Let's flashback to 1989 and the 61st Annual Academy Awards. Someone gets the idea to hire producer-manager Allan Carr to produce and manage the festivities and the show goes down in show business history for an opening number of jaw-dropping awfulness. As I recall, the remainder of the telecast was generally decent (or as decent as they ever are) but all people talked about thereafter was that opening number. It left Rob Lowe, a lady dressed as Snow White and a lot of stars who are still — even if they're now dead — embarrassed about their participation. A bevy of notable Hollywood stars, including Julie Andrews and Gregory Peck, signed a much-publicized letter to the Academy demanding that such "tastelessness" never again be allowed to despoil their beloved Oscar ceremony.
Imagine: Tastelessness at the Oscar ceremony. That had certainly never happened before.
Carr was a fan of the outrageously-costumed musical revue, Beach Blanket Babylon, which opened in San Francisco in 1974 and still seems to be playing there. (I've never seen it but here's a link to its website — with a warning that music plays the moment you get there.) He conscripted its creator, Steve Silver, to invent the Oscar moment, adapting some elements of the stage show. Our link today is to that number, which runs close to ten minutes.
You can decide for yourself if it's the horror that some thought. My view, then as now, is that it's a bad production number but so what? How often did that ceremony ever start with a not-bad production number? When Billy Crystal first hosted the following year, the broadcast was lauded for dispensing with the opening musical extravaganza…and not just because of the Carr-spawned disaster. Those numbers were usually pretty gruesome. Obviously, though no one said this aloud at the time, the objections to the start of the '89 event, were not that it was too grotesque but that it was too gay. Back then, that mattered more than it would today. Today, I suspect, people would just say it was a lousy number and be done with it.
Oh, yeah — and the Disney folks would threaten a lawsuit for copyright infringement as they did then. Some things never change.
The person I felt sorry for in all this was the luckless actress who played Snow White. Her name was Eileen Bowman and she later told interviewers that she'd never seen an Academy Award ceremony before performing at one. She was a veteran of Beach Blanket Babylon and quite wonderful in it, everyone said. She was actually quite wonderful in this awful number, too. A quick scan of the 'net shows that she's still performing — or at least, someone with that name is — in the occasional theatrical production in California.
Thanks to several folks who sent me this link. The first was Paul Blankenship so he gets his name in the weblog.
