Can't Stop the Cocaine

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The film-maker Jeffrey Schwartz, the documentarian who's focused his recent career on telling the gayest of gay stories -- he made Tab Hunter Confidential, I Am Divine, Vito (the doc on Celluloid Closet author Vito Russo), and Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon (the doc on porn star Jack Wrangler), amongst others -- has two projects coming up. He is making a doc on Showgirls (!!!) and he is making a doc about Allan Carr, the flamingly camp producer of Grease and Can't Stop the Music who crashed and burned on a turbulent sea of caftans and cocaine in the late 70s and early 80s. Here's an interview with Schwartz on the doc, which is already screening at fests around the country. (via)

I've been telling people for years that they need to read Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr, the biography of Mr. Carr, it is an insane spectacle of Hollywood excess - well now's your chance. Buy your copy now before it goes out of stock like the book Feud was based on did.

The doc is titled The Fabulous Allan Carr and if anybody earned that gay title tis he. Anyway when I went looking up this project I also stumbled upon this fun story told by Steve Guttenberg in his own biography about the auditioning process for Can't Stop the Music gig:

“Allan, 350 pounds of cynicism and creativity, sat on a couch in a caftan, a flowing one-piece tent that covered almost all of his body….I tried not to notice that he wasn’t wearing underwear. ” ‘Turn around. Let me see your tush.’ I did. Is this what I have to do to get a job? ” ‘Do you have any aversion to wearing a sock in your pants? Enough.’ He clapped his hands like a sultan and his yes-men ushered me out.” Well, Allan must have liked what he saw, because Guttenberg got the job–but not without a warning. The actor’s agent urged him, “Whatever you do, don’t be alone with Allan. He’s a grabber!”

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