. They all got slipped discs later in life and wondered why. I know. I hope they got complimentary like massages, neck massages. But

So it was like this growing kind of local San Francisco institution. And they had one edition called Beach Blanket Babylon Goes to the Stars, which was about Snow White searching for her Prince Charming. I do like that. So Alan had seen it and thought, oh, this would be perfect to just import into the Academy Awards. And like not to say that the staging wasn't disastrous, but it also feels like in a way like

overrating the taste of the average American viewer to just bring them a fairly unedited, like campy San Francisco nightclub, you know, Hollywood Babylon kind of spoof show. Ding, ding, ding. Exactly. Exactly. And here's another quote from Bruce Valanche, who became the head writer for this, this

He said of this number, it exploded full-born from his head like Zeus. The headdresses struck me as being in perfect Oscar's bad taste. So he's barreling full steam ahead with this very elaborate opening number. The other thing that was happening was that this is some more foreshadowing. First of all, Los Angeles Magazine had a report that Alan Carr, quote, has some of the Academy's conservatives edgy.

edgy about what the flamboyant producer may come up with oh boy and this is of course like flamboyant was code word for gay so we're starting to see some of the some of the some of the hesitancy about like what is this what is this gay guy in a caftan going to be doing until what year in media would you say that that's true of flamboyant being the code word for gay

Oh, gosh, that's I mean, at least up until Nathan Lane was in the birdcage while not actually being like publicly out. And he would answer people, you know, I'm I'm 40. I'm single and I work in musical theater. You figure it out. You do feel like Bobby Fine on Sex and the City was like probably not too much of a departure. Yeah.

Exactly. God bless. So that's starting to like raise some eyebrows, just the fact that he's Alan Carr and he's notorious for a certain thing. But then part of what he would be doing as producer was trying to get people to present on the show. And he had a

bit of like a sort of jerky edge to him. He couldn't get Lana Turner for some reasons. He kept like dropping little hints in the press that like he said, you know, he went to the gossip pages and was like, for some reason, Lana doesn't want to take part in the program. I don't know what her problem is, but I'm working on it. Well,

Live on, Alan. It's hard to be a woman aging publicly. And then like if someone did come in, he'd leak it to like Liz Smith and he would sort of give another person an exclusive on who came in or didn't come in or might be coming in. And like he would be playing all these gossip columnists like against each other with exclusives.

And that's not how the Academy usually does things. They usually would just like send out a press release saying here's who is presenting. But he kind of turned it into a process that was reported on where his name was constantly in the press. And he actually hired a PR agent for himself so that everyone would know these were the Alan Carr Oscars. That is a really important piece of foreshadowing once people need to have somewhere to point their fingers when it all goes terribly wrong.

Let me perhaps remind us of the theme you have stated earlier of Icarus. And he would also openly badmouth previous producers of the Oscars. Another person he kind of ticked off was his frequent party guest and former Academy president, Gregory Peck.

who he did not ask to present. Gregory Peck is one of these people who would always come to the Oscars along with Elizabeth Taylor. Obvious choice for Prince Charming's dad, honestly. Yeah.

But he had just had like an AFI tribute or something. And Alan thought he was overexposed. Like the invitation never went out. And Gregory Peck got annoyed. More foreshadowing. And then he would just do things that were kind of mean to get his name in the press. Like so one of the big nominees that year was Rain Man. That really puts us in a time and place. It truly does. It truly does.

But if you remember Rain Man, do you remember that Dustin Hoffman's character is obsessed with Judge Wapner? Yes, I do. Yeah. Time for Wapner. Yeah. Time for Wapner. Time for Wapner from the People's Court.

So apparently, you know, this was a real judge, Joseph Wapner, who was the judge on the People's Court. And he had apparently asked for Oscar tickets. But Alan Carp, instead of like just saying yes, Alan planted a story in the L.A. Times claiming that Wapner was like trying to get himself on the show as a presenter and then made fun of him saying, I don't think he's a member of the Screen Actors Guild. Yeah.

And I talked to one of his assistants at the time who said they were in like a car. He used the car phone to plant this story, which was just just totally made up. I'm picturing like Saul Rubinick and true romance for that part. Yeah, yeah.

And so you can see that like part of this, you know, job of Oscar producer was going to his head in kind of a destructive way already. He told on paper for three weeks, you are the most powerful person in the town. But don't worry, I'm not turning into Little Caesar. Oh, boy. Well, no, you're not a pizza. But it's also it is it does feel like maybe this is a tale of like,

Yeah, the way people are exposed when they're given a lot of power. And he, you know, the truth is, like, I talked to a bunch of his former assistants and he had a mean streak. He also had, like, addiction problems with pills, with alcohol, with cocaine. Which I'm sure were exacerbated by producing the Oscars. Like, I can't imagine that you wouldn't be taking more speed than usual or whatever. Yeah.

Yeah. So at this point in our ominous foreshadowing, I want to introduce you to a new character. Yeah. Eileen Bowman, the woman who plays Snow White. Oh, no. Oh, Eileen, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I spoke at length to

To Eileen, who was absolutely lovely. So, okay. So at the time she was, she had a job seeing show tunes at a restaurant in San Diego and singing with the Youth for Christ Choir. When she got an opportunity to audition for what she thought was the Snow White role in the Vegas version of Beach Blanket Babylon. Oh. And she was told to come to the Beverly Hills Hotel at 8 a.m. She brought her fiance who waited by the bar and

I'm going to tell you a little bit about her day of her audition because it's quite a saga. So she was given these pages of sheet music where she had to learn like new rewritten lyrics for Proud Mary, etc. And she was brought upstairs to a room in the hotel and there were two Snow White costumes laid on the bed.

And Steve Silver, the director of Beach Blanket Babylon, said, you know, I want to see if you if you fit into the dress. And it was her and this other girl. And they both were now dressed as Snow White. Then the guy, Steve, asked them to get into a Mercedes, both of these Snow Whites. He says, this is top secret. Close your eyes because you're going to someone's house and you can't know how to get there. Are you sure this isn't an unused draft of Mulholland Drive? No.

Oh my God, this is so Lynchian. Thank you for saying that. Yeah, two beautiful young women dressed like Snow White being driven to a mysterious location by a menacing guy. It's perfect. Okay, we are now officially in a David Lynch movie. That is perfect. Was Eileen, like, did she talk about how she was feeling at this point? Anxious, anxious. Her fiance, who was waiting at the bar at the hotel, was like, do not go with this man in this car. And she was like,

don't worry you'll be fine I'll you know I'll be back in a few hours I always get out of camp somehow you know you know me I'm Snow White she's a little like young and naive and like she knows this is kind of weird but like

trying to just keep her fiance from completely blowing it all up. It's not clear like what is going to happen next. And she also has to make it back to town to San Diego for the next day for her sister's wedding. So she's like very anxious about just getting it over with. So she was she opens her eyes and she sees like a, you know, a pink pool and a, you know, like a loose side grand piano inside. And she says, oh boy, we're in Hollywood now. And then out comes Alan Carr and

And Eileen told me he was wearing a kimono robe and he was very uncomfortable because he wasn't crossing his legs. And I thought, where do I look? Over here? Over there? Aw, Alan, come on. Manners. She does an audition.

And then they go to Marvin Hamlisch's office and they audition with him singing these songs. And then the guy who's driving them around, the director, Steve Silver from Beach Bank of Babylon, says he's insisting that they go everywhere, the two Snow Whites, walking with their hands held side by side because he thinks it's really funny. And finally he tells them, like, okay, here's what we're going to do. They're human beings, you guys. He says, here's what we're going to do. We're going to drive to Rodeo Drive and I want you to both walk down Rodeo Drive together.

You know, some child saw that that day and then went home and told their parents. They were like, you're lying, Johnny. And you know what liars get? A closet. And at this point, Eileen is like, absolutely not. I have to get back. I need to go to my sister's wedding. I don't know what's going on here. I need to get home. So.

So they make one last stop. They go back to the hotel. And as they're going up the elevator, Steve Silver says, you know, you should be very grateful that we are thinking about using you. Gross.

Very, very manipulative. And she says, yes, thank you. And he goes, how are you with famous people? Oh, my God. She goes, well, they're just like anybody else. That's true. Except shorter. This at the end of the 13 hours was the answer that got her the job over the other girl. And then finally, Silver says, do you know what this is for? And she goes, beach blanket.

beach blanket Babylon and he goes no honey this is for the Oscars treat your auditioners better and I know people are now but like my god you know you like when we had this big realization not too many years ago about like oh my god there's a lot of sexual assault in Hollywood it's like yeah why do you think that is it's a very rigid hierarchical manipulative power structure where like

It seems like everyone has a story of being taken on some kind of menacing joyride by a hideous man at least one time. Yeah. And being told basically you should be grateful that we're even considering you for this thing that we haven't told you what it is. And we're like basically abducting you for half a day.

Yeah. She gets $350 a week for rehearsing. So it's a terribly paid job for which she is told that she should be paying them because it's such great exposure and it's going to launch her career in Hollywood. And so now she's like thrown into rehearsals.

And Alan Carr, she remembers sort of like guarding the doors that no one would know what was going on. It was top secret. He would not let anyone in. And sometimes he would come, he would poke his head in and he would tell them all, thank you so much for your work, but they're canceling the number. And

And then it was revealed that it was a big prank. Oh, my God, Alan, you got to you got to calm down. You got to do some yoga. Just go call your friend Jane Fonda and get a yoga studio recommendation or something. And Eileen told me it was the cat playing with the mouse. Let's see how much we can play with these toys. Toys meaning people and their feelings.

Yeah. Do you have thoughts about why this brought it out in him? Like, do you think he was like this normally or was this sort of like an escalated way of being or something? I mean, I think, you know, the bluntest way to put it is he was having a power trip and it's sort of bringing out the worst in him. You know, maybe the most generous way to put it is like letting the wounded little kid inside you like drive like a maniac. Yeah. I mean, I also think that this kind of treatment of

of people in Hollywood was just kind of how things were, you know, in the 80s.

I don't think this is unusual behavior for a man in a position of power and a young, naive newcomer woman. Which doesn't excuse it, but does a lot to explain it and also does a lot to explain sort of a lot of other horrors. And it does make me think of how, you know, part of the death of David Lynch that has been really quite nice to see is like so many people reflecting on how nice he was to work with and how that's a very rare quality, it seems, because if people talk about it that much, like...

It's got to be unusual. You know, if everybody was like that, it wouldn't be one of the main things people said about him. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I'm so glad that you identified that audition story as a David Lynch movie. I'll never think of it in any other way ever again. So so Eileen Bowman, she's in rehearsal as Snow White. And that is when Alan Carr reveals that her Prince Charming will be.

Mr. Rob Lowe and his his first choice was Tom Cruise even more unhinged but that but Tom Cruise had a shaved head because he was doing Born on the Fourth of July and Carr did not like it so they went to Rob Lowe oh my gosh so now we're at Oscar night this is March 29th 1989 uh you know it's just it's just the height of 80s excess and

So let me tell you how this played out first from the perspective of our friend Eileen Bowman. She told me this amazing story about how just a couple hours before showtime, she was in her dressing room and Rob Lowe, with whom she really got along well, pays her an unexpected visit. He says, hey, my manager loves the chemistry we have together and he's going to come up to you and want to sign you. Don't do it because I'm leaving him.

And then he leans in and tells her, if I were you, I would get out of this town tonight because there's blood in the water and the sharks are circling. There are people who are going to take advantage of you. And I don't want to see that happen. And as as as as Eileen just has this like horrified, shocked look on her face. Yeah. He tells her never trust a man in a caftan.

God. The David Lynch theory really does hold on this one. Oh, yes. Also, I'm just I'm very nervous for Rob Lowe to be in close quarters with with anyone. You know, in terms of like Hollywood sex pests, he's seated pretty low in terms of the all time worst. But like.

I don't trust him. I don't trust him. And maybe this would be a good time to just contextualize where on the timeline this is in terms of his sex scandal. Yeah. Talk about that. At this point, the act has happened, but the scandal has not broken. In other words, when he had videotaped sex with two people, one of whom was 16 years old, it was at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. Yeah.

Hi there. This is an episode that probably should happen. But, and I mean, and this is like, I don't know, hinting at a whole area of like consent and celebrity and age. And, you know, A, it's you can't give consent if you're underage legally. And I believe in reality as well. And also just if like celebrities...

cannot act like they don't know that they have all the power in almost any interaction that they have with a normal person, especially someone who's attracted to them. You know, and this is something that I guess from like the sheer number of Hollywood sexual assault stories that we've now read about, like we have enough data to realize that like that's a huge part in in ethically difficult situations and also just predatory situations that people end up in. Yeah. Yeah.

And for Rob Lowe, like he so he is unaware that like the thing he has already done is about to like completely, you know, come back to haunt him months later. And in this moment, he at least is not a predator, but a kind of like someone who's warning Eileen, like, be careful. Like Hollywood is dangerous.

And I guess he's an unlikely bearer of that message to a young woman. I think I personally would not to project would have a sense of like all these people seem equally important and they're all telling me different things. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And you don't know someone's messing with your head and like.

And it does seem like, you know, succeeding in many entertainment industries. And it's no secret because it's just something people generally have spoken with about with with pride and with some amount of veiled trauma. If you read between the lines is that like it seems very difficult to get very far if you don't. Basically, when someone says jump, say how high. Yeah, absolutely. And one little ominous last story she told me before the ceremony begins is.

She said she was hiding in a broom closet right before the show started because she was like a top secret. The announcer on the speaker system telling people to take their seats was saying, the star of all time will be here soon. And she's that star. And she's dressed like Snow White hiding in a broom closet. It's kind of like Woodstock 2 as well. You do no favors to someone by hyping them up to that extent. Yeah.

And the guard who is sort of a nice guy who was just like making sure she was not, you know, she was like safe in the broom closet. She confided in him and said, you know, I'm really scared right now. I could just go right out this door and run down Jefferson Boulevard. And the nice guard said, you could, but you're not going to. And she says, yes, sir. I'm going to sit right here.

So even up until like it was about to begin, she had this instinct to just run the hell away. Yeah. Yeah. Instead, the show begins. She instantly she was very nervous. And the part where she walks down the aisle, she had she had practiced with like car headshots on the seats of all the stars faces.

Oh, wow.

It's so funny to be like, I'm filled our show with all of these very bad choices, but we can't give Robin Williams 90 seconds. That would be terrible. Meanwhile, the people in the audience later talk about just how uncomfortable they were. Like everyone was flinching. This guy, Peter Bart, who was at the time the editor of Variety, said the minute that it started, everybody sucked in their breath and felt something awful was going to take place. Oh, gosh.

These are the things that bring us together, really. And oh, and Barry Levinson, who was the director of Rain Man. Rob Lowe tells this story where he is singing Proud Mary on stage with Eileen Bowman and looks out in the audience and sees Levinson.

Rob Lowe said his mouth is agape. He looks almost ashen. He turns to his date, his face, a mask of shock and disgust. Even in the middle of singing a duet, I can very clearly read his lips as he says, what the fuck is this?

Oh, boy. I know that this is a tragedy, but there are and not in a I hope in the most respectful way possible. I feel like we need these things to sort of to come to that they do bring us together in a weird way, you know, that like everybody knew, but they just had to do it anyway. And

They were all realizing it at the same time. And we can all look back and be like, we all knew. Why didn't we do anything? I don't know. It's like Fyre Fest. The number happens. The only person who doesn't seem to realize that it has been a gigantic disaster is Mr. Alan Carr.

Well, yeah. But he's basically like popping around, like watching the show from different angles all during it, like going to the balcony, going to the stage left and like taking a look. And he pretty much keeps saying like, hey, they like that, right? That was good. That was great. Yeah. His first inkling that things have not gone great is when he goes to the press room. Jeannie Williams from USA Today asked him, don't you think the Snow White opening was a bit over the top?

And he goes, what? Do you hear the ovations out there? It was magical. And she goes, but Alan, why Snow White? What's the connection between her and, well, the whole Coconut Grove theme of the show? And he goes, it's called theatrical. Well, this is true. And then he turns to his press rep and goes, get me out of here. Oh, my God.

He's going to get the last chopper out of Saigon. So Alan goes up to the governor's ball, which of course is like...

festooned with chiffon and like a 20 piece orchestra on a revolving pedestal, like a classic Alan Carr extravaganza. Everyone's toasting him. It's great. He gets in a limo to go to Swifty Lazar's after party at Spago with Bruce Valanche. What a sentence. The show is over. He's feeling great. Except Bruce Valanche did tell me this one time.

A line he said when they were it was like they had a quiet moment in the limo. I guess Alan Carr was thinking about all this sort of like egos he had bruised, like Gregory Peck and those people. And he says to the launch, I burned a lot of bridges on this one. Man, that is just one of the fascinating human narratives that I think we're really drawn to the same way. It's like we love love stories and we love power tragedies.

You know, it's not like the other Academy Award ceremonies from the 80s were any less tacky and, you know, schlocky than this one. Like the year before, there was a part where Pee Wee Herman presented with Robocop. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

I so happy that happened. Oh, it's on YouTube. And it is a must watch after you're done watching things from 1989. Plug in 1988 Pee Wee Herman Robocop Oscars and it is it is absolutely surreal advice I've gotten in 2025 so far. Okay, given that the other 80s Oscars were basically the you know, a similar level like within the same realm of like,

Mm-hmm.

The Associated Press called it a flaming wreck. That feels slightly homophobic. Yeah. I don't think they meant flaming in that fashion, but, you know, noted. At first I was thinking of the Ford Pinto and then I was like, hey, wait a minute. The Sacramento Bee called it a flatulent gas bag of a show. Well, at least that's not homophobic. Janet Maslin in The Times writes that the opening number deserves a permanent place in the annals of Oscar embarrassments.

At around the same time Alan Carr was waking up to bad reviews and an absolute lack of bouquets at his doorstep, the president of the Academy, Richard Kahn, was taking pride in the ratings when he got a call from the president of Disney, Frank Wells, who said, Dick, we got a problem. Because apparently no one had cleared Snow White's

with the studio. Oh, no. Oh, I wouldn't worry about it. Disney isn't very litigious. Of course, Snow White, you know, if anyone's wondering, yes, Snow White is like a classic fairy tale character. But this was very clearly the Disney cartoon version of Snow White. Right. Like the costume is the same. The look is the same. Like you look at her and you know who it is, I assume. Yes. So Gregory Peck is angry. The Academy is angry. The critics are very unhappy. Car...

Oh, boy.

And in this restaurant, you had to pay your bill at the front before you left. And people were like climbing over chairs trying to get out without passing his table. Yeah. Since we're on like the morning after, just wrap up Eileen Bowman's story because she had fled right after the number. She like we should someone from the Academy had told her, oh, like, let's get you know, when we let's go to the governor's ball in your Snow White costume and arm in arm with Rob Lowe. And she was finally just like, no, I am getting the.

fuck out of here. I love it. Yeah. She leaves the theater. The only thing she kept was her fake eyelashes. The next morning, the doorbell rings and a lawyer in a suit is there with a pile of papers for her to sign. Of course, sweet, young, naive Eileen Bowman has no idea. She just signs and it turns out these documents forbid her from talking about the Oscars for 13 years. Wow.

Wow. Fortunately, that time had passed by the time I was writing my book so she could tell me all about it. So it's a play in the long game is what the historian does. So that Thursday, Disney filed a trademark infringement lawsuit. The spokesman said, we thought it was extremely unrepresentative of our creative work and of the quality of our creative work.

the Academy and Disney meet the following day to try to resolve the dispute and eventually they reach a settlement but part of the settlement is that the Academy can no longer officially use this opening number which is why it is not on the official Academy YouTube channel and why it will never be part of any kind of

clip show or anything like that that the Academy produces. It is banned. It is the lost Oscars. So what does Alan do? The first thing he does once he's sort of like

himself into oblivion and cried in his Egyptian underground disco is he calls army Archer at variety and tells him all sorts of lies about how many people have been sending him telegrams. Apparently he, he says that he's doing the euphoria gift. I've never been happier. He claims that Ronald Reagan actually called him to compliment him and told him how he used to go to the coconut grove. Yeah.

He also invites over the arts editor of the L.A. Times who describes in this piece he wrote top of the budget floral arrangements and towering sprays of spring blossoms that were all over the living room. Apparently from people who had sent them. One of the assistants I talked to confirmed that he had just asked them to send the flowers for him.

Yeah, I think this is like a nice time to point out that like, you know, this is the guy who behaved pretty abusively with his performers and that like when we tell these stories, you know, dangerous people and pathetic people are often the same. That is very true. Just when things couldn't get any worse, another bomb drops, which is a letter. This letter is signed by 17 Hollywood luminaries, including Gregory Peck, Paul

Paul Newman, Julie Andrews, Blake Edwards, Billy Wilder, Joseph Mankiewicz, Sidney Lumet, and on and on. You don't want to piss off Julie Andrews. She was married to Blake Edwards, who apparently...

Edwards and Peck were like the people who sort of corralled everyone to sign this letter. Nice. They sent it to the Academy, but it's an open letter that calls the ceremony, quote, an embarrassment both to the Academy and the entire motion picture industry. And then says, it is neither fitting nor acceptable that the best work in motion pictures be acknowledged in such a demeaning fashion. I really get the sense that this final rejection from Peck

you know, the echelon of, you know, A-list Hollywood in this letter was the thing that really just destroyed him. And I'm going to read you something that his friend Jean Wolf told me. She said they just froze him out.

And it took a while for him to figure that out. But once he did, he was devastated. He was devastated. He talked about being a nerd when he was in school. And he talked about always being the fat kid, the guy who looked like he wanted to be different but wanted to be part of the crowd. If you're wearing a caftan and if you're on a constant diet your whole life, you want to be accepted. You want to be one of the A-listers. And he could feel this ultimate rejection.

It also makes me think of, I forget, I think of there being two guys who founded and ran Studio 54 and, you know, that being a like symbol of 70s excess that got brought down for, I think, faulty bookkeeping. I mean, in the fraud way. But one of them said, like, I was asked, would you let yourself into this club that you run? And he was like, no, of course not. You know, and that thing of like trying to get into a club that you know you can only get by sort of

of exerting power in a way that people sort of have to say yes to you and the sort of how like even if you get what you want it's maybe not what you wanted well yeah I mean and if you've seen the movie 54 where Mike Myers plays Steve Rubell like you know he's sort of this guy who doesn't really belong and you can see him kind of like I just have this image from that movie of him like

on like a like up in the rafters like watching the party below and like he knows he's not this pretty young thing like ryan phillip but he sort of made himself the impresario so that he could get into the cool party totally and that being like a real sort of role that people find themselves in and kind of an archetype that you find in these stories i think

A couple months later, the Rob Lowe sex tape comes out like the fallout from his career from being in this Oscar number was like completely overshadowed by the, you know, catastrophe of the sex tape. And like was the scandal about the fact that he had that there was an underage teenage girl in it or was it mostly just about that it was a sex tape and that that was tacky?

It was kind of all of those things. Actually, she was 16. The age of consent in Georgia was 14 at the time. Oh, boy. Yeah. Well, I disagree with that. Yeah. The age of consent for being videotaped was 18.

That's interesting. Okay. Yeah. And then her mother filed a lawsuit. And then, of course, like the tabloids had a feeding frenzy. And one thing that Bruce Valange told me is that like every time the news would cover like the sex tape, like they'd say, oh, Rob Lowe, most recently seen Dancing with Snow White and the disastrous opening number at the Academy Awards. So it actually like

Like the sex tape somehow like fed the scandal of the opening number Oscars rather than vice versa. And, you know, I tend to suspect that this affected her life a lot more negatively than it did his.

Oh, yeah. I mean, he bounced back with Wayne's World, really, like in the early 90s. You know, he took a few years off and then he was back. So the Academy set up a committee called the Awards Presentation Review Committee to kind of assess what had gone wrong and like figure out how to fix the show, because obviously this had been a gigantic turkey event.

And it was, it was chaired by a very well-liked veteran TV director and producer named Gil Cates. Oh my God. Gil Cates then became the new director

sort of regular producer of the Oscars. And he was kind of like the anti-Alan Carr because he was very like buttoned up, even tempered person who like didn't seek out publicity. The Victor Fleming of Oscars producers. To draw on another 80s metaphor, like

The car Oscars were kind of like New Coke. And then in 1990, they were like, this is Coca-Cola classic, like back to the, you know, the, you know, like the best of the Academy Awards. And that was the first year that Billy Crystal hosted.

Oh, wow. And so, of course, he became like one of the great Oscar hosts. Yeah. And he comes out and instead of doing like a big production number, he does a comedy routine. So it just it immediately feels like a more modern show. And that's what I grew up with it being was like somebody comes out and like

does some comedy and then is like, all right, time for the awards now. Thank you. Yeah. And it was a clean break from like, we're going to put on a lavish production number with like, you know, chorus girls and like, you know,

Gold spandex. And one of the first things he said in his monologue was, thank you very much. So people are applauding. He goes, is that for me? Or are you just glad I'm not Snow White? Which I'm sure like everybody needed. And yet some of the things that he came up with remain. Like they kept...

the phrase the Oscar and the Oscar goes to instead of and the winner is a good one. I like that. They kept Bruce Valanche who stayed on and did like, you know, like two dozen Oscars as the as the writer as a joke writer. So he kind of became like the comic voice of

of the Oscars. And then, of course, like the fashion aspect just grew and grew and grew. And along came Joan Rivers and Melissa Rivers at a certain point. And that made the, you know, the red carpet like a little more edgy and dangerous and critical. But it also like turned it into a show kind of to rival the Oscars itself. So totally, you know, he left some some changes that were positive that but they had to sort of they had to make a clean break from him.

In the meanwhile, what became of our friend Alan Carr? He immediately became a recluse at his party mansion. His parties kind of became like quiet little dinners. He continued with his drinking, popping Percocet, anything he could lay his hands on. Bruce Valanche told me,

I frankly wasn't that eager to talk to him because I knew what was coming. I knew there would be a night of the long knives where eventually he would say, you, you fat queen, you fag, you talked me into that shit with the young kids, which isn't true. But there would be a blanket condemnation or there would be it was just you and me. We were the only ones who got it. They defeated us. And I didn't particularly want to be there either. So the two of them never saw each other again.

Yeah, which as an avoidant person, I really respect Bruce Valanche's choices. Yeah, so some of his friends did feel like there was just a...

a homophobia behind this entire kind of ostracization of him. Yeah, I feel like inevitably. Interesting. I feel like there is something like inherently gay about this ceremony, but there's something inherently gay about the Oscars. I don't think people were ready to admit that in 1989. Hollywood? Gay? No. So as we get into the 90s, he...

couldn't get any of his producing projects off the ground. He had a couple ideas. He wanted to make a movie out of Lana Turner's daughter's memoir about, you know, she's the one who like, who stabbed Lana Turner's abusive boyfriend. He had it coming. He had it coming. He had it coming all along. So anyway.

He hired a personal trainer who kind of became like a pseudo boyfriend. And, you know, some of his friends I talked to were a little suspicious of like all the staff that surrounded him, like maybe they were taking advantage of him. He apparently got glued to CNBC and was like just screaming all day to his financial analyst. Yeah.

He had one like last little moment of glory on this on the 20th anniversary of Grease in 1998 where he he persuaded Paramount to re-release the film and they had a big like premiere party and he showed up in like a Grease T-shirt. And it was kind of this last hurrah for for Alan. But he you know, he he never really was able to produce anything else. So it definitively just ended his career there.

Wow. In 1998, he had a kidney transplant and he he went back and he threw a party for his new kidney. But I really appreciate that. Yeah. And I think actually that's a good recommendation to anyone who goes through an organ transplant. Once it happens, throw a party for your new organ. Sadly, midway through this kidney party, he had to call an ambulance to take him to Cedars-Sinai because he actually had liver cancer.

And he died at age 62 in June 1999. I talked to his oldest friend from Illinois, Joanne Cimbalo, who said he had no family at that point. His parents were gone. He had no brothers or sisters. So it was his staff that made the arrangements. It was very sad, very odd. Yeah. And then his friends, you know, I want to just end with this quote from his friend Nikki Haskell.

Who, you know, after he died, everyone kind of realized that like there was this metaphorical death in 1990 in 1989. And then he sort of lived another 10 years. But before he had died of cancer, he kind of it was like death by Oscars. And his friend, Nikki Haskell, said that was the end of his life.

What did he do that was so terrible that everybody got so hysterical? He made it too much about himself. That was the problem. He made it so much about Alan that when it wasn't flawless, they killed him. Do you feel like this is a cautionary tale in some way? Or why do you feel drawn to this story as this chapter of your book?

all of the kind of like anatomy of a fiasco is what really drew me to this story. But I found myself really... That's the difference between a fiasco and a disaster, I guess. A fiasco is a disaster without fatalities. Fiasco is a fun word. It's the title of this chapter in the book. But I found myself really kind of caring about Alan Carr. And, you know, yes, he was kind of like a toxic queen who had a really mean side, a really narcissistic side. And, you know,

Yeah, but like I kind of understood I came to understand like just the forces that made him feel like he had to overcompensate so much and build himself up so much. I think I think there was just a kind of emptiness in the center that sort of spread outward. Wow. And made him just like seek a certain kind of acceptance and, you know, glamour. And it kind of.

played out through the Oscars. Like the Oscars were his vehicle for ultimate acceptance. And it turns out that that is what ruined his life. Like once he got the chance to do the thing he always wanted to do, it destroyed him. That's like a, an aspect of the Icarus story that I find very compelling. It's like Icarus was doing something amazing. He was flying, you know, in the air, which no human being can do. And, and,

If it hadn't been a, you know, total wreck, like it would have been extraordinary. It would have been fabulous. And then, but yeah, it's like, you know, you can't use it as a cautionary tale against trying to fly. It's like, just, you know, keep a cool head and play test your wing material. Yeah.

And, you know, and cut down the opening number. It should not be longer than six minutes at the most. I also feel like there's kind of a sad irony to the fact that he grew up dreaming of a Hollywood life. And what's more of a Hollywood life than dying lonely and surrounded by staff? Yeah, there's like an undercurrent of schadenfreude to the Oscars. And I think that I think that and it represents like

The establishment sort of anointing you as as one of their own, but like that just doesn't last. And for some people, including Alan Carr, it's actually the thing that destroys you and like ends the Hollywood dream that you were climbing for that whole time.

Well, I'm so happy that you told this story. I do feel like a lot of tenderness for everybody involved, you know? Well, especially Eileen Bowman. She's doing well. Yes. Oh, my God. That's so good. Yeah. She never went back to Hollywood. She actually told me that she tried to audition for things. But as soon as people saw Snow White at the Oscars on her resume, they kind of laughed her out of the room. Yeah.

But I think that she realized pretty quickly, as naive as she was, that like this town was just not for her. Yeah. I would love to close by asking you, what is your Oscar Roman Empire? If you can pick just one. I realize this might be it. Honestly, one of them has been mentioned already, which is that in 1988, Pee Wee Herman presented with Robocop. Yeah, I don't think you can top that. Oh, my God.

Where's Robocop? You can never find a Robocop when you need one. Oh my god! Thanks, Robocop. All right, Wee. It's safe to continue giving the award now. Thanks, Robocop.

Michael, this has been so fun. Is there just anything of yours that you would like people to read? Tell us about your book. What are you writing about lately? What are you excited about? All of that stuff. Yeah, well, my book is called Oscar Wars, A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears. The Alan Carr story is part of it, as well as...

Oscar stories from every other era from the past century. And then, you know, I'm a staff writer at The New Yorker, and right now I'm covering Oscar season, including I just wrote a piece about the whole Emilia Perez, Carlos Sofía Gascon cascade of scandals. And I will be at the Oscars this year and will write an account of my night. ♪

And that was our episode. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being with us. Thank you to Michael Schulman, our Oscar correspondent. Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing this show. And thank you for you, the listener, more so than usual, because you're going to help us more so than usual with our next episode. I posed a question on Patreon a couple weeks ago asking people what they were excited about, what they

was giving them joy, how they were connecting to their communities in this time when a lot of us are trying to think about how to do that and how to feel more connection to the people around us and finding little joys wherever we can. My example was cabbage. I've started some little cabbage seedlings in my laundry room. And so in the morning I wake up

And I feel excited to go check on the cabbage. And I spent the day reading the responses to that question over on our Patreon and just loved what I read so much. And it made me feel just so lucky to have this community that has grown up around the show that I wanted everybody to get to hear that. So that's why I'm asking you to tell us what you're excited about. What's bringing you joy? What's bringing you hope?

We set up an email address for this. It's sloppyandaliveatgmail.com. We could not resist a Stepford Wives reference. And so that's S-L-O-P-P-Y-A-N-D-A-L-I-V-E at gmail.com. And so basically just send us a three minute or shorter voice memo. That to me is the easiest way to make a sound file on a regular phone these days. But any kind of sound file will do.

three minutes or less and get it in by 6 p.m. Pacific time, Sunday, March 2nd. And we are only going to be able to feature a few on the episode that we're going to put out, but we're going to listen to all of them and you're going to share so many of these of the world with us. And I can't wait. And I can't wait to bring that back to all of you in a couple of weeks. And that's it. I'll see you in two weeks.

Talk to you soon.