The Gatsby of Benedict Canyon

The hottest movie in the U.S. right now is Survive! In three weeks it has grossed $6 million, and it may rank with the nastiest 90 minutes ever to appear on the screen.

Survive! is a quickie rip-off of a quickie ripoff. Exploiting the 1972 plane crash in the Andes in which 16 of the 45 Uruguayans aboard survived by eating the flesh of those who had died, a Mexican company brought out an instant tamale version of the saga. Allan Carr, 39, an epicene Hollywood talent manager and promoter, snapped up the film for $500,000.

For less than $500,000, Carr reshot the original negative through netting and filters so that the snow would not look quite so much like the whitewashed cornflakes of the original. He spliced in stock avalanche footage, inserted some cretinous English dialogue (sample: "There's no food left ... What are we going to do?"), added a bombastic score, and cut the original by about one-third. The film is ignoble, demeaning hokum. Nevertheless, Paramount has spent $1 million to promote it.

Survival, if by less dire means, is a subject for which Allan Carr has near-Andean credentials. He was hopelessly show-biz-struck as a kid named Alan Solomon in suburban Highland Park, Ill. At 21 he changed his last name and the spelling of his first. He landed a job as general manager of Chicago's Civic Theater, staging such productions as The World of Carl Sandburg, with Bette Davis and Gary Merrill. "I also flew in Carl Sandburg," Carr recalls superciliously, "who brought a little carton of goat's milk." The aspiring entrepreneur arrived in Hollywood in 1961, only to endure some lean years: the leaner they got, the fatter he got. Gradually Carr's drive, persistence and imagination began paying off. He became personal manager for a string of luminaries who now include Ann-Margret, Nancy Walker, Peter Sellers, Sonny Bono, Composer Marvin Hamlisch and a dog named Gus, alias Won Ton Ton.

Glamorous Roles. "In a way," says Carr, "I am like a career doctor. I look at somebody, and I become an analyst of everything from what they wear to what they want out of the business." What Nancy Walker wanted was her own show. "Would two years be good enough?" asked Allan. When he heard that Producer Norman Lear "had a fantasy about doing a series concerning a show-biz lady," he got Walker the starring role--the series is called The Nancy Walker Show and will premiere next month. At the moment, Carr is helping Ann-Margret shed the beat-up image she acquired from Carnal Knowledge and Tommy. She is making two movies and has signed for a third, in all of which she plays glamorous roles.

Try as he might, however, Carr remained a 310-lb. flop on the social circuit. As his old friend and sometime business partner, ex-Actor Roger Smith (Ann-Margret's husband), puts it, "He was just not pleasant to look at." On Smith's advice, Carr underwent an operation that tied off 18 ft. of intestines and helped to pare his 5-ft. 7-in. frame to a relatively sylphlike 210 lbs.

Carr has become a character in his own right. He is defiantly recognizable, with his tiny brown curls permed by Vidal Sassoon, his collection of kaftans, kimonos, velvet suits and diamonds by the yard--all loosely combined in a style he calls "glitterfunk"--he coined the word himself. On the dolce vita circuit, he has become instant Elsa Maxwell, giving lavish bashes such as his star-spangled shindig for Truman Capote at the abandoned Lincoln Heights Jail in downtown Los Angeles (the guests were not invited but subpoenaed). Carr's sumptuous Benedict Canyon house was originally built by David O. Selznick for one of his wives. When Carr throws a party at home, like his blowout for Nureyev with its Stolichnaya-to-balalaika Russian motif, the bottom of the driveway is blocked by 6-ft. 6-in. security guards with 17-in. necks. Their ostensible duty is to usher guests into waiting limousines for the 150-yd. drive to the house.

Inside the lovable Gatsby of Benedict Canyon, say close acquaintances, lurks a morose, tightfisted neurotic who has few real friends. His temper explodes equally at both studio heads and staff members. Clients who are late with their monthly fee get a prompt call from his business office. No one, however --least of all Allan Carr--questions Glitterfunk's ability to revivify glamour in a Hollywood whose current denizens are more preoccupied with soybean futures than scintillation. Carr's reputation may survive Survive!, particularly if his movie production of Grease, the musical that has been running for 4 1/2 years in Manhattan, is as lubricantly lubricious as he claims it will be. Says he: "I have a dream of opening a Broadway show and having it run right around the corner from a movie I have produced." The Broadway show could even be a musical version of Survive!

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.