Allan Carr (; May 27, 1937 – June 29, 1999) was an American producer and manager of stage and screen. He was nominated for numerous awards, winning a Tony Award and two People's Choice Awards, and was named Producer of the Year by the National Association of Theatre Owners.
Early career
Carr was born Allan Solomon to an American Jewish family in Chicago, Illinois. He attended Lake Forest College and Northwestern University, but his interest was always in show business. While at Northwestern, he invested $750 in the Broadway musical Ziegfeld Follies starring Tallulah Bankhead. Though the show was not a hit, he had also invested $1,250 in the 1967 film The Happiest Millionaire, which gave him the success he needed to leave school and embark on a career in entertainment.
In Chicago in the 1960s, he opened the Civic Theater and financed The World of Carl Sandburg starring Bette Davis and Gary Merrill, as well as Eva Le Gallienne in Mary Stuart, directed by Tyrone Guthrie, and Tennessee Williams's Garden District, featuring Cathleen Nesbitt and Diana Barrymore. Carr worked behind the scenes at Playboy with Hugh Hefner and was a co-creator of the Playboy Penthouse television series, which in turn launched the Playboy Club.
Through the years, he became known as a great planner of promotional events and parties. One such event, a black-tie affair for Truman Capote, took place in an abandoned Los Angeles jail.
Management career
In 1966, Carr founded the talent agency Allan Carr Enterprises, managing the actors Tony Curtis, Peter Sellers,
Carr is also credited for having discovered numerous celebrities, including some who also became his clients, such as Mark Hamill, Michelle Pfeiffer, Steve Guttenberg and Lisa Hartman. Three time Academy Award winner Marvin Hamlisch was brought in as conductor. With the promise of being "the antithesis of tacky," for which the ceremony would have no host, as it would rotate actors and actresses instead generally put in pairs as part of Carr's theme of "couples, companions, costars, and compadres", with the most notable pair being Bob Hope and Lucille Ball (in her final public appearance before her death just a few weeks later). The criticism for the ceremony stemmed mostly from the musical numbers that attempted to cross both Old and New Hollywood together. It began with a booming voice stating that the "star of all time" would arrive soon, which came in the form of Snow White, played by Eileen Bowman (Lorna Luft declined, much to her subsequent relief), who proceeded to try and shake the hands of stars in the audience in the theater (much to the embarrassment of nominated actress Michelle Pfeiffer). Merv Griffin started the show with his 1950 hit “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts!”, complete with a re-creation of the Cocoanut Grove nightclub that featured a collection of established stars such as Vincent Price, Alice Faye, and Roy Rogers. Bowman returned to the stage afterwards to sing a duet of "Proud Mary" with Rob Lowe, which lasted twelve minutes.
Steve Silver, asked about the opening number while looking at the reviews, stated, "Janet Maslin says it is the worst production number in the history of the Oscars. I guess you can't top that. The publicity for Beach Blanket Babylon ought to be wonderful.” An open letter was released on April 7, featuring 17 figures of Hollywood (such as former Academy president Gregory Peck) that called the ceremony an embarrassment to the academy and the industry. Two days later, the Los Angeles Times dedicated its entire letter section (ten in total) to hate mail about the ceremony, titling it “For Some, the Oscar Show Was One Big Carr Crash." The Walt Disney Company sued the academy shortly after the ceremony for copyright infringement (no one at the academy had asked for permission from Disney regarding Snow White), which forced the academy to make a formal apology. Lowe defended his appearance by describing himself as a "good soldier" doing it for the academy, while Bowman would state later that the show looked like a "gay bar mitzvah", doing so years after the fact after having signed a gag order that had her not talk about the show for thirteen years. Carr's reputation in Hollywood did not fully recover from the blowback the ceremony received, although there were some retaining benefits. The ratings for the show were marginally better than the previous ceremony, as over 42 million viewers in 26 million homes saw the ceremony in the United States. The choice of no host for the ceremony would be replicated for the 2019 ceremony. Carr's decision to change the announcement from "And the winner is..." to "And the Oscar goes to.." has been used for each Academy ceremony since. Carr elected to have retailer Fred Hayman get designers to dress the stars for arrival on the red carpet, which became its own segment of focus in later years. Comedian Bruce Vilanch, hired as a writer for the show, would work on the show for the next two decades, which included a promotion to head writer. Carr did not produce another film or television show again.
Later work
That same year Carr helmed the project Goya: A Life in Song with Freddie Gershon and CBS Records, a concept album and, later, an off-Broadway musical theater production written by Maury Yeston (Nine) and featuring Plácido Domingo as artist Francisco Goya. Still in development for a full Broadway production, the music has been recorded by Domingo with Dionne Warwick in English and Gloria Estefan in Spanish, and a version of the duet "Till I Loved You" was a top-40 single for Barbra Streisand and Don Johnson.
Carr continued his work in theater, sponsoring the 1984-85 Royal Shakespeare Company productions of Cyrano de Bergerac and Much Ado About Nothing at Washington's Kennedy Center and Broadway's Gershwin Theatre, earning 10 Tony nominations between them including one more for Carr.
Carr had returned to Paramount Pictures to handle the re-release of Grease in 1998, which included producing a VH1 television special of the twentieth anniversary Hollywood "premiere" screening and party, and special edition re-releases of the video, DVD, and soundtrack album.
Production filmography
Carr was a producer of numerous movies, including:
- The First Time (1969)
- C.C. and Company (1970)
- Grease (1978)
- Can't Stop the Music (1980)
- Grease 2 (1982)
- Where the Boys Are '84 (1984)
- Cloak & Dagger (1984)
Personal life and death
Carr died from liver cancer
In 2017, a documentary about Carr's life was released entitled The Fabulous Allan Carr. The film's director, Jeffrey Schwarz, said, "Although it was no secret that Allan Carr was gay, he never formally acknowledged it publicly. The word 'flamboyant' was used to describe him, a code word."