"At least nobody sued": Bruce Vilanch on the hilarity and chaos of writing for the Academy Awards

During the last writers’ strike, a friend of mine posted a message on social media, or as it is known at my man cave, keyboard warfare, saying how it would be fine with him if all awards shows were done without writers, thus sparing us all the “witless banter and egregious propagandizing” that is “inevitably” a part of such proceedings. I immediately blocked him and his agent, who had undoubtedly pitched him to write on one of my awards shows.

I then realized that in some quarters, awards shows are considered the bad ideas of all time. It follows that the Academy Awards, the biggest of them, would therefore be the worst. It doesn’t really follow, but please play along.

The Oscars are the awards show that started it all. They’re creeping up on one hundred years of thanking the little people, and even in a world of diminished ratings, they still pull in more eyeballs than any of the others.

I have been officially credited on twenty-five of them and unofficially involved with a dozen more. Sometimes I was the head writer, sometimes I was on the team that wrote for the host, sometimes the team that wrote for everyone but the host, sometimes straddling the two teams like Yakima Canutt driving a runaway stagecoach. Also sometimes phoning it in as a favor to a friend who needed a rewrite.

Translation: uncredited.

I’ve won two Emmys for cowriting two of the Oscar shows hosted by Billy Crystal, was nominated for the Steve Martin–Alec Baldwin show, and probably should have been nominated for a few others, but the writers who nominate suffer from Oscar fatigue just like everybody else, and it’s difficult to compete with a popular comedian who’s written a terrific stand-up special. My mother got confused now and again on whether I won an Oscar for writing the Emmys or was it the other way around. You can’t win an Oscar for writing the Emmys, and you can’t win an Emmy for writing the Emmys, either, because even the Television Academy recognizes how infra dig and crazy meta that would be.

I’m back. Had to lie down after that paragraph.

The first Oscar show I got to have my name on is the most infamous: the Snow White show, 1989. The same Allan Carr who fired me off the Village People picture came to me ten years later and asked me to write the Academy Awards, which he was entrusted to overhaul with his big-time showman ways. Allan could sell something like nobody else. He sold me on writing the show — previously written by several teams of writers — by myself. Never having done an awards show before, I had no idea what a foolhardy proposition that was. And I didn’t remain alone for long. We roped Hildy Parks, writer of many great Tony Awards shows, to partner with me.

Allan also sold the Academy on a few other things. He had them sit down with the L.A. municipal government and formulate a strategic traffic plan so that the parade of limos heading for the Shrine Auditorium could coexist with Los Angeles rush hour traffic. Allan loathed seeing a star in traffic-produced distress.

He engaged Fred Hayman, grand pooh-bah of Giorgio, the toniest dress shop in Beverly Hills, as “fashion consultant,” and organized a preshow fashion event to whet everyone’s appetite. The Oscars are as much about dresses as movies, why not admit that? He got some corporations to design and cater the greenroom backstage so overdressed divas could canoodle in comfort before their appearances onstage.

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Instead of a host, he came up with the creative theme of presenters who had a reason to be onstage together, either as real-life couples (Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis, Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson), movie pairs (Kim Novak and James Stewart, Sammy Davis Jr. and Gregory Hines), or colleagues (two James Bonds, Sean Connery and Roger Moore, with Michael Caine, all three of whom would later be knighted, but not for this).

To beef up the marquee, he added clips of the five nominated best pictures, each introduced by a movie star. At the suggestion of the new director, Jeff Margolis, he changed “The winner is . . .” to “And the Oscar goes to . . .”—a kinder, gentler way of covering the strained expressions of goodwill that form on the faces of the people who don’t win.

Allan knew he could sell better than anyone. Unfortunately, he also thought he could write better than anyone, direct better than anyone, edit better than anyone and design better than anyone. He believed that passing judgment on other people’s work was the same as creating that work. This was unfortunate, as it alienated other people, even his own management client, Marvin Hamlisch, who was the music director for the show and finally had to say to him, “Allan, I know what I’m doing.”

Bruce Vilanch (Photo by Rick Stockwell)I had not reached that level with him, but he didn’t give me too much of a hard time, because he was so busy marketing the event. And that was something he could do better than anybody else. In his non-Oscar life, he drove around in a yellow Mercedes convertible that was a gift from Universal for showing them how to sell "The Deer Hunter" (1978), which they had more or less given up on as a lost downer. Allan saw a screening of it and was profoundly moved and laid out a marketing plan that worked beyond all of their dreams. In the smoke of what has been written about Allan, his real talents have become invisible.

Meanwhile, I was getting to write for giants I had worshipped: Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, Lucille Ball and Bob Hope. It was the last appearance Lucille made before her startling death a month later. She and Hope introduced a number that was so strange it made people almost forget their appearance a minute before.

It happened because, in Allan’s view, the entries that were eligible for the Best Original Song award were so uninteresting to him, and so unheard (not a good thing for a song), that he got the music branch to institute a minimum number of votes a song had to get in order to make the top five. Only three songs reached it, so only three were nominated. One by Phil Collins, one by Carly Simon, and one by Bob Telson. I know, I haven’t come across that last name lately, either, but it was the song from the West German dramedy "Bagdad Cafe," sung by Oleta Adams.

Phil Collins was, we heard, pissed at the Academy for not asking him to perform his nominated song in a previous year, turning it instead into an interpretive ballet for Ann Reinking. So Phil was out. Carly Simon was in a period of not performing live, so that was two strikes. Oleta Adams, who is a gorgeous vocalist, was not the draw Allan was looking for, and no one else was interested in performing either of the other songs, so the music branch allowed Allan to, for the one and only time, cut the original song performances altogether.

Instead, Allan had two unrelated musical numbers up his sleeve, one of which became the modern definition of infamy. It was the other one that Hope and Lucille introduced. These two famous movie partners and stratospheric television stars liked what I wrote for them, and I remember after they rehearsed it, Lucille said to me, “I like it and I’ll do it just like that, but he’ll do whatever he wants to do, you know that, don’t you?” Ultimately, it didn’t matter—the crowd ate them up. They feasted on the number that followed, but for all the wrong reasons.

Allan, starstruck to a fault, decided it would be great fun to do the ultimate nepo-baby production, and that term would not be invented for thirty more years. He made a list of all of the kids of all the famous Hollywood people he could think of and canvassed the bunch to see who could sing, who could dance, who could do neither but looked pretty. It was an eclectic group. Connie Stevens’ two daughters by Eddie Fisher — Joely Fisher and Tricia Leigh Fisher — came along, as did Tyrone Power Jr., Keith Coogan (grandson of Jackie), Carrie Hamilton (daughter of Carol Burnett), Tracy Nelson (daughter of Ricky and granddaughter of Ozzie and Harriet!), and Patrick O’Neal, son of Ryan but not an Oscar winner like his half-sister Tatum, who wisely passed. Less intuitively, participants also included Chad Lowe (brother of Rob more to come on him), Patrick Dempsey and Corey Parker (Patrick was married to Corey’s mother Rocky, his much older manager), Corey Feldman (an unrelated Corey), Ricki Lake and Savion Glover (I was never sure of their status in the theme of things), Christian Slater (mother was in casting), Holly Robinson (mother was a manager), and Matt Lattanzi (wife was Olivia Newton-John). Forgive me if I’ve left out any member of Young Hollywood. The number, written by John Kander and Fred Ebb (also not in the Broadway production of their New York, New York) and arranged and conducted by Marvin Hamlisch, was called “I Wanna Be an Oscar Winner,” and, to date, none of them has become one.

It was a very elaborate production on one of those enormous staircases you’ve seen in every old Hollywood musical ever, and solos flew by as you tried to identify who everybody was. The only spot I remember was Patrick Dempsey’s; he proved to be an adept Gene Kelly dancer, lithe and graceful and totally in control of his hat.

The other number that Allan came up with was the one that has the distinction of being the Titanic of TV production numbers, the one that sank on its maiden voyage and remains a subject of passionate interest thirty-five years later. To date, nobody has made a movie about it, but streaming has a hearty appetite that must be appeased, and I wouldn’t rule it out.

It started, as the Village People movie started ten years earlier, with Allan seeing a performance. I wasn’t there for this one, but he called, abrim with enthusiasm, to tell me about it. It was in San Francisco, and it was called "Beach Blanket Babylon."

The "Beach Blanket" shows started in 1974, created by a dynamo named Steve Silver and maintained by his wife, later widow, Jo. Many times, San Francisco show biz types have said to me, “In this town, if it ain’t flashin’, they don’t see it.” The "Beach Blanket" shows flashed like the beacon on Telegraph Hill, beckoning all the ships at sea. Stuffed into the top floor of a union hall, or something like it, in North Beach, the haunt of beatnik poets and filmmakers, it told the story of Snow White’s trip around the world in eighty ways.

This mock Disney Candide-ette met every bizarre experience, including impersonations of famous people dead and alive, with wide-eyed innocence and lunatic happiness. Many of them featured mammoth headdresses they could just keep from plummeting into the ringside patrons. Snow wound up in San Francisco, of course, with a massive gondola on her head containing the entire city skyline, the Golden Gate Bridge, that beacon, everything but Kim Novak, Jeanette MacDonald and Carol Doda. It was quintessentially San Francisco, risqué but innocent, satirical but fun-loving, the message being Come here and be yourself, whatever you are. It was the kind of thing that local audiences embraced and tourists enjoyed for its uniqueness. It never really worked anywhere else. They tried it in London and Vegas. But it was a fish out of water wherever it went . . . as Allan Carr was about to demonstrate on global television. 

Allan’s bad idea was to take Snow White to Hollywood and the Oscars. This, of course, took her out of her context. What reason did Snow White have to return to Hollywood? Steve Silver had never considered featuring it in her world tour, maybe because he planted Hollywood characters in all the places she visited. Also, the show was San Francisco–centric. So to have Snow White come back to Hollywood would beg the question: Why? Having her dance down the aisle at the Shrine would be a real disruptor. Iceberg, dead ahead.

To add to the confusion, Snow would wind up at a reincarnation of L.A.’s Cocoanut Grove nightclub, and to further add to the incongruity, the room would be stacked with stars from Snow White’s own golden age. Allan made up a list of stars who would be seated there. What he failed or willfully refused to take into account was that his memory of the stars he loved as a teenager did not stack up with the condition they were in today, 1989. Lower all boats.

He plunged ahead with the number. As it was set at the Cocoanut Grove, Merv Griffin was enlisted to pretend he was the boy singer on the bandstand, as he once had been, singing “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts,” which may have been the moment that caused one homophobic critic to write that the number simulated a gay nightclub. Maybe it was the other bits from "Babylon" that were peppered throughout the thing.

One wholly original piece never made it past dress rehearsal: an unlikely trio made up of Mayim Bialik and the Nicholas Brothers. Mayim at the time was a child actress with her "Big Bang Theory" and "Jeopardy!" days far ahead of her. At the moment, she was noted for playing Bette Midler as a little girl in "Beaches." Harold and Fayard Nicholas were a dance team noted for coming down a staircase by doing a split on each step and for flying across the stage in superhuman style. As old as they were—sixty-eight and seventy-four—they could still do it, and with relative ease. The routine that had been cooked up for them and young Mayim was a knockoff of the things little Shirley Temple did with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in musicals of the ’30s, things that younger viewers only knew from Carol Burnett sketches. It was fun to watch these three carry on, but as the whole opening shebang was heading toward thirty minutes of airtime, something had to go, and the axe wound up falling on them. They got off the boat just in time.

The thing that stayed, and stayed, and stayed was not that trio but another trio, the trio that would not die . . . Snow White and Rob Lowe and “Proud Mary.” Rob has written and spoken and podcasted about this calamity, and Michael Schulman, in his excellent book "Oscar Wars," unearthed Eileen Bowman, the young performer who played Snow White and had quite a story to tell, but here’s what I know.

First off, Hildy Parks and I had nothing to do with the number. It was crafted by Steve Silver and Allan Carr and all we could do was offer opinions that, if they didn’t concur with Allan’s, were dismissed after ten seconds like the pasties on Carol Doda.

As it finally turned out, the number began at the end of the red carpet arrivals, which had yet to blossom into the full-scale “What are you wearing?” fashion parade that now upstages the movies. As tradition dictated, Variety columnist Army Archerd conducted a series of mini interviews with legends and newcomers, the last one being something of both: Snow White, in the person of Miss Bowman, playing her as directed, just like she would be played in the "Beach Blanket" show. But she wasn’t there. She was at the Academy Awards and coming down the aisle seeing and talking to famous people who were not exactly ready to see and talk to her. Some were pros and played along, some were too nervous, some couldn’t quite put together what was happening. None had been warned. Some faces reflected a common feeling: I am nominated for an Academy Award and I’m suddenly a day player in somebody else’s movie? The terror was only beginning.

She mounted the stage and the curtain rose to reveal the Cocoanut Grove and Merv, and several tables of . . . who are they, exactly, I’m not sure I recognize them? There was Cyd Charisse, looking great, and Alice Faye, looking well, and Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, in full cowboy drag, smiling up a storm. But when Dorothy Lamour was gingerly moved downstage by two chorus boys manfully holding each arm, it was not a good look. These were not the golden stars we remembered, and this was not the glamorous Hollywood look Allan had been going for.

He watched it in his office, in tears. He idolized these people so. And he had gotten his wish, but he had deluded himself into thinking he had pulled it off. Then along came Mary.

As an antidote to the admitted antiquarian head count onstage, a young, hot presence was needed to perform with Snow White, and after a number of people politely declined, the good-natured I’ll-try-anything Rob Lowe stepped in. Not famous for singing or dancing but for being pretty, which was an overriding qualification here, Rob grabbed a microphone and launched into “Proud Mary.” The song had nothing to do with Hollywood, nothing to do with anything nominated that year, nothing to do with Rob Lowe or Snow White, but there it was, opening the greatest show on earth and your TV.

People had very strong reactions, one of which we will get to in a moment, but while they were forming them, it was left to my friend and colleague Lily Tomlin to welcome everyone, in the absence of a host.

Lily and I had sat watching the dress rehearsal with a small bunch of people who, when the song finished, all looked at each other like the stagehands high above Citizen Kane’s mistress when she sang grand opera. We knew the ship of show was very much down at the head and taking water.

Lily asked, “How do I follow that?” I told her it would be funny if, coming down the giant staircase, one of her shoes came off and she had to limp downstage. There was no time for her to rehearse that safely, so instead we got a stagehand to place a stray shoe on the stairs as if it had come off someone’s foot during the number, and then had another stagehand crawl down from the top of the staircase to get it as if hoping nobody would notice, while Lily made her welcoming remarks. We thought it would take the audience’s mind off what they had just seen and give her something to play with. All the lines we wrote about what a spectacle we had all just witnessed were as double-edged as a Delphic sword. I think Lily emerged unscathed, and we were into a commercial, about which more in a minute.

It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time by Bruce Vilanch (Courtesy of Chicago Review Press)The show resumed with the president of the Academy making the speech that you can’t seem to talk presidents of the Academy out of making. You know, film is the universal language, those beautiful people out there in the dark, more people are watching this show than there are on this or any neighboring planet, and so on.

And then the first presenters came out, Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, and did a very funny bit giving the Supporting Actress award to Geena Davis for "The Accidental Tourist." The show ran pretty well after that.

There were a couple of bits that I liked that other people pointedly didn’t. Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, presenting Cinematography, showed home movies of their new baby as an example of bad cinematography. Martin Short and Carrie Fisher showed up each wearing the same dress (“Carrie, you have hundreds of dresses. I have four”), and Kurt Russell went off the printed script to do a bit where he sort of proposed to an allegedly unprepared Goldie Hawn. This last became a tabloid favorite in the pre-internet universe; it made covers all over the world.

The James Bonds were charming, and Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak had fun giving the Sound award, with Jimmy exaggerating his drawling speech, which he said drove the sound people crazy. Candice Bergen and Jackie Bisset introduced the Foreign Film award partly in French, then were joined by Jack Valenti, Hollywood’s ambassador in Washington, who admitted he didn’t speak it. Billy Crystal did a hilarious piece, and Patrick Swayze did a tender tribute to his inspiration as a kid, the big Hollywood musicals.

Watching all this from home was the titular head of the Walt Disney Company, one Frank Wells, an old Hollywood corporate hand, and Frank was not amused. The outcome of his non-amusement has echoed through the corridors of gossip. Here is what I know, or was told, by several sources at the time.

At the time, the Academy had a policy of not allowing commercial spots for movies to be a part of the broadcast, thinking that it would imply endorsement by the Academy, especially since so many commercials used phrases like “Oscar winner,” “Oscar nominee,” etc. For reasons no one has explained to me, this fiat had been expanded to include such things as theme parks run by members of the  Academy. Disney was about to open what was then called the Disney-MGM Studios at Walt Disney World, now known as Disney’s Hollywood Studios. They wanted to advertise it on the Oscars, but they apparently got a no. So they made a deal with Chevrolet to film their introduction of a new-model Chevy at the new park, in the forecourt of its imitation Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. They wanted to show us how big the car was, so guess who popped out of it . . . Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Frank Wells went ballistic. He started calling people during the show to complain.

I’m guessing he was mad because our Snow White made his commercial’s Snow White look like sloppy seconds . . . who may have been the eighth dwarf, by the way. The wheels went into motion. I don’t think he knew beforehand about our opening number, but here’s who did: the lawyers at Disney, who, even though Snow White is in the public domain and they have no rights in the matter, signed off on the look of our Snow. Also the lawyers at the Academy and at the network that aired the show, ABC, both of whom were consulted. There was a Snow White Cafe on Hollywood Boulevard that everyone in Hollywood had been to or at least knew about, and it remained in operation until 2024, and nobody ever blasted them publicly for copyright infringement.

The Academy was, of course, loath to get into a copyright or trademark dispute with one of its own members, especially as the Oscar trademark is its prime, heavily defended asset. So the next day they issued an apology, cut the number from the archival tape, and thought it was settled. For the moment, peace was on the land.

While all this was hatching, I accompanied Allan in his limo to the shindig being thrown by Irving Lazar, known as Swifty to the world, the legendary power agent whose Oscar-night viewing party at the old Spago restaurant was the annual hot ticket (it has been replaced by the Vanity Fair party and an explosion of other parties around town). Allan thought the show had gone well, and after the opening number, it had, in the theater. The nation had not yet checked in. But he was a little despondent and at a disturbingly low energy level, for him. He looked out the window at the freeway and quietly said, “I burned a lot of bridges on this one.”

He was right, starting with the people who had produced previous shows, whom he’d dumped all over in the press and trash-talked around town in the run-up to the show. Then there were the people who assumed they would be on the show but were not asked—or, even worse, were asked and then unasked because the network had told him he had to “young up” the proceedings. The day after the show, a couple of those people wrote a letter to the Academy about the show they were not asked to be on. They got many famous people to sign the letter, which a lot of them turned out to have never read. These were all friends of Allan’s, at least in his mind.

The press, who had not been in the room where it happened, did not care for the show either, and gave Allan a major shellacking. This was the same press he had spent his entire career lavishly courting, the press who he also thought were his friends. Allan never recovered. As producer Gil Cates, with whom I did a lot of subsequent Oscar shows, put it, “All a producer really has is his taste. When that’s invalidated, the game is over.”

And then, only two months later, just when we were all beginning to put the show behind us, came the Rob Lowe Sex Tape.

Rob, who has long owned his mistake and has publicly called himself the poster child for bad choices, had taped himself having sex with a sixteen-year-old girl in a hotel room in Atlanta, where he was in town for the Democratic National Convention that nominated Michael Dukakis in 1988. Before viral was invented, this went viral. And every time it was mentioned, it was this: “Rob Lowe, most recently seen dancing with Snow White in a number on the Oscars that drew a lawsuit from the Walt Disney Company . . .”

The combination of the lawsuit and the letter and the sex tape sealed the show’s fate in the Ninth Circle of Show Business Hell.

For all this, the show did exceptionally well in the Nielsen ratings and people continue to tell me how, opening number aside, they enjoy watching it on YouTube—where the opening number exists, by the way.

The following year, the Oscars did a housecleaning, bringing in Gil Cates to replace Allan. I was persona non grata as well, but after a year of penance, Gil and host Billy Crystal brought me back into the fold, where I remained for . . . another book . . . this one about the shows that worked!