The Worst Oscars Ever?? with Michael Schulman

What do Lily Tomlin, Snow White, and Kenny Ortega have in common? They were all part of the 61st Academy Awards, a broadcast now remembered as the worst of all time, and masterminded by Allan Carr (lover of spectacle and producer of Grease). But awards season correspondent and New Yorker staff writer Michael Schulman is here to argue that the tackiest, most disastrous Oscars of all time might just be... unfairly maligned. And to tell us what's bringing you joy and excitement right now, send us a voice memo (three minutes or shorter) at sloppyandalive (at) gmail (dot) com. We can't wait to hear from you. Michael's book Oscar Warshttps://www.harpercollins.com/products/oscar-wars-michael-schulman?variant=41063519387682Michael's New Yorker pagehttps://www.newyorker.com/contributors/michael-schulman the video of the opening numberhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mronRVvdmw the video of Pee-wee and RoboCop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETFHeMSIMGc&t=63s And the book Michael mentioned about Allan Carr, Party Animals, is here https://www.dacapopress.com/titles/robert-hofler/party-animals/9780306818943/ Support You're Wrong About:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are GoodLinks:https://www.harpercollins.com/products/oscar-wars-michael-schulman?variant=41063519387682https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/michael-schulmanhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mronRVvdmwhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETFHeMSIMGc&t=63shttps://www.dacapopress.com/titles/robert-hofler/party-animals/9780306818943/http://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-good Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Sarah Marshall?

  Let me perhaps remind us of the theme you have stated earlier of Icarus.

• 0:16Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall, and we are talking today about the worst Oscars ever. Where 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 election 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.

• 1:00Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:39Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Hello. Hi, Sarah. It's great to be back.

• 1:56Sarah Marshall?

  It's so great to have you back. You were here last year to talk about the Oscar streaker. And in a shocking coincidence, we are having another Academy Award ceremony this year at about the same time. So I thought we should talk about them again.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Who could have predicted that?

• 2:12Sarah Marshall?

  Let me clear up something. So are you the Oscar correspondent or the Oscars correspondent? I think the first one does sound better.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  I tend to try to just use Oscar, like Oscar night, Oscar winner.

• 2:24Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, you're right. That is better. Right.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Is that better?

• 2:27Sarah Marshall?

  It is better.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  But, you know, opinions are split on this.

• 2:29Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  And my book is Oscar Wars, not Oscars Wars, which would have been too plural.

• 2:36Sarah Marshall?

  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?

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Named Oscar?

• 2:47Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:48Sarah Marshall?

  The other Oscar, that was the subtitle. So, okay, so last time you talked with us about the Oscar streaker, which was the early 70s?

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm, 74.

• 3:01Sarah Marshall?

  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?

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Yes, we are talking about the 1989 ceremony.

• 3:18Sarah Marshall?

  Of the 1988 Academy Awards.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  The Academy, we call them the 1998 Awards, but it in fact happened in 1989.

• 3:26Sarah Marshall?

  And the picture 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?

• 3:48Speaker 01

  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?

• 3:56Sarah Marshall?

  It's the Ford Pinto of Oscars.

• 3:59Sarah Marshall?

  But I digress.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  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 doesn't have anything to do with what won, what lost, you know? I think that there are far more notorious years for that. The infamous crash when over Brokeback Mountain. You know, there was the year Citizen Kane lost.

• 4:26Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  So, you know, as I dug deep into this supposed worst Oscars ever, you know, the reason it got that rep has 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.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  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, 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 eighties. But, you know, I think more than anything else, it's, it's, it's an Icarus story. You know, it's about a man who flew too close to the sun.

• 5:23Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, and I, I'm also interested in this ceremony because I think the question of like, the line between like terrible and great is often subjective. I'm just very curious.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  I think the best way to begin before we get to Alan Carr 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, in, you know, in, in spoken word. So the first thing that we see is Armie Archer, who was a long time variety columnist, and he's standing outside of the Shrine Auditorium with a microphone.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  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, 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, how do, how do I get into the theater?" And he says, "Just follow the Hollywood stars."

• 6:38Sarah Marshall?

  Mixing references.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Oh, just you wait. Don't, don't expect like, you know, like world building consistency here. 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.

• 6:57Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  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 it's "We Only Have Stars For You." And she's greeting people like on the aisle, like Tom Hanks and Dustin Hoffman and Glenn Close, and like 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.

• 7:31Sarah Marshall?

  Like, I didn't rehearse this.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  But that goes on for quite a while.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  And then, uh, 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."

• 7:54Sarah Marshall?

  Wow. Okay. I feel like they said yes to all their ideas and brainstorming, maybe.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  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, uh, you know, Hollywood stars. And 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 in fringed cowboy costumes. And like Vincent Price is there and Dorothy Lemoir. And then they kind of each have a moment. And then Merv tells Snow White, "Meet your blind date, Rob Lowe."

• 8:37Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, be careful, Snow White. He's not, he's not a safe pair of hands.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  He's definitely not, and we will also get to that. So Rob Lowe comes out in all black and he and Snow White sing a duet of Proud Mary with different lyrics, with new lyrics.

• 8:53Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my god.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  One of them is, "But you said goodbye to grumpy and sleepy, left the dwarves behind, came to town to stay."

• 9:02Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  The problem here is that Rob Lowe really cannot sing.

• 9:13Sarah Marshall?

  Ah, yeah.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:22Sarah Marshall?

  Well, the people who are watching it on mute, because they're at work right now, are probably like, "Oh, my buddy's doing good."

• 9:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  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 boogying around. They're doing the uptempo part of Proud Mary. It's been eight minutes so far that this number has going on, and it is not over.

• 9:56Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, they're just sitting in theater rows, trapped. The Coconut Grove set rises, and we're now at Grauman's Chinese Theater, the famous movie palace.

• 10:12Sarah Marshall?

  A theater inside a theater.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Who walks down the stairs, losing one of her high heels.

• 10:53Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, Lily.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  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 watched that. And at this very moment, they're trying to make sense of it.

• 11:06Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  And then a chorus boy climbs down the stairs, 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.

• 11:20Sarah Marshall?

  Wow. This, how does Lily Tom, does she seem into it?

• 11:27Speaker 01

  She seemed like everyone else involved in the situation, just like vaguely mortified to be there.

• 11:33Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, just like being a pro, getting through it. Truly the last person I would expect to emerge at the end of all this, but it's.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  A giant pagoda hat. So that's, that's what happens in, 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.

• 12:01Sarah Marshall?

  Hello, Alan. Welcome, welcome to the show.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:13Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  That was kind of the pinnacle of his producing career.

• 12:16Sarah Marshall?

  That's pretty good.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  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?

• 12:27Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  It's absolutely great. But he was actually more sort of famous around town for throwing incredible parties at his home.

• 12:56Sarah Marshall?

  That makes sense.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  First of all, he had 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 in Aling Gingham, because she was the star of Grease. 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 in gold lame, and a bar called the Bella Darby Bar, which is like a Hollywood, old Hollywood in joke, because Bella Darby was the Polish film star who starred in the movie The Egyptian.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  And I spoke to his frie- 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.

• 13:49Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, wonderful.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  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, he's just a man, he's a man with the shaggy blonde hair and the gigantic red glasses, just a Hollywood staple.

• 14:02Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  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, and say things like, you know, this is quite a scene.

• 14:48Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Alice Cooper was at this part, at these parties. Here's a quote from Alice Cooper. He said, "We'd go to Alan's and it would not be surprising to find Mae West sitting next to Rod Stewart, or Salvador Dali, or Jack Benny."

• 15:11Sarah Marshall?

  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 got like tightly packed sometimes.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  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 absolutely breathtaking array of designer caftans.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  He had like a hundred caftans in all different colors. They were all lined up in a closet in his, in his bedroom. And usually these parties included multiple wardrobe changes and a lot of, a lot of showing off caftans.

• 16:06Sarah Marshall?

  I don't think that's too many caftans for the record, you know?

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Too many caftan, I didn't say too many.

• 16:11Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, I know. I guess I, I just want to make sure if anybody is out there, you know, wanting me to get ahead of this issue.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  You know, if you haven't guessed it by now, Alan Carr was very flamboyantly homosexual. You know, it was the eighties. It was not an easy time to be a gay man in America. As, as Bruce Valanche, who was also gay, told me, he, he never declared himself like baggage. You know, he was just openly gay to his friends. And in fact, he, he threw parties where the sort of, the underground gay scene in Hollywood could come and sort of be themselves. Like, you know, people talking about how like, you know, like David Geffen and like the sort of power gaze of Hollywood would come. And in fact, Bruce Valanche claims that Roy Cohn even came to some of these parties.

• 16:59Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  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 the, his interest in caftans.

• 17:26Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  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 was, he grew up in Highland Park, the, 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,

• 18:12Speaker 01

  except with, obsessed with like Hollywood glitz. His early, his actual name was Alan Solomon, but he changed it because he was angry that his parents were getting divorced. But also he thought Alan Carr would look better on a marquee. And also it rhymes with star.

• 18:30Sarah Marshall?

  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% 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.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. 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 a, like a old timey, like showbiz producer was kind of his way of coping. And, and kind of even like the, the, the way he dressed, the, the sort of like the caftans and everything. It was a way of like drawing attention and like poking the fun of himself and drawing attention to himself. Like no one could, no one else could do it on their terms.

• 19:33Sarah Marshall?

  Right. The Paul Lind School of feeling insecure.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. 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.

• 19:50Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Then he hooked up somehow with Hugh Hefner, who was trying to turn his magazine to a TV show called Playboy's, Playboy's Penthouse. And he became the talent coordinator. So that's how he kind of like established himself in Los Angeles. He, he became a manager and his, his big client was Ann Margaret.

• 20:08Sarah Marshall?

  Is this in, in the 60s?

• 20:09Speaker 01

  It was like the early 70s we're in now.

• 20:11Sarah Marshall?

  Her, her post Bye Bye Birdie, pre Newsies period of wilderness.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Now, here's how he actually became a movie producer. And you're gonna like this because this ties back into a previous episode of You're Wrong About.

• 20:24Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, nice.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  I have listened to the wonderful episode about the, uh, the, uh, Eurograin plane crash in the Andes in 1972.

• 20:33Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, oh, boy.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  In the seventies, there was a quick, like a sort of exploitation movie, uh, made in Mexico, uh, about it called Supervivientes de los Andes. And, uh, basically Alan, like-

• 20:45Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, boy.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  Snapped up, he found out that someone else was, uh, was trying to make a movie about the, the plane crash. So he basically just acquired the US rights to the Mexican exploitation movie version. And he reopened it in the United States with the title Survive with an exclamation point.

• 21:07Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  And that kind of got him into the Academy Awards because he was hired in the late seventies to throw the governor's ball, which is like the onsite party that you go, 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 he, 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, in the, like the seventies world of like variety shows.

• 21:46Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Uh, I love what, going back and watch, all, watching all those old variety shows. But like, think about it, it's like now 1988 and going to 1989. 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, um, there's something very like schmancy about it and, um-

• 22:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:27Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:53Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely, yeah. And the Oscars weren't getting any shorter.

• 23:17Sarah Marshall?

  They never have. It's amazing.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  So basically, he had lived his whole life wanting to be sort of like embraced by old Hollywood, like nurturing 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 Grease, like he brought in these old stars like Eve Arden to like

• 23:44Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  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, horribly wrong.

• 23:57Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, no. Gosh, darn it.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  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's the, who the producer of the Oscars is. Can you recall any other than the one, the couple that I've named?

• 24:22Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, God, no, no. I only think of it in terms of hosts, which I think is what most people do.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. The, the producer of the ceremony has to do a lot, has to kind of shape the entire evening, sort of

• 24:35Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I would not want that job.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Under the aegis of like the Academy Board of Directors.

• 24:39Sarah Marshall?

  They're the middlemen between two very demanding groups of people, it also sounds like.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  And he had so, you know, 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, he had something he called baton theory, which is that like every, every pair of presenters could then like introduce the next pair and keep the show moving. And he also developed something called the four Cs, compadres, co-stars, couples and companions. So each pair of, 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 as a brother and sister, like, you know, Gina Davis and Jeff Goldblum, who were a married couple.

• 25:26Sarah Marshall?

  Which is smart. It's like people who have talked together even once before, right?

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:33Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, which they don't always try for, I don't think.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  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 as 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 Hayman, who was known as the father of rodeo drive, to sort of advise 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, he used to, uh, he used to help the stars dress for the Academy Awards. But as, as Fred Hayman, this guy put it, Edith is dead and it shows.

• 26:22Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Oh, exactly. And like, you know, the Joan and Melissa Rivers phenomenon happened in the 90s, but Alan kind of, you know, planted the seed.

• 26:54Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  And here's a quote from this guy Fred Hayman, 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."

• 27:10Sarah Marshall?

  Ah, 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, I forget, this comes up in Disney War, which is a really long, fun book about just internal squabbles at Disney and the Michaelized New Years, but like, that initially Disney was very against the idea of releasing any of their old movies on home video or any kind of home media because they felt it diluted the brand, which is

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 27:45Sarah Marshall?

  wild to me, because like.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Oh, and you had like the Disney Vault where like,

• 27:50Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  you couldn't, just couldn't access things?

• 27:53Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 28:08Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. Another thing that Alan instituted as producer was that, this was the, 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" is sort of subliminal branding. You're hearing Oscar all night, Oscar, Oscar, Oscar.

• 28:44Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, similar.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  And so those are some of the things that he had in mind, but, but the, 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.

• 29:18Sarah Marshall?

  I like him.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  With one exception, which is Let the River Run by Carly Simon from Working Girl, which is an amazing song, but.

• 29:25Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, it is.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  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 a, you know, a dozen and a half or so young stars to sort of sing, 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, it's so fascinating to see like who they found to represent the, you know, the future of Hollywood to sing the song,

• 30:08Speaker 01

  I Want to Be an Oscar Winner. Like for instance, Ricky Lake was in it. She had just been in Hairspray.

• 30:14Sarah Marshall?

  Nice.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Savion Glover, who was like, you know, teenage tap dancing phenomenon.

• 30:19Sarah Marshall?

  Young tap dancer, yeah.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Patrick Dempsey, who was, you know, at the height of his sort of early.

• 30:23Sarah Marshall?

  Had just been in Lover Boy, I want to say.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  Right, right. Christian Slater was in it. Corey Feldman. Oh, Blair Underwood.

• 30:32Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, wow.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then, so a lot of people who were like, some people who, their names have resonance today.

• 30:39Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  And some of them less so. And, and then at a certain point, they kind of ran out of, of people and they needed more. So they found basically what we would now call nepo babies to fill out the rest. Like Carol Monet's daughter and Ryan O'Neal'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."

• 31:02Sarah Marshall?

  See, we, look, they've always known.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:04Sarah Marshall?

  But you could, you could tell who, who was filler, which is not a great feeling for anybody.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Anyway, and this, and this number, the, the Young Hollywood number, it was choreographed by Kenny Ortega, who's a big name now, and he had just, he had just done Dirty Dancing.

• 31:17Sarah Marshall?

  Director of Newsies, Kenny Ortega, and yeah, salsa Dirty Dancing.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  It all comes back to Newsies for you, doesn't it?

• 31:23Sarah Marshall?

  It does. And Can't Stop the Music, one of the two, yeah.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  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, 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, of the group, wanted to swashbuckle. Oh, Chad Low 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."

• 32:13Speaker 01

  But then he said, "I mean, you had Alan Carr and Kenny Ortega in the Academy. How could you say no to that?"

• 32:18Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah, it is one of those, because you, you have to assume there are a lot of movies like this too, where like, people just sort of like, commit 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.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and Chad Low 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.

• 32:49Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  They, none of, none of the, none of the fingers got pointed as, at these young Gen X-y brat-packy stars.

• 32:56Sarah Marshall?

  That's good. They had enough to deal with.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  So, the opening number, let's talk about it. How did it originate?

• 33:03Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, a dream, I assume.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  As it turns out, Alan Carr was a big fan of this musical review in San Francisco called Beach Blanket Babylon.

• 33:14Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, I've heard of this. This was like a legend, right?

• 33:17Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 33:58Sarah Marshall?

  They all got slipped discs later in life and wondered why.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  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 addition called Beach Blanket Babylon Goes to the Stars, which was about Snow White searching for her prince charming.

• 34:17Sarah Marshall?

  Ah, I do like that.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  So Alan had seen it and thought, oh, this would be perfect to just import into the Academy Awards.

• 34:27Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm. 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.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Ding ding ding. Exactly. Exactly. And here's another quote from Bruce Valanche, who became the head writer for this Oscar ceremony. He said of this number, "It exploded full bore from his head like Zeus. The headdresses struck me as being in perfect Oscars bad taste." So he's, 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 about what the flamboyant producer may come up with."

• 35:26Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, boy.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  And this is of course, like flamboyant was code word for gay. So we're starting to see some of the Some of the hesitancy about like, what is this? What is this gay guy in a caftan going to be doing?

• 35:40Sarah Marshall?

  Until what year in media would you say that that's true? Of flamboyant being the code word for gay?

• 35:46Speaker 01

  Oh, gosh, that's like, 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 40, I'm single, and I work in musical theater. You figure it out.

• 36:03Sarah Marshall?

  You do feel like Bobby Fine on Sex and the City was like, probably not too much of a departure.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  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, who he kept like dropping little hints in the 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.

• 36:39Sarah Marshall?

  Move on, Alan. It's hard to be a woman aging publicly.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 37:20Sarah Marshall?

  Let me perhaps remind us of the the theme you have stated earlier of Icarus.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. And he would also openly bad mouth 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. He was, you know, Gregory Peck is one of these people who would always Come to the Oscars along with Elizabeth Taylor.

• 37:45Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, obvious choice for Prince Charming's dad, honestly.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 38:11Sarah Marshall?

  That really puts us in a time and place.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  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?

• 38:22Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, I do. Yep. Time for Wapner.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  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 LA 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. And I talked to one of his assistants at the time, who said they were in like a car and he used the car phone to plant this story, which was just, just totally made up.

• 39:02Sarah Marshall?

  I'm picturing like Saul Rubinek in True Romance for that part.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  And so, so you can see that like part of this, 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.

• 39:24Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:45Sarah Marshall?

  Which I'm sure we're exacerbated by producing the Oscars. Like, I can't imagine that you wouldn't be taking more speed than usual or whatever.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So at this point in our ominous foreshadowing, I want to introduce you to a new character.

• 40:00Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Eileen Bowman, the woman who plays Snow White.

• 40:06Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, no. Oh, Eileen, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  I spoke at length to Eileen, who was absolutely lovely. So, OK, 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.

• 40:30Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  And she was told to come to the Beverly Hills Hotel at 8:00 a.m. She brought her fiance, who waited by the bar. I'm going to tell you a little bit about her day of her audition, because it was, 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, et cetera. And she was brought upstairs to a room with, 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.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:23Sarah Marshall?

  Are you sure this isn't an unused draft of Mulholland Drive?

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, this is so Lynchian. Thank you for saying that.

• 41:31Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, two beautiful young women dressed like Snow White being driven to a mysterious location by a menacing guy. It's perfect.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  OK, we are now officially in a David Lynch movie. That is, that is perfect.

• 41:43Sarah Marshall?

  Was Eileen, like, did she talk about how she was feeling at this point?

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Anxious, anxious. And 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, um, don't worry, it'll be fine. I'll, you know, I'll be back in a few hours.

• 41:58Sarah Marshall?

  I always get out of jams somehow, you know. You know me, I'm Snow White.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  She's a little like young and naive and like, she knows this is kind of weird, but like, she's 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 Lucide grand piano inside. And she says, oh, boy, we're in Hollywood now.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  And then out comes Alan Carr. And Eileen told me he was wearing a kimono robe. And it was very uncomfortable because he wasn't crossing his legs. And I thought, where do I look? Over here? Over there?

• 42:44Sarah Marshall?

  Aw, Alan, come on. Manners.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  She does an audition. And then they go to Marvin Hamish'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 Blanket Babylon, says, like, he's insisting that they go everywhere, the two Snow Whites, walking with their hands held side by side because he thinks it's like really funny. And finally, he tells them like, okay, here's what we're gonna do.

• 43:10Sarah Marshall?

  They're human beings, you guys.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  He says, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna drive to Rodeo Drive and I want you to both walk down Rodeo Drive with your hands held.

• 43:20Sarah Marshall?

  You know, some child saw that that day and then went home and told their parents. And they were like, you're lying, Johnny. And you know what liars get? A closet.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  And at this point, Eileen is like, absolutely not.

• 43:34Speaker 01

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

• 43:51Sarah Marshall?

  Gross.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Very, very manipulative. And she says, yes, thank you. And he goes, how are you with famous people?

• 43:57Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  And she goes, well, they're just like anybody else.

• 44:00Sarah Marshall?

  That's true. They accept shorter.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  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 Babylon? And he goes, no, honey. This is for the Oscars.

• 44:19Sarah Marshall?

  Treat your auditioners better.

• 44:22Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 44:55Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  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 door so 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 then it was revealed that it was a big prank.

• 45:29Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my god, Alan, you gotta, you gotta calm down. You gotta do some yoga. Just go call your friend Jane Fonda and get a yoga studio recommendation or something.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 45:46Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Do you have thoughts about why this brought it out in him? Like, do you think he was like this normaly, or was this sort of like an escalated way of being or something?

• 45:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 46:03Sarah Marshall?

  You know, maybe the more, the most generous way to put it is like letting the wounded little kid inside you like drive like a maniac.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 46:28Sarah Marshall?

  Which doesn't excuse it, but does a lot to explain it, and also does a lot to explain sort of. 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 gotta be unusual, you know? If everybody was like that, it wouldn't be one of the main things people said about him.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  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.

• 47:17Sarah Marshall?

  Even more unhinged.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  But then, but Tom Cruise had a shaved head because he was doing Born on the 4th of July. And Carr did not like it, so they went to Rob Lowe.

• 47:28Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  So now we're at Oscar night. This is March 29th, 1989. You know, it's just, it's just the height of 80s excess. So, um, 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.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  He says, uh, hey, my manager loves the chemistry we have together. And he's gonna 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.

• 48:29Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  He tells her. Never trust a man in a caftan.

• 48:34Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, God. The David Lynch theory really does hold on this one.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 48:40Sarah Marshall?

  Also, I'm just, I'm very nervous for Rob Lowe to be in close quarters with, with anyone.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 48:46Sarah Marshall?

  You know, in, in terms of like Hollywood sex pests, he's seeded pretty low in terms of the all time worst. But like, I don't, I don't trust him. I don't trust him.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  And maybe this would be a good time to just contextualize where on the timeline this is in, you know, in terms of his sex scandal.

• 49:03Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, talk about that.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 49:21Sarah Marshall?

  Why there? This is an episode that, 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, you know, 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

• 50:02Sarah Marshall?

  in, in ethically difficult situations and also just predatory situations that people end up in.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. And for Rob Lowe, like he, so he is unaware that like he, 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.

• 50:34Sarah Marshall?

  I think I personally, not to project, would have a sense of like, all these people seem equally. Important and they're all telling me different things.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 50:44Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and you don't know if 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.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yeah, absolutely. And one little ominous last story she told me before the ceremony begins, she said she was hiding in a broom closet right before the show started because she was like, she was like a top secret, you know, like the speaker, 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. And the

• 51:32Sarah Marshall?

  Kind of like Woodstock two as well. Like you can't, you do no favors to someone by hyping them up to that extent.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the, the guard who was 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 run, go right out this door and run down Jefferson Boulevard. And, 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 she even up until like it was about to begin, she had this instinct to just run the hell away.

• 52:10Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  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, on the seats of all the stars faces. But now they were real people. And like, for instance, the director told her, don't go to Robin Williams because he'll start to like get involved in the bit. So she's thinking, no, Robin, no Robin Williams, no Robin Williams, no Robin Williams. And then she was supposed to go to Kevin Kline, but the back of his head looked exactly the same as Robin Williams. So of course she goes right up to Robin Williams.

• 52:43Sarah Marshall?

  I wouldn't have thought of that, but I guess they did.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  Telling herself like, abort, abort, abort.

• 52:48Sarah Marshall?

  He's, it's so funny to be like, I'm, 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.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  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."

• 53:15Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, God. These are the things that bring us together, really.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  And, oh, and Barry Levinson, who was the director of Rain Man. Rob Lowe tells this story where he is singing Proud Mary onstage with Eileen Bomet 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?'"

• 53:51Sarah Marshall?

  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, 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 Fire Fest.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  The number happens. The only person who doesn't seem to realize that it has been a gigantic disaster is Mr. Alan Carr.

• 54:30Sarah Marshall?

  Well, yeah.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  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 liked that, right? That was good. That was great."

• 54:44Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  His first inkling that things have not gone great is when he goes to the press room. Jeannie Williams from USA Today asks 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."

• 55:12Sarah Marshall?

  Well, this is true.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  And then he turns to his press rep and goes, "Get me out of here."

• 55:22Sarah Marshall?

  Oh my god.

• 55:25Sarah Marshall?

  He's gonna get the last chopper out of Saigon.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  So Alan goes up to the governor's ball, which of course is like festooned with chiffon in like a 20-piece orchestra and 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.

• 55:51Sarah Marshall?

  What a sentence.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  The show is over. He's feeling great, except Bruce Valanche did tell me this one line. He said, 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 Valanche, "I burned a lot of bridges on this one."

• 56:13Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  You know, it's not like the other Academy Awards 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.

• 56:42Sarah Marshall?

  I'm so happy that happened.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  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 absolutely surreal.

• 56:57Sarah Marshall?

  Best advice I've gotten in 2025 so far.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  Okay, given that the other 80s Oscars were basically, you know, a similar level, like within the same realm of like, of tacky, why is this one the one that became so notorious as the worst Oscars ever? And a lot of that has to do, actually, with what comes next, which is the aftermath. Alan Carr, who is basically expecting a raft of bouquets and congratulatory telegrams to appear at his party mansion, wakes up.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  And reads the reviews.

• 57:32Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  Uh, the Associated Press called it a flaming wreck.

• 57:37Sarah Marshall?

  That, that feels, um.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  Oh, slightly homophobic, yeah.

• 57:40Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  I don't think they meant flaming in that fashion, but you know.

• 57:44Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  Noted, noted.

• 57:45Sarah Marshall?

  At first I was thinking of the Ford Pinto and then I was like, hey, wait a minute.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  Uh, the Sacramento Bee called it a flatulent gas bag of a show.

• 57:53Sarah Marshall?

  Well, at least that's not homophobic.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  Uh, Janet Maslin in the Times writes that the opening number deserves a permanent place in the annals of Oscar embarrassments.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  At the, at around the same time, uh, Alan Carr was waking up to bad reviews and an absolute lack of bouquets at his doorstep. The president of the Academy, Richard Khan, 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.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  Because apparently no one had cleared Snow White with the studio.

• 58:28Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, no. Oh, I wouldn't worry about it. Disney isn't very litigious.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  Of course, Snow White, you know, if anyone's wondering, yes, Snow White is like a classic fairy tale character.

• 58:38Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  But this was very clearly the Disney cartoon version of Snow White's.

• 58:42Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Like, the costume's the same, the look is the same. Like, you look at her and you know who it is, I assume.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Gregory Peck is angry, the Academy is angry, the critics are, uh, very unhappy.

• 58:54Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  Uh, Carr, uh, basically drags himself to lunch, uh, he had, at Morton's, which is a kind of industry hangout. He was, he was with his friend, uh, Gary Pudney, who, who told me he walked into Morton's for lunch expecting a standing ovation and instead people wouldn't even talk to him.

• 59:12Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, boy.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 59:22Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  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, um, 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.

• 59:43Sarah Marshall?

  I love it. Yeah.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  She leaves the theater. The only thing she kept was her fake eyelashes.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:00:11Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  Fortunately, that time had passed by the time I was writing my book, so she could tell me all about it.

• 1:00:16Sarah Marshall?

  It's a play in the long game is what the historian does.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 1:01:00Sarah Marshall?

  It is the lost Oscars.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  So what does Alan do? The first thing he does, once he's sort of like drunk 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 says that-

• 1:01:23Sarah Marshall?

  He's doing the Euphoria gif, "I have never been happier."

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  He claims that Ronald Reagan actually called him to compliment him and told him how he-

• 1:01:33Sarah Marshall?

  I believe that Reagan would have liked that.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  He also invites over the arts editor of the LA 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.

• 1:02:02Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  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 Newman, Julie Andrews, Blake Edwards, Billy Wilder, Joseph Mankiewicz, Sidney Lumet, and on and on.

• 1:02:35Sarah Marshall?

  You don't want to piss off Julie Andrews.

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  Well, she was married to Blake Edwards, who apparently Edwards and Peck were like the people who stood, who like sort of corralled everyone to sign this letter.

• 1:02:45Sarah Marshall?

  Nice.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  It, it, they sent it to the Academy, but it's, you know, open letter that, 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, 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 Wolfe 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.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  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 you're, 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.

• 1:03:51Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm. 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 that one of them said, like, or 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.

• 1:04:21Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  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 see him kind of like, I just had 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 Phillippe, but he's sort of made himself the impresario so that he could get into the cool party.

• 1:04:55Sarah Marshall?

  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.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  A couple of 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.

• 1:05:18Sarah Marshall?

  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?

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  It was kind of all of those things. Actually, she was 16. The age of consent in Georgia was 14 at the time.

• 1:05:39Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, boy. Yeah. Well, I disagree with that.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. The age of consent for being videotaped was 18.

• 1:05:46Sarah Marshall?

  That's interesting. Okay.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then her mother filed a lawsuit. And then, of course, like the tabloids had a had a feeding frenzy. And one thing that Bruce Valange told me is that like every time the news would cover like this sex tape, like they'd say, oh, Rob Lowe, most recently seen dancing with Snow White in the disastrous opening number of the Academy Awards. So it actually like, it like the sex tape somehow like fed the scandal of the opening number of the Oscars rather than vice versa.

• 1:06:16Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And, you know, I tend to suspect that this affected her life a lot more negatively than it did his.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, he bounced back with

• 1:06:25Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  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. And it was chaired by a very well-liked veteran TV director and producer named Gil Katz.

• 1:06:53Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  Gil Katz then became the new 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.

• 1:07:08Sarah Marshall?

  The Victor Fleming of Oscars producers.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  To draw on another 80s metaphor, like the Carr 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.

• 1:07:29Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  And so, of course, he became like one of the great Oscar hosts.

• 1:07:34Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:07:44Sarah Marshall?

  And that was 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.

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  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?"

• 1:08:12Sarah Marshall?

  Which I'm sure like everybody needed.

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  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...

• 1:08:22Sarah Marshall?

  That is a good one. I like that.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  They kept Bruce Valanche, who stayed on and did like, you know, like two dozen Oscars as the, as the writer, as a joke. 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 the red carpet like a little more edgy and dangerous and critical. But it also like turned it into a show kind of to to rival the Oscars itself. So

• 1:08:57Sarah Marshall?

  Totally.

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:09:04Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  In the meanwhile, what became of our our friend Alan Carr?

• 1:09:11Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  He immediately became a recluse at his his party mansion. His parties kind of became like quiet little dinners. He continued with his drinking, popping Percocet, you know, anything he could lay his hands on. Bruce Valanche told me, I frankly wasn't that eager to talk to him because I knew it was coming. I knew there would be a night of the long knives where eventually he would say, you, you fat queen Jew 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.

• 1:09:56Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, which as an avoidant person, I really respect Bruce Valanche's choices.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  Yes, and there's so some of his friends did feel like there was a just a homophobia behind this entire kind of ostracization of him.

• 1:10:12Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I feel like inevitably.

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:10:25Sarah Marshall?

  Hollywood gay? No.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  So as we get into the 90s, he couldn't get any of his producing projects off the ground. He had a couple of 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.

• 1:10:48Sarah Marshall?

  He had it coming. He had it coming. He had it coming all along. So anyway.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  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 days to his financial analyst. He had one like last little moment of glory on this, on the 20th anniversary of Grease in 1998, where 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 Alan.

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  But he, you know, he, he never really was able to produce anything else. So it definitively just ended his career.

• 1:11:39Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  In 1998, he had a kidney transplant and he, he went back and he threw a party for his new kidney. But sadly-

• 1:11:49Sarah Marshall?

  I really appreciate that.

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think actually that's a good recommendation to anyone who goes through a, an organ transplant. Once it happens, throw a, throw a party for your new organ. Sadly, midway through this kidney party, he had to call an ambulance to take him to Cedar Sinai because he actually had liver cancer.

• 1:12:09Sarah Marshall?

  Ah.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  And, and he died at age 62 in June, 1999. I talked to his oldest friend from Illinois, Joanne Simbalo, who said he had no family at that point. His parents were gone. He had no brothers or sisters. So it was, it was his staff that made the arrangements. It was very sad, very odd.

• 1:12:31Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  And then his friends, you know, I'll just, 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 nineteen ninety, in nineteen eighty-nine, and then he sort of lived another ten years, but before he had died of cancer, he kind of, it was like death by Oscars. And, 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.

• 1:13:10Sarah Marshall?

  Do you, 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?

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  All of the, the kind of like anatomy of a fiasco is what really drew me to this story.

• 1:13:22Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  But I found myself really.

• 1:13:23Sarah Marshall?

  That's the difference between a fiasco and a disaster, I guess. A fiasco is a disaster without fatalities.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  Fiasco is a fun word. It's the, it's the title of this chapter in the book. But I, I, 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. Uh, 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.

• 1:14:02Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 1:14:02Speaker 01

  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, a, 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 if it hadn't been a, you know, total wreck, like, it would have been extraordinary. It would have been fabulous.

• 1:14:48Sarah Marshall?

  And then, but yeah, it's like, you know, you can't use it as a, a cautionary tale against trying to fly. It's like, just, you know, keep a cool head and, uh, play test your wing material.

• 1:15:02Speaker 01

  And you know, and cut down the opening number. It should not be longer than six minutes at the most.

• 1:15:07Sarah Marshall?

  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?

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:15:48Sarah Marshall?

  Well, I'm, I'm so happy that you told this story. I do feel like a lot of tenderness for everybody involved, you know?

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  Well, especially Eileen Bowman. She's, she's doing well.

• 1:15:59Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, oh my God, that's so good, yeah?

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  She went, she never went back to Hollywood. She, she actually told me that she tried to audition for things, but like as soon as people saw Snow White at the Oscars on her resume, they kind of like laughed her out of the room. But I think that she realized pretty quickly, as naive as she was, that like this town was just not for her.

• 1:16:18Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. I, I would love to close by asking you, what is your Oscar Roman Empire? If you can pick just one, I realize this might, this might be it.

• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  Honestly, one of them has been mentioned already, which is that in 1988, Pee Wee Herman presented with Robocop.

• 1:16:35Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I don't think he can top that.

• 1:16:54Speaker 02

  Thanks, Robocop.

• 1:16:58Speaker 03

  All right, Kiwi. It's safe to continue giving the award now.

• 1:17:03Speaker 02

  Thanks, Robocop.

• 1:17:06Sarah Marshall?

  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, what are you writing about lately? What are you excited about? All of that stuff.

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  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, my, I'm a staff writer with The New Yorker, and right now I'm, I'm covering Oscar season, including I just wrote a piece about the whole Emilia Perez, Carlos Sofia Gascón cascade of scandals. And I will be at the Oscars this year and will write an account of my night.

• 1:17:57Sarah Marshall?

  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 of weeks ago, asking people what they were excited about, what 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.

• 1:18:38Sarah Marshall?

  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 am asking you to tell us what you're excited about. What's bringing you joy? What's bringing you hope? We've set up an email address for this. It's [email protected]. We could not resist a Stepford Wives reference.

• 1:19:17Sarah Marshall?

  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 6:00 PM 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 views of the world with us. And I can't wait.

• 1:19:58Sarah Marshall?

  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.