How Grease Beat the Odds and Became the Biggest Movie Musical of the 2. He drove a yellow Mercedes with a personalized license plate that read CAFTANS, a nod to the more than 1. The décor inside his Benedict Canyon mansion was gaudy, lacquered, and more than a tad narcissistic: there were several gilt- framed portraits of himself on the walls. He threw outrageous parties accented with Petrossian caviar and Cristal champagne, their invitations so coveted in Hollywood that he split them up into “Rolodex parties,” hosting the A- L guest list one night, the M- Z one the next.

Many of his after- parties were even spicier—all- gay affairs with actors and moguls mingling with lithe, sinewy young men he called his “twinkies,” their collective sexual exploits watched by the host from his master bedroom on closed- circuit television. Watch The Legend Of Ben Hall Putlocker there. His home contained a stainless- steel refrigerator in the master bedroom and a dialysis machine—a testament to both his voracious appetite and the health problems that would plague him his entire life. His name was Allan Carr, and he had grown up as Alan Solomon in the suburbs of Chicago, a nice Jewish boy known as Poopsie who had a flashy personality and a stubbornly pudgy physique.

• From the magazine How Grease Beat the Odds and Became the Biggest Movie Musical of the 20th Century.
• Read reviews, watch trailers and clips, find showtimes, view celebrity photos and more on MSN Movies.

In the 1. 96. 0s, bankrolled by his parents, he dabbled in small- potatoes theatrical producing before branching out as an event planner (he once staged a party in a jail for Truman Capote) and talent manager, at one time or another overseeing the careers of performers from Tony Curtis to Joan Rivers to Mama Cass Elliot. He produced a series of sparkly television specials for Ann- Margret. He drifted into marketing films, first for Robert Stigwood’s 1. Tommy, and a year later for Survive!, a Mexican film about plane- crash survivors who turn to cannibalism.

Brandon gets an n64 for christmas 1998 and gets way too excited inquiries about usage / questions / comments? Watch Plague Town HDQ.

It was this last movie, eviscerated by critics but a surprise hit at the box office, that made him a player at Paramount Pictures. At Paramount, Carr would single- handedly revive a genre of tinselly filmmaking left for dead, help create superstardom for the era’s most bankable leading man, and oversee the highest- grossing American movie musical of the 2. Grease. The slapdash production, mapped out in five weeks and shot over two months, was given a modest $6 million budget by Paramount C.

E. O. Barry Diller, who dismissed the whole thing as so much cinematic cotton candy. Its leading lady was foreign and untried, its cast was too old, its score uneven, its choreography and staging more often than not thought up on the fly. Its supporting cast was made up largely of a ragtag cluster of 1. There were so many reasons Grease should not have worked, so many times one decision made in the other direction could have blown apart the entire production like a house of cards. But Grease had Carr—“he was like Uncle Allan,” Didi Conn, who played beauty- school dropout Frenchy, says today—and, in the end, that’s what transformed it from fluffy hokum into a celluloid icon. Its stage version still pops up at high schools every year and is now being reimagined as a live, one- night- only television event on Fox, airing January 3. Without Allan being the showman, we wouldn’t have been able to pull it off,” says John Travolta, who carried the film as good- hearted bad boy Danny Zuko.

He was the Barnum & Bailey of it all.”“Allan would come in standing on the dolly cart in his caftan, with his arms outstretched like Moses, and he would say, ‘Children, children, gather round,’ and then give us the reports on the dailies and how they were being received,” recalls Dinah Manoff, who played Marty, one of the Pink Ladies, in the movie. There was nobody like him. He was really the star of Grease.”Casting and Crow’s- Feet.

Grease was the brainchild of an advertising copywriter, Jim Jacobs, and a high- school art teacher, Warren Casey. The two had met through an amateur theater group in Chicago in the early 1.

Jacobs had been a greaser himself in high school; Casey had been bookish and studious. Hearing Led Zeppelin records playing at a late- night cast party, they both lamented the passing of the great doo- wop songs of the 1. They would call it Grease, an homage to the era’s greasy hair, greasy engines, and greasy food. The gritty, profanity- laced, raunchy story of teenage attitude—for which Jacobs and Casey collaborated on the book, the lyrics, and the music—opened on February 5, 1. Chicago. When it arrived in New York a year later, playing Off Broadway at the Eden Theatre, Carr caught it one night with composer Marvin Hamlisch and director- choreographer Michael Bennett and instantly saw its potential as a film. Film rights had already been sold to Ralph Bakshi (the animator who made the X- rated Fritz the Cat), but when they lapsed, Carr snapped them up for $2. Paramount. The studio sniffed at the idea as lowbrow even as it green- lighted it.

Barry Diller and Allan Carr hated each other’s guts,” says Robert Hofler, Carr’s biographer. Barry considered Allan to be this gross joke.” Diller disputes this characterization, stating that he “didn’t intensely like or dislike Allan Carr,” whom he recalls as “a flamboyant fellow who had occasional good instincts.” Diller does admit “there were disagreements throughout production and editing, not particularly unusual, but—because of the parties involved—complex.”Carr booked 3. Randal Kleiser—a college roommate of George Lucas’s—to direct and hired a young southern novelist named Bronte Woodard to help him adapt the screenplay. The original treatment, submitted to the studio in December 1. Grease might have turned out.

Carr’s vision included Danny Zuko as a busboy and gas- station attendant (doing a song called “Gas Pump Jockey”); Paul Lynde (at that time best known as Uncle Arthur on television’s Bewitched) as the Rydell High principal; Detroit Tigers star Mark “The Bird” Fidrych as the school baseball hero; Donny Osmond as Teen Angel; and the Beach Boys doing the showstopping garage production number, “Greased Lightnin’.” There was even a scene with Lynde dressed as Carmen Miranda. Mercifully, none of it came to pass.)Paramount had wanted Henry Winkler, Fonzie on ABC’s popular sitcom Happy Days, as Danny, but Winkler, leery of being typecast, passed. Watch Jarhead 3: The Siege Online. Stigwood, Carr’s co- producer, had a three- picture deal with the 2. Travolta, the Farrah- maned breakout star of ABC’s Welcome Back, Kotter. The actor had grown up in a musical home (“My house was like Glee,” he now says), had played Doody, one of the Burger Palace Boys (later the T- Birds), in the traveling company of Grease, and had teamed up with Kleiser in the ABC tele- movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. He would make Stigwood’s picture Saturday Night Fever first.

But he was in. Casting Sandy, the good- girl counterweight to Travolta’s slick Danny, would prove thornier. Kleiser took a gander at rushes from a new film his old college pal Lucas was making, titled Star Wars, to see if its female lead, Carrie Fisher, could be a fit.

Unable to judge either her acting or singing ability, Kleiser and Carr mulled other possibilities, including *The Partridge Family’*s Susan Dey, Deborah Raffin, and toothy singer Marie Osmond, who became the front- runner until she objected to Sandy’s transformation from good girl to bad girl and dropped out in protest. The high- living Allan Carr with his star, in Malibu, 1. Photograph by Peter Borsari/© 1. Borsari Images. Carr then zeroed in on Olivia Newton- John, the blonde, Australian, country- lite singer who sat across from him at a dinner party at Helen Reddy’s house one night without realizing she was auditioning. Carr gushed to Newton- John that she would be perfect for the role, but the singer—who had made her film debut in 1.

Toomorrow, an English science- fiction bomb—put on the brakes. I was very anxious about making another film, because my music career was going well,” Newton- John says, “and I did not want to mess it up by doing another movie that wasn’t good.”Kleiser wasn’t convinced, either.