The Worst Oscars Ever?? with Michael Schulman

Summary

Podcast Summary: "The Worst Oscars Ever?? with Michael Schulman"

Introduction In the February 27, 2025 episode of "You're Wrong About", host Sarah Marshall delves into the notorious 1988 Academy Awards, often cited as the "worst Oscars ever." Joined by Michael Shulman, author of Oscar: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat and Tears, the episode unpacks the events that culminated in one of Hollywood’s most infamous ceremonies.

Setting the Stage: The 1988 Academy Awards Sarah Marshall (00:01) opens the discussion by highlighting the ceremony's reputation. She introduces Michael Shulman, who previously discussed the Oscar streaker incident, to explore why the 1988 Oscars are considered so disastrous.

Michael Shulman (03:14) clarifies that while the ceremony is labeled the worst, the actual nominations and winners weren't the primary issue. Instead, the fiasco stemmed from the ceremony's execution, particularly an 11-minute opening number that overstepped traditional boundaries.

The Infamous Opening Number Shulman provides a vivid description of the opening number (05:36), featuring Eileen Bowman as Snow White and Rob Lowe performing a chaotic rendition of "Proud Mary." The sequence included extravagant costumes, elaborate sets, and numerous cameos from Hollywood legends, all resulting in widespread discomfort among attendees.

Shulman (06:47) recounts how the number defied sense and good taste:

"It's so completely bonkers that it just kind of, like, defies all standards of, like, sense and good taste."

Marshall (09:02) remarks on the audacity of the performance:

"I do admire anyone who takes such a big swing. I have to say. Like, have I ever gambled so big in my life?"

Despite the visual spectacle, the performance was poorly received for its lack of coherence and inappropriate casting.

Alan Carr: The Producer Behind the Disaster The heart of the episode centers on Alan Carr, the producer responsible for the disastrous opening number. Shulman paints a detailed portrait of Carr (12:03), outlining his flamboyant personality, Hollywood connections, and the personal struggles that fueled his ambition.

Marshall (16:21) addresses Carr's identity:

"You know, if you haven't guessed it by now, Alan Carr was very flamboyantly homosexual."

Carr's attempt to modernize the Oscars clashed with the traditional elements, leading to friction within the Academy.

Planning and Execution: Carr’s Vision vs. Reality Carr aimed to rejuvenate the Oscars by infusing them with glamour and innovation (22:27). He introduced several changes, including the "Baton Theory" and the "Four C's" (compadres, co-stars, couples, companions), to streamline presenters and enhance the show's flow.

Shulman (25:33) explains Carr's efforts to modernize:

"He also developed something called the four C's: compadres, co-stars, couples, and companions."

Despite these intentions, Carr's vision led to an overextended and incoherent ceremony, marked by excessive performances and an inability to resonate with the audience.

The Aftermath: Backlash and Ostracization Post-ceremony, Carr faced severe backlash. Critics labeled the Oscars a "flaming wreck" (57:37), and an open letter signed by 17 Hollywood luminaries condemned the ceremony as "an embarrassment" to the industry (62:35).

Shulman (57:37) describes the negative reviews:

"The Associated Press called it a flaming wreck."

The fallout extended to personal ruin for Carr, who became ostracized by his peers and struggled with addiction (69:56).

Eileen Bowman’s Ordeal Eileen Bowman, the performer portraying Snow White, endured significant distress due to the chaotic nature of the performance. Her audition process was manipulative and coercive, reflecting broader issues of power abuse within Hollywood (40:01).

Shulman (44:44) recounts Bowman’s experience:

"She... had to make sure no one would know what was going on. It was top secret."

Bowman's subsequent career suffered irreparably, highlighting the personal costs of Carr's mismanagement.

Lessons Learned: The Icarus Myth in Hollywood Carr's story serves as a modern Icarus tale—his ambition to soar too high led to his inevitable downfall. Shulman reflects on Carr's internal struggles and the destructive nature of unchecked ambition within the Hollywood elite (73:10).

Shulman (74:02) summarizes Carr's tragic arc:

"He made it so much about Alan that when it wasn't flawless, they killed him."

Rebuilding the Oscars: A New Era In response to the disaster, the Academy appointed Gil Cates as the new producer, who revamped the Oscars to focus more on hosting and less on extravagant performances (66:53). This shift led to a more streamlined and enjoyable ceremony, epitomized by Billy Crystal's acclaimed hosting style (67:29).

Marshall (67:44) notes the positive changes:

"And one of the first things he said in his monologue was, thank you very much. So people are applauding. He goes, is that for me or are you just glad I'm not Snow White?"

Conclusion: Reflection and Community Connection Sarah Marshall concludes the episode by reflecting on the shared human narratives of love and power struggles, drawing parallels to other infamous events like Studio 54's downfall. She emphasizes the importance of community and shared experiences, inviting listeners to contribute their own stories for future episodes.

Marshall (75:56) shares a personal note:

"I lavender a lot of tenderness for everybody involved."

Notable Quotes

• Michael Shulman (05:36): "It's a story of folly. It's a story of saying yes to too many ideas."

• Sarah Marshall (09:02): "I do admire anyone who takes such a big swing. I have to say. Like, have I ever gambled so big in my life?"

• Michael Shulman (25:33): "He also developed something called the four C's: compadres, co-stars, couples, and companions."

• Sarah Marshall (57:37): "That feels slightly homophobic."

• Michael Shulman (62:35): "They sent it to the Academy. But it's an open letter that calls the ceremony, quote, an embarrassment both to the Academy and the entire motion picture industry."

• Michael Shulman (73:10): "He made it so much about Alan that when it wasn't flawless, they killed him."

Key Takeaways

1. Ambition and Hubris: Alan Carr's overambitious vision for the Oscars exemplifies how unchecked ambition can lead to personal and professional downfall.

2. Power Dynamics in Hollywood: The episode highlights the toxic power structures within Hollywood, where individuals in positions of authority can manipulate and abuse aspiring talents.

3. Legacy of the 1988 Oscars: The disastrous ceremony serves as a cautionary tale for event planning, emphasizing the need for balance between innovation and tradition.

4. Resilience and Reformation: The Academy's response to the fiasco demonstrates the industry's capacity for self-correction and adaptation, paving the way for more successful and beloved ceremonies in subsequent years.

5. Human Stories Behind Events: Shulman’s and Marshall’s empathetic portrayal of characters like Alan Carr and Eileen Bowman underscores the personal tragedies often hidden behind public scandals.

Conclusion Sarah Marshall and Michael Shulman provide a compelling narrative of the 1988 Academy Awards, blending historical analysis with personal stories to uncover why this ceremony remains a low point in Hollywood history. Through meticulous research and engaging storytelling, the episode serves both as an informative recount and a reflective examination of the darker facets of fame and ambition.

Transcript

[Sarah Marshall]

Let me perhaps remind us of the theme you have stated earlier of Icarus. Welcome to youo Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall and we are talking today about the worst Oscars ever. Or were they? Our guest today is Michael Shulman, author of Oscar A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat and Tears. He came on last year to talk about the Oscar streaker and he has returned to tell us about the elect Worst Oscars ever. We're now in the 80s and we are telling a story with cameos from everybody from Alice Cooper to Gregory Peck to Bruce Vilanche to everybody in between, which is pretty much everybody. And it is a story of folly. It's a story of saying yes to too many ideas. And it's also a story of how the most over the top ideas can sometimes bring us the innovation that we need, even if we don't ever really admit it. This was such a fun episode to do. I loved returning to the Oscars this way. And thank you again to Michael for coming on. Check out Oscar wars, why don't you? Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. Thank you for continuing into this year with us. Take care of yourself this week. And here is your episode. Welcome to youo Wrongabout. The show where your host has not watched the Oscars since the year Crash won. But boy, do I still love to talk about them. And with me today is our Oscars correspondent, Michael Shulman.

[Michael Shulman]

Hello. Hi, Sarah. It's great to be back.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's so great to have you back. You were here last year to talk about the Oscars streaker. And in a shocking coincidence, we are having another Academy Awards ceremony this year at about the same time. So I thought we should talk about them again.

[Michael Shulman]

Who could have predicted that?

[Sarah Marshall]

Let me clear up something. So are you the Oscar correspondent or the Oscars correspondent? I think the first one does sound better.

[Michael Shulman]

I tend to try to just use Oscar like Oscar night Oscar wins.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, you're right. That is better. Right?

[Michael Shulman]

Is that better? It is better, but, you know, opinions are split on this.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay.

[Michael Shulman]

And my book is Oscar wars, not Oscars wars, which would have been too plural.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oscars wars would have been like a book about some like long forgotten but very acrimonious producer who worked with Louis B. Mayer and had a lot of.

[Michael Shulman]

Feuds, you know, named Oscar.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, exactly. The other Oscar, that was the subtitle. So, okay, so last time you talked with us about the Oscar streaker, which was the early 70s, 74. Now we're going forward in time to. Well, this is a little Tricky, too, because it's like the 2023 Academy Awards happened in 2024, but in terms of the actual calendar, we are in 1988 with this one, right?

[Michael Shulman]

Yes. We are talking about the 19 ceremony.

[Sarah Marshall]

Of the 1988 Academy Awards.

[Michael Shulman]

The Academy, we call them the 1998 awards, but it, in fact happened in 1989.

[Sarah Marshall]

And the pitch for this was worst Oscars ever. And I think that's very intriguing because I feel like a lot of people have different nominations for their own personal worst Oscars. But I feel like within Oscar lore, like, this seems like kind of empirically the worst one. Or is it.

[Michael Shulman]

This is a true. You're wrong about for me, because every year there's some article online that says, remember the worst Oscars ever, 1989.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's the Ford Pinto of Oscars. But I digress.

[Michael Shulman]

And the closer I looked at it, the more I realized that this is actually kind of a tragedy. The reason it's called the worst Oscars ever doesn't have anything to do with what won. What lost. You know, I think that there are far more notorious years for that. The infamous crash win over Brokeback Mountain, you know, there was the year Citizen Kane lost.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Michael Shulman]

So, you know, as I dug deep into this supposed worst Oscars ever, you know, the reason it got that rep has to do not with the winners, as I said, but with the ceremony itself and in particular, an opening number that lasted 11 long minutes and is so completely bonkers that it just kind of, like, defies all standards of, like, sense and good taste. But the story of this Oscars is actually the story of the producer Alan Carr, and why this happened. Why him? What became of him. To me, it's a story about ostracization, about hubris, about excess, and to some extent, homophobia in the 80s. But, you know, I think more than anything else, it's an Icarus story. You know, it's about a man who flew too close to the sun.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay. And I'm also interested in this ceremony because I think the question of, like, the line between like, terrible and great is often subjective. I'm just very curious.

[Michael Shulman]

I think the best way to begin before we get to Alan Carr would be for me to just describe what happens in this opening number. Now, if people want to find it, it is on YouTube. It's not on the Academy's official YouTube channel. There's a legal reason. But if you want to find it and watch it, just go to Google, search for 1989 Oscars opening number, and you can See it in all its glory, but if you want it rendered in, you know, in spoken word. So the first thing that we see is Army Archer, who was a longtime Variety columnist, and he's standing outside of the Shrine Auditorium with a microphone, and he introduces Snow White, who is a woman dressed like the classic Disney Snow White. And when she speaks, it's in this very squeaky high voice, like the cartoon. And she says, good evening, Mr. Archer. It's so exciting to be here tonight. And then she asks him, how. How do I get into the theater? And he says, just follow the Hollywood stars mixing references. Oh, just you wait. Don't expect, like, you know, like, world building consistency here.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay?

[Michael Shulman]

At that point, a bunch of dancers show up who are in sparkly, like, star costumes. Like, you can't see their heads. They're just giant stars with legs coming out of the bottom.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh.

[Michael Shulman]

And they. They glide past. They flit into the theater and guides Snow White down the aisle. So now we're in the theater, the Shrine Auditorium, and this woman dressed as Snow White is walking down the aisle singing a version of I only have eyes for you, except we only have stars for you. And she's greeting people, like, on the aisle, like Tom Hanks and Dustin Hoffman and Glenn Close and, like, singing to them and tapping them on the shoulder. And everyone looks very startled and uncomfortable. Like, you can just see all these A list actors from the 80s just trying to avert their gaze that they aren't.

[Sarah Marshall]

They're like, I didn't rehearse this.

[Michael Shulman]

But that goes on for quite a while. And then Snow White gets up on stage, and we're now at a replica of the Coconut Grove, the classic Hollywood nightclub with palm trees and dancing waiters who are doing, like, a mambo number. And then out from the wings comes Merv Griffin to sing I've got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts.

[Sarah Marshall]

Wow. Okay. I feel like they said yes to all their ideas and brainstorming, maybe.

[Michael Shulman]

And then there are ladies who come out who have, like, pina colada headdresses, Little, like, half coconuts. There's a row of cocktail tables at the back with sort of, like, classic, you know, Hollywood stars. And Merv starts introducing them, and they do little things, like Sid Charisse, the classic dancer, does a tango, and Roy Rogers and Dale Evans are in fringed cowboy costumes. And, like, Vincent Price is there and Dorothy Lamour. And then they kind of each have a moment. And then Merv tells Snow White, meet your blind date, Rob Lowe.

[Sarah Marshall]

God. Oh, be careful, Snow White. He's not a safe pair of hands.

[Michael Shulman]

He's definitely not. And we will also get to that. So Rob Lowe comes out in all black, and he and Snow White sing a duet of Proud Mary with different lyrics, with new lyrics.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, my God.

[Michael Shulman]

One of them is, but you said goodbye to Grumpy and Sleepy Left the dwarves behind, Came to town to stay.

[Sarah Marshall]

I do admire anyone who takes such a big swing. I have to say. Like, have I ever gambled so big in my life? Obviously not.

[Michael Shulman]

The problem here is that Rob Lowe really cannot sing. It sounds like dry heaving. It's really bad. It's not a pretty sound. It's a pretty face. Not a pretty sound coming out of it.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, the people who are watching it on mute because they're at work right now are probably like, oh, I bet he's doing good.

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah. But it's like big wheels keep on turning. It's bad. It's like he's crawled through a desert. It's not good. Then Snow White says, uno, dos, tres, cuatros, and does a conga line with the dancing waiters. The cocktail tables with the human heads are now fully up and boogieing around. They're doing the up tempo part of Proud Mary. It's been eight minutes so far that this number is going on, and it is not over.

[Sarah Marshall]

You're just sitting. It's not like the Golden Globes where you have a table, right? Like, people are just sitting there without the ability to have drinks for hours and hours.

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah, no, they're just sitting in. Sitting in theater rows. Trapped. The Coconut Grove set rises, and we're now at Grauman's Chinese Theater, the famous movie palace.

[Sarah Marshall]

A theater inside a theater.

[Michael Shulman]

It's a true Turducken situation. And Snow White sings to Rob Lowe about how beautiful this theater is. And then they pull open the theater doors to reveal a chorus line in red usher costumes. And they do a kick line. Then the set lifts again, and we see that the gigantic, like, pagoda thing from the Chinese Theater is actually an enormous hat that Snow White is wearing on her head. Okay, now here's our big finish. All the ushers then sing Hooray for Hollywood as a big staircase comes on in front of the hat pagoda. And then out of the middle of the pagoda emerges Lily Tomlin, who walks down the stairs losing one of her high heels.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, Lily.

[Michael Shulman]

And says, well, I told them I'd be thrilled to do the Oscars if they could just come up with an entrance. And then she says, and think of it more than a Billion and a half people just watch that. And at this very moment, they're trying to make sense of it.

[Sarah Marshall]

Wow.

[Michael Shulman]

And then a chorus boy climbs down the stairs, gets her shoe that's fallen off, throws her the shoe, and she says, welcome to the shoe show. We'll be right back. And they cut to commercial.

[Sarah Marshall]

Wow. How does Lily, Tom, does she seem into it?

[Michael Shulman]

She seemed like everyone else involved in this situation, just, like, vaguely mortified to be there.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, just like being a pro getting through it. Truly the last person I would expect to emerge at the end of all this.

[Michael Shulman]

But it's from a giant pagoda hat. So that's what happens in this notorious opening number. It's as excessive and over the top and nonsensical as it sounds. And now we're gonna meet the man behind this extravaganza of terrible taste, Mr. Alan Carr.

[Sarah Marshall]

Hello, Alan. Welcome. Welcome to the show.

[Michael Shulman]

Who is Alan Carr? Allen Carr was a producer and a former talent manager. First of all, he was the producer of Grease, the movie.

[Sarah Marshall]

Wow.

[Michael Shulman]

That was kind of the pinnacle of his producing career.

[Sarah Marshall]

That's pretty good.

[Michael Shulman]

He also produced very bad movies which I happen to love, like Can't Stop the Music, the movie about the Village People starring Steve Guttenberg. Have you seen that?

[Sarah Marshall]

Not so much lately. But at many times in my life when I have needed just, like, some positive vibes, I will watch the opening of Can't Stop the Music where Steve Guttenberg is roller skating through New York City. Well, first he's at work and they won't let him leave work to audition or something. And he says, my time is now.

[Michael Shulman]

My time is now. It's absolutely great. But he was actually more sort of famous around town for throwing incredible parties at his home.

[Sarah Marshall]

That makes sense.

[Michael Shulman]

First of all, he had a Lucite grand piano under a crystal chandelier. There was a gigantic Oscar statue outside and a pool with pink. A pink pool. He had upstairs an honorary bedroom, an honorary Olivia and John bedroom in all in Gingham because she was the star of Greece. And in the basement, this is the piece de resistance. He had an Egyptian themed disco and a couch that he liked to lie on like Cleopatra. And all the couches and gold lame. And a bar called the Bella Darvy Bar, which is like a old Hollywood inn joke, because Bella Darvi was the Polish film star who starred in the movie the Egyptian. And I spoke to his friend. I spoke to a lot of people who knew Alan Carr for this part of the book. One of them was Bruce Valanche, who plays a Major role in this story.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, wonderful.

[Michael Shulman]

If you're not picturing Bruce Valanche, he was, you know, the one time was he center square on the new Hollywood Squares. He's just a man. He's a man with the shaggy blonde hair and the gigantic red glasses. Just a Hollywood staple.

[Sarah Marshall]

He was just like in. I mean, when I was growing up, kind of watching random sitcoms and whatever was on TV in the 90s. He just felt like a supporting character in sort of all culture.

[Michael Shulman]

He is a very funny man. And he was friends with Alan Carr, and he'd go to these parties, and he told me most everyone was chemically altered. So it was a great place to sit and trip, meaning the downstairs Egyptian disco. And so part of what Alan Carr loved to do at these parties was sort of mix old Hollywood and young Hollywood. Like, he had one of the people who was there all the time was Gregory Peck, which is going to come. This is foreshadowing. Gregory Peck was, you know, an elder statesman of Hollywood by that point, kind of a square. But he loved to come and say things like, you know, this is quite a scene.

[Sarah Marshall]

I just want, like a Pirates of the Caribbean. But it's just going through one of these parties, like the ride, not the movie. I don't care for the movies, but it's a superlative ride.

[Michael Shulman]

Alice Cooper was at this part at these parties. Here's a quote from Alice Cooper. He said, we'd go to Allen's and it would not be surprising to find Mae west sitting next to Rod Stewart or Salvador Dali or Jack Benny.

[Sarah Marshall]

I mean, that is one of the things that's so fascinating about this period, or really, I guess any period, is that you're always gonna have these people who you don't think of as existing in the same universe, but they all live in the same area and they all are in the same industry. And so they just get tightly packed sometimes.

[Michael Shulman]

Also, to go back to our last episode we did together right after the Oscar streak, he invited the streaker, Robert Opal, to come to a party he was throwing and, like, streak the party, which he did. So these two characters of ours met at one point. Another thing that Alan was famous for, besides throwing these parties was his absolutely breathtaking array of designer caftans. He had, like a hundred caftans in all different colors. They were all lined up in a closet in his bedroom. And usually these parties included multiple wardrobe changes and a lot of showing off caftans.

[Sarah Marshall]

I don't think that's too many caftans. For the record, you know, too many caftans.

[Michael Shulman]

I didn't say too many.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, I know. I guess too many doesn't. I just want to make sure if anybody is out there, you know, wanting me to get ahead of this issue.

[Michael Shulman]

You know, if you haven't guessed it by now, Alan Carr was very flamboyantly homosexual. You know, it was the 80s. It was not an easy time to be a gay man in America. As Bruce Valanche, who was also gay, told me, he never declared himself like baggage. You know, he was just openly gay to his friends. In fact, he threw parties where the sort of the underground gay scene in Hollywood could come and sort of be themselves. Like, you know, people were talking about how like, you know, like David Geffen and like the sort of power gaze of Hollywood would come. And in fact, Bruce Valanche claims that Roy Cohn even came to some of these parties.

[Sarah Marshall]

I believe it. I mean, this is also my moment to lodge my complaint with that Apprentice movie, which is that because of the rules of screenwriting, I guess it ended up being about poor old Roy Cohn. Couldn't hurt a fly. Feels a little weird.

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah. I mean, another thing I should say about Alan Carr is he did struggle his whole life with his weight. He was a large guy and that really counts for the. His interest in caftans. Yeah, that kind of brings me back to like, who is this guy? Where did he come from? I'll tell you a little bit about his background. He grew up in Highland park, the suburb of Chicago. And his sort of origin myth that he would always say is that when he was a teenager, the producer Mike Todd came to Chicago to open his big Oscar winning epic, around The World in 80 Days, which starred Mike Todd's bride to be, Elizabeth Taylor. And he threw like a three day party and Allen Carr went to it and said, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. So picture this just like small gay child in suburban Illinois, just obsessed with the Academy Awards, obsessed with like Hollywood glitz. His early. His actual name was Alan Solomon, but he changed it because he was angry at his parents for getting divorced. But also he thought Alan Carr would look better on a marquee. And also it rhymes with star.

[Sarah Marshall]

I love that. And also, because changing your name is a good Hollywood origin story, I also feel like you're kind of. You're summarizing 75% of my approach to history, which is just, let's start by imagining someone as the small gay child that they almost inevitably once were.

[Michael Shulman]

Mm. And part of how he kind of got by as that person was to sort of make himself the center of attention. Here's a quote from Alan. He said, at home I was secure, but at school I felt I was not physically attractive. And this exaggerated my desire for approval, to be amusing, to be liked. That's why I came on so strong. Turning himself into like an old timey, like, showbiz producer was kind of his way of coping and kind of even like the way he dressed, the sort of like the caftans and everything. It was a way of drawing attention and poking the fun at himself and drawing attention to himself. So, like, no one else could do it on their terms.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. The Paul Lynde school of feeling insecure.

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah, totally. And he had this sort of like, whirlwind career right out of college. He got money from his parents to reopen the Civic Theater in Chicago and he booked Bette Davis on a tour she was doing.

[Sarah Marshall]

Wow.

[Michael Shulman]

Then he hooked up somehow with Hugh Hefner, who was trying to turn his magazine to a TV show called Playboy's Penthouse. And he became the talent coordinator. So that's how he kind of like established himself in Los Angeles. He became a manager and his big client was Ann Margret.

[Sarah Marshall]

Is this in the 60s?

[Michael Shulman]

This is like early 70s. We're in now.

[Sarah Marshall]

Her post Bye Bye Birdie. Pre Newsies period of wilderness.

[Michael Shulman]

Well, here's how he actually became a movie producer. And you're gonna like this because this ties back into a previous episode of youf're Wrong About.

[Sarah Marshall]

Ooh, nice.

[Michael Shulman]

I have listened to the wonderful episode about the Uruguayan plane crash in the Andes in 1972.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Oh, boy.

[Michael Shulman]

In the 70s there was like a sort of exploitation movie made in Mexico about it called Super Vivientes de los Andes. And basically Alan like, oh, boy, snapped up. He found out that someone else was trying to make a movie about the plane crash. So he basically just acquired the US rights to the Mexican exploitation movie version and he reopened it in the United States with the title Survive with an exclamation point.

[Sarah Marshall]

That is some good producing, I think. I mean, it's not like, ethically the most amazing, but that is not what the job is about, as far as I can tell.

[Michael Shulman]

And that kind of got him into the Academy Awards because he was hired in the late 70s to throw the Governor's Ball, which is like the on site party that you go to right after, like the official after party. He of course, was like an Academy Awards fanatic. So this was a very exciting job for Him. But what he really wanted was to produce the show. Part of the problem was that the Academy Awards were still kind of stuck in the seventies world of variety shows.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right.

[Michael Shulman]

I love going back and watching all those old variety shows, but think about it. It's now 1988, going into 1989. That is a very outdated form. And it's now the era of mtv, and the Oscars are still having these sort of, like, you know, opening numbers with, like, chorus girls and, like, you know, dressed as Oscars and stuff like that. And there's something very, like, schmaltzy about it. And so the Academy Awards had to figure out, like, what to do. And they had had this string of producers who were basically, like movie people, like Samuel Goldwyn Jr. Or like William Friedkin act as the producer of the awards.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, my God.

[Michael Shulman]

So people who were sort of from the movie world, but not necessarily from, like, the television world. And the reason they went to Alan Carr is that he had done these, like, lavish parties and was known for sort of throwing these extravaganzas. And he promised that he could, like, bring glamour back to the Oscars and remake them, make them bigger, better, more exciting, more glamorous, more this, more that.

[Sarah Marshall]

It does feel like one of the things they're coping with is, like, the attention span of the American viewer already starting to get smaller, you know? Cause, like. Yeah, and the MTV years, we're getting into sort of, like the music video era, which is orienting the American attention span more to something that's about four minutes long.

[Michael Shulman]

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And the Oscars weren't getting any shorter.

[Sarah Marshall]

They never have. It's amazing.

[Michael Shulman]

So basically, he had lived his whole life wanting to be sort of, like, embraced by old Hollywood, like, nurturing these relationships with, like, Gregory Peck and all these old stars and, like, believing in the glamour of, like, Mike Todd and Elizabeth Taylor and the Academy Awards. And, you know, even in Greece, like, he brought in these old stars like Eve Arden to, like, play the principal, you know, and then finally, he has gotten his Hollywood dream come true sort of right when he needed it in his career. And now is the part where it's about to go all horribly, horribly wrong.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, no. Oh, gosh darn it.

[Michael Shulman]

Okay, so Alan had very big plans for his Academy Awards. And this will help explain, I think, sort of what the job of the Oscars producer is. The average person usually doesn't know who the producer of the Oscars is. Can you recall any other than the one, the couple that I've named?

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, God. No, no, I only think of it in terms of hosts, which I think is what most people do.

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah, the producer of the ceremony has to do a lot, has to kind of shape the entire evening sort of under the aegis of like the Academy board of directors.

[Sarah Marshall]

So you're the middleman between two very demanding groups of people. It also sounds like.

[Michael Shulman]

And he had some, you know, he had a lot of experience like, you know, getting celebrities to do things. One of his plans was that he wanted to do away with the host and have the presenters kind of be the stars of the show. And he had something called, he had something he called Baton Theory, which is that like every, every pair of presenters could then like introduce the next pair and keep the show moving. And he also developed something called the four C's compadres, co stars, couples and companions. So each pair of, of presenters would have some kind of like, you know, pre existing relationship, like whether, you know, he wanted like Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine. Cause they're brother and sister, like, you know, Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum, who were a married couple, which is smart.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's like people who have talked together even once before, right?

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Which they don't always try for. I don't think so.

[Michael Shulman]

Not a bad idea. He also wanted to zhuzh up the fashion for the awards. So like, we think of like the red carpet and fashion as like a very central part of the Academy Awards. But back then, like, there would basically be a quick two minute clip show of people doing the arrivals on tv and he actually thought, we can expand this. And he hired this guy, Fred Heyman, who was known as the father of Rodeo Drive, to sort of advise the stars on what to wear. Now there had been a version of this because Edith Head, the famous sort of golden age costume designer, used to, used to help the stars dress for the Academy Awards. But as Fred Heyman, this guy put it, edith is dead. And it shows.

[Sarah Marshall]

I mean, people do need guidance. It is like, it's shocking to me that the red carpet ever wasn't a huge part of it, you know, because that's so much of what I remember from when I did watch them growing up was like, I don't know. And it's not that it was that exciting. Like it was kind of boring, but it was just really great. And it was part of the ceremony and you got to watch Joan. Melissa river is bothering everyone.

[Michael Shulman]

Oh, exactly. And like, you know, the Joan and Melissa Rivers phenomenon happened in the 90s. But Alan kind of, you know, Planted the seed.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Michael Shulman]

And here's a quote from this guy, Fred Heyman, the father of Rodeo Drive. He said at some point, the designers weren't eager to loan. This was before all the top designers fought to get an actress to wear their fashions at the Oscars. There's been a whole evolution, and it began with Alan Carr.

[Sarah Marshall]

See, there's so many things that we just think of as part of the world, but that people were so against initially, and that seemed weird. What that makes me think of is that I bet you remember this or that you've written about it, maybe, but that Disney. I forget. This comes up in Disney War, which is a really long, fun book about just internal squabblings at Disney in the Michael Eisner years. But that initially, Disney was very against the idea of releasing any of their old movies on home video or any kind of home media because they felt it diluted the brand. Which is wild to me because, like.

[Michael Shulman]

Oh, and you had, like, the Disney vault, where, like, you couldn't. Just couldn't access things.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. And that they would just, like, periodically theatrically re release movies, but, like, thought that if people could watch Pinocchio on home video, that it would, like, harm them as a corporation. And it's just like, okay, you guys. You know, just like these things that seem like very obvious good ideas now, but that people were adamantly against when they were first proposed.

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah, for sure. Another thing that Alan instituted as producer was that this was the suggestion of the production designer who thought that maybe instead of. And the winner is. Which is what they had always said they should say, and the Oscar goes to, because then it's not, as, you know, winner implies that the rest are losers. And, like, also, and the Oscar goes to is sort of subliminal branding. You're hearing Oscar all night. Oscar, Oscar, Oscar.

[Sarah Marshall]

I do like. And the Oscar goes to. It's also like, I also like to say, juries can't find you innocent. They can only find you not guilty. Which is not the same thing.

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah, no, similar. And so those are some of the things that he had in mind. But the really pivotal one is that he decided right away that he didn't want to have performances of the best original song nominations, in part because he thought they were all, and I quote, turds, with one exception, which is Let the River Run by Carly Simon Working Girl, which is an amazing song, but.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yes, it is.

[Michael Shulman]

But Carly Simon wouldn't agree to sing it herself. So they didn't really have, like, the one good song they didn't have an Oscar performance of it. Instead of this song, nominees, Carr decided that there would be two big production numbers during the show. One would be this big opening number, and the second would be a number about young Hollywood that would sort of have, you know, a dozen and a half or so young stars to sort of sing this original song about how they wanted to be famous and win an Oscar someday. This is not the opening number. This is a different one. It's so fascinating to see who they found to represent the future of Hollywood to sing the song I Wanna Be an Oscar winner. For instance, Ricki Lake was in it. She had just been in Hairspray.

[Sarah Marshall]

Nice.

[Michael Shulman]

Savion Glover, who was teenage tap dancing phenomenon. Patrick Dempsey, who was at the height of his early.

[Sarah Marshall]

He'd just been in Lover Boy. I Want to.

[Michael Shulman]

Right, right. Christian Slater was in it. Corey Feldman. Oh, Blair Underwood.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, wow.

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah. And then. So a lot of people who were like, some people who. Their names have resonance today and some of them less so. And then at a certain point, they kind of ran out of people and they needed more. So they found basically what we would now call Nepo babies to fill out the rest, like Carol Burnett's daughter and Ryan O'Neill's son. And Tyrone Power Jr. Was in it. And there was a headline in the Los Angeles Herald examiner that was, Hooray for nepotism.

[Sarah Marshall]

See, we. Look, they've always known, but you could tell who was filler, which is not a great feeling for anybody.

[Michael Shulman]

Anyway. And this number, the Young Hollywood number, it was choreographed by Kenny Ortega, who's a big name now, and he had.

[Sarah Marshall]

Just danced Director of Newsies, Kenny Ortega. And yes, Salsa, Dirty dancing.

[Michael Shulman]

It all comes back to Newsies for you.

[Sarah Marshall]

It does. And Can't Stop the Music. One of the two.

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah. So all these young Gen X Y celebrities or quasi celebrities or children of celebrities got together, and Kenny Ortega asked each of them if they had some special skill. So if you watch this number, like Corey Feldman does a Michael Jackson impression, kind of dark in retrospect. Christian Slater really wanted to swing in on a rope. So you see him swinging on a rope. Patrick Dempsey was kind of like the stud of the group. Wanted to swashbuckle. Oh, Chad Lowe was in it. Younger brother of Rob Lowe, who was about to make his entrance. And also, famously, life goes on. Anyway, I spoke to him when I was writing this, and he said about this number instinctively, it just felt like something I shouldn't be doing.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, God.

[Michael Shulman]

But then he said, I mean, you had Alan Carr and Kenny Ortega in the Academy. How could you say no to that?

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, it is one of those. Because you have to assume there are a lot of movies like this, too, where people just sort of commit affinity fraud in their own minds, where they're like, well, I don't know. There's a lot of great people involved. How bad could it be? And then, you know, sometimes it could be bad.

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah. And Chad Lowe also told me that he later felt like he had dodged a bullet because even though their number is kind of terrible, it got totally overshadowed by the opening number, which his brother Rob was in.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Michael Shulman]

None of the fingers got pointed at these young Gen X, Y Brat Packy stars.

[Sarah Marshall]

That's good. They had enough to deal with.

[Michael Shulman]

So the opening number, let's talk about it. How did it originate?

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, a dream, I assume.

[Michael Shulman]

As it turns out, Alan Carr was a big fan of this musical revue in San Francisco called Beach Blanket Babylon.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yes, I've heard of this. This was, like, a legend, right?

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah, it ran for decades and decades and decades. And it was directed by this guy, Steve Silver, who. The first one was an outdoor happening that was a spoof of, like, old Annette Funicello beach movies. They got their costumes from Rent a Freak and did it on a corner, and then they moved into a club, and they were kind of like campy, like, draggy spoofs of old Hollywood. And one of the things they became famous for are their very elaborate headdresses. So, like, they had, like, you know, like, someone would be in a headdress in the shape of Buckingham palace or, like, the San Francisco cityscape with, like, working trolleys running through it.

[Sarah Marshall]

They all got slipped discs later in life and wondered why.

[Michael Shulman]

I know. I hope they got complimentary, like, massages, neck massages, but. So it was like this growing kind of local San Francisco institution. And they had one edition called Beach Blanket Babylon Goes to the Stars, which was about Snow White searching for her Prince Charming.

[Sarah Marshall]

Ah, I do like that.

[Michael Shulman]

So Alan had seen it and thought, oh, this would be perfect to just import into the Academy Awards.

[Sarah Marshall]

And, like, not to say that the staging wasn't disastrous, but it also feels like, in a way, like, overrating the taste of the average American viewer to just bring them a fairly unedited, like, campy San Francisco nightclub, you know, Hollywood Babylon kind of spoof show.

[Michael Shulman]

Ding, ding, ding. Exactly, exactly. And here's another quote from Bruce Valanch, who became the head writer for this Oscar ceremony. He said of this number, it exploded full born from his head Like Zeus, the headdresses struck me as being in perfect Oscar's bad taste. So he's barreling full steam ahead with this very elaborate opening number. The other thing that was happening was that this is some more foreshadowing. First of all, Los Angeles magazine had a report that Alan Carr, quote, has some of the Academy's conservatives edgy about what the flamboyant producer may come up with.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, boy.

[Michael Shulman]

And this is, of course, like, flamboyant was code word for gay. So we're starting to see some of the. Some of the. Some of the hesitancy about, like, what is this. What is this gay guy in a caftan gonna be doing?

[Sarah Marshall]

What year in media would you say that that's true of flamboyant being the code word for gay?

[Michael Shulman]

Oh, gosh, that's a. I mean, at least up until Nathan Lane was in the Birdcage while not actually being, like, publicly out. And he would answer people, I'm 40, I'm single, and I work in musical theater. You figure it out.

[Sarah Marshall]

You do feel like Bobby Fine on Sex and the City was probably not too much of a departure.

[Michael Shulman]

Exactly. God bless. So that's starting to, like, raise some eyebrows. Just the fact that he's Alan Carr and he's notorious for a certain thing. But then part of what he would be doing as producer was trying to get people to present on the show. And he had a bit of, like, a sort of jerky edge to him. He couldn't get Lana Turner for some reason. So he kept, like, dropping little hints in the. In the press that, like, he said, you know, he went to the gossip pages and was like, for some reason, Lana doesn't want to take part in the program. I don't know what her problem is, but I'm working on it.

[Sarah Marshall]

Move on, Alan. It's hard to be a woman aging publicly.

[Michael Shulman]

And then, like, if someone did come in, he'd leak it to, like, Liz Smith, and he would sort of give another person an exclusive on who came in, who didn't come in or might be coming in. And, like, he would be playing all these gossip columnists, like, against each other with exclusives. And that's not how the Academy usually does things. They usually would just, like, send out a press release saying, here's who is presenting. But he kind of turned it into a process that was reported on where his name was constantly in the press. And he actually hired a PR agent for himself so that everyone would know these were the Alan Carr Oscars. That is a really important piece of foreshadowing once. People need to have somewhere to point their fingers when it all goes terribly wrong.

[Sarah Marshall]

Let me perhaps remind us of the theme you have stated earlier of Icarus.

[Michael Shulman]

And he would also openly badmouth previous producers of the Oscars. Another person he kind of ticked off was his frequent party guest and former Academy president Gregory Peck, who he did not ask to present. You know, Gregory Peck is one of these people who would always come to the Oscars, along with Elizabeth Taylor, obvious.

[Sarah Marshall]

Choice for Prince Charming. Zad.

[Michael Shulman]

Honestly. But he had just had, like, an AFI tribute or something, and Alan thought he was overexposed. So, like, the invitation never went out. And Gregory Peck. And Gregory Peck got annoyed. More foreshadowing. And then he would just do things that were kind of mean to get his name in the press, like, so one of the big nominees that year was Rain Man.

[Sarah Marshall]

That really puts us in a time and place.

[Michael Shulman]

It truly does. It truly does. But if you remember Rain man, do you remember that Dustin Hoffman's character is obsessed with Judge Wapner?

[Sarah Marshall]

Yes, I do. Yep. Time for Wapner.

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah, time for Wapner. Time for Wapner from the People's Court. So apparently, you know, this was a real judge, Joseph Wapner, who was the judge on the People's Court, and he had apparently asked for Oscar tickets. But Alan Carp, instead of, like, just saying yes, Alan planted a story in the LA Times claiming that Wapner was, like, trying to get himself on the show as a presenter, and then made fun of him, saying, I don't think he's a member of the Screen Actors Guild. And I talked to one of his assistants at the time who said they were in, like, a car, and he used the car phone to plant this story, which was just. Just totally made up.

[Sarah Marshall]

I'm picturing, like, Saul Rubinek in True Romance for that part.

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah. Yeah. And so you can see that, like, part of this job of Oscar producer was going to his head in kind of a destructive way already. He told on paper for three weeks, you are the most powerful person in the town. But don't worry, I'm not turning into Little Caesar.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, boy. Well, no, you're not a pizza. But it's also. It does feel like maybe this is a tale of, like. Yeah, the way people are exposed when they're given a lot of power.

[Michael Shulman]

And the truth is, I talked to a bunch of his former assistants, and he had a mean streak. He also had addiction problems with pills, with alcohol, with cocaine, which I'm sure.

[Sarah Marshall]

Were exacerbated by producing the Oscars. I can't imagine that you wouldn't be taking more speed than usual or whatever.

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah. So at this point in our ominous foreshadowing, I want to introduce you to a new character.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Michael Shulman]

Eileen Bowman, the woman who plays Snow White.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, no. Oh, Eileen, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.

[Michael Shulman]

I spoke at length to Eileen, who was absolutely lovely. So, okay, so at the time, she was. She had a job singing show tunes at a restaurant in San Diego and singing with the Youth for Christ Choir. When she got an opportunity to audition for what she thought was the Snow White role in the Vegas version of Beach Blanket Babylon.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh.

[Michael Shulman]

And she was told to come to the Beverly Hills Hotel at 8am she brought her fiance, who waited by the bar. I'm gonna tell you a little bit about her day of her audition. Cause it's quite a saga. So she was given these pages of sheet music where she had to learn, like, new rewritten lyrics for Proud Mary, et cetera. And she was brought upstairs to a room in the hotel. And there were two Snow White costumes laid on the bed. And Steve Silver, the director of Beach Blanket at Babylon, said, you know, I want to see if you. If you fit into the dress. And it was her and this other girl, and they both were now dressed as Snow White. Then the guy Steve asks them to get into a Mercedes, both of these snow whites. He says, this is top secret. Close your eyes. Because you're going to someone's house and you can't know how to get there.

[Sarah Marshall]

Are you sure this isn't an unused draft of Mulholland Durham?

[Michael Shulman]

Oh, my God. This is so Lynchian. Thank you for saying that.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Two beautiful young women dressed like Snow White being driven to a mysterious location by a menacing guy. It's perfect.

[Michael Shulman]

Okay. We are now officially in a David lynch movie. That is perfect.

[Sarah Marshall]

Was Eileen, like. Did she talk about how she was feeling at this point?

[Michael Shulman]

Anxious. Anxious. And her fiance, who was waiting at the bar at the hotel, was like, do not go with this man in this car. And she was like, don't worry. It'll be fine. I'll, you know, I'll be back in a few hours.

[Sarah Marshall]

I always get out of cam somehow. You know me. I'm Snow White.

[Michael Shulman]

She's a little, like, young and naive and, like, she knows this is kind of weird, but, like, she's trying to just keep her fiance from completely blowing it all up. It's not clear, like, what is gonna happen next. And she also has to make it back to town, to San Diego the next day for her sister's wedding. So she's, like, very anxious about just getting it over with. So she opens her eyes, and she sees, like, you know, a pink pool and a, you know, like a Lucite grand piano inside. And she says, oh, boy, we're in Hollywood now. And then out comes Alan Carr. And Eileen told me he was wearing a kimono robe, and he was very uncomfortable because he wasn't crossing his legs. And I thought, where do I look? Over here. Over there.

[Sarah Marshall]

Aw, Alan, come on. Manners.

[Michael Shulman]

She doesn't audition. And then they go to Marvin Hamlisch's office, and they audition with him singing these songs. And then the guy who's driving around, the director, Steve Silver from Beach bank of Babylon, says, like, he's insisting that they go everywhere. The two snow whites walking with their hands held side by side. Cause he thinks it's, like, really funny. And finally he tells them, like, okay, here's what we're gonna do.

[Sarah Marshall]

They're human beings, you guys.

[Michael Shulman]

He says, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna drive to Rodeo Drive, and I want you to both walk down Rodeo Drive with your hands held.

[Sarah Marshall]

You know, some child saw that that day and then went home and told their parents, and they were like, you're lying, Johnny. And you know what? Liars get the closet.

[Michael Shulman]

And at this point, Eileen is like, absolutely not. I have to get back. I need to go to my sister's wedding. I don't know what's going on here. I need to get home. So they make one last stop. They go back to the hotel, and as they're going up the elevator, Steve Silver says, you know, you should be very grateful that we are thinking about using you. Gross. Very, very manipulative. And she says, yes, thank you. And he goes, how are you with famous people?

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, my God.

[Michael Shulman]

And she goes, well, they're just like anybody else.

[Sarah Marshall]

That's true. Except shorter.

[Michael Shulman]

This, at the end of the 13 hours, was the answer that got her the job over the other girl. And then finally, Silver says, do you know what this is for? And she goes, beach Blanket Babylon. And he goes, no, honey, this is for the Oscars.

[Sarah Marshall]

Treat your auditioners better. And I know people are now, but, like, my God, you know, you. Like when we had this big realization not too many years ago about, like, oh, my God, there's a lot of sexual assault in Hollywood. It's like, yeah, why do you think that is? It's a very rigid, hierarchical manipulative power structure where, like, it seems like everyone has a story of being taken on some kind of menacing joyride by a hideous man at least one time.

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah. And being told, basically, you should be grateful that we're even considering you for this thing. That we haven't told you what it is. And we're, like, basically abducting you for half a day.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Michael Shulman]

She gets $350 a week for rehearsing. So it's a terribly paid job for which she is told that she should be paying them because such great exposure. And it's gonna launch her career in Hollywood. And so now she's, like, thrown into rehearsals. And Alan Carr, she remembers sort of, like guarding the door so that no one would know what was going on. It was top secret. He would not let anyone in. And sometimes he would come, he would poke his head in, and he would tell them all, thank you so much for your work, but they're canceling the number. And then it was revealed that it was a big prank.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, my God, Alan, you gotta calm down. You gotta do some yoga. Just go call your friend Jane Fonda and get a yoga studio recommendation or something.

[Michael Shulman]

And Eileen told me it was the cat playing with the mouse. Let's see how much we can play with these toys. Toys meaning people and their feelings.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Do you have thoughts about why this brought it out in him? Like, do you think he was like this normally or was this sort of, like an escalated way of being or something?

[Michael Shulman]

I mean, I think, you know, the bluntest way to put it is he was having a power trip and it's sort of bringing out the worst in him.

[Sarah Marshall]

You know, maybe the most generous way to put it is, like, letting the wounded little kid inside you, like, drive like a maniac.

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah. I mean, I also think that this kind of treatment of people in Hollywood was just kind of how things were, you know, in the 80s. I don't think this is unusual behavior for a man in a position of power and a young, naive, newcomer woman.

[Sarah Marshall]

Which doesn't excuse it, but does a lot to explain it. And also does a lot to explain sort of a lot of other horrors. And it does make me think of how, you know, part of the death of David lynch that has been really quite nice to see is, like, so many people reflecting on how nice he was to work with. And how that's a very rare quality, it seems, because if people talk about it that much, like, it's gotta be unusual. You know, if everybody was like that, it wouldn't be one of the main things people said about him.

[Michael Shulman]

Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I'm so glad that you identified that audition story as a David lynch movie. I'll never think of it in any other way ever again. So Eileen Bowman, she's in rehearsal as Snow White. And that is when Alan Carr reveals that her Prince charming will be Mr. Rob Lowe. And his first choice was Tom Cruise, even more unhinged. But Tom Cruise had a shaved head. Cause he was doing Born on the Fourth of July. And Carr did not like it. So they went to Rob Lowe.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, my God.

[Michael Shulman]

So now we're at Oscar night. This is March 29, 1989. You know, it's just the height of 80s excess. So let me tell you how this played out first from the perspective of our friend Eileen Bowman. She told me this amazing story about how just a couple hours before showtime, she was in her dressing room and Rob Lowe, with whom she really got along well, pays her an unexpected visit. He says, hey, my manager loves the chemistry we have together and he's gonna come up to you and want to sign you. Don't do it because I'm leaving him. And then he leans in and tells her, if I were you, I would get out of this town tonight because there's blood in the water and the sharks are circling. There are people who are going to take advantage of you, and I don't want to see that happen. And as, as, as, as. Eileen just has this like, horrified, shocked look on her face.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Michael Shulman]

He tells her, never trust a man in a caftan.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, God. The, the David lynch theory really does hold on this one.

[Michael Shulman]

Oh, yes.

[Sarah Marshall]

Also, I'm just, I'm very nervous for Rob Lowe to be in close quarters with, with anyone, you know, in, in terms of like Hollywood sex pass. He's seated pretty low in terms of the all time worth. But like, I don't trust him. I don't trust him.

[Michael Shulman]

And maybe this would be a good time to just contextualize where on the timeline this is, you know, in terms of his sex scandal.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, talk about that.

[Michael Shulman]

At this point, the act has happened, but the scandal has not broken. In other words, when he had videotaped sex with two people, one of whom was 16 years old. It was at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta.

[Sarah Marshall]

Why there? This is an episode that, that probably should happen. But. And I mean, and this is like, I don't know, hinting at a whole area of like consent and celebrity and age and, you know, a. It's, you can't give consent if you're underage legally. And I believe in reality as well. And also, just if, like, celebrities cannot act. Like, they don't know that they have all the power in almost any interaction that they have with a normal, especially someone who's attracted to them, you know, and this is something that, you know just from, like, the sheer number of Hollywood sexual assault stories that we've now read about. Like, we have enough data to realize that, like, that's a huge part in ethically difficult situations and also, I guess, predatory situations that people end up in.

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah. And for Rob Lowe, like, he. So he is unaware that, like, the thing he has already done is about to, like, completely, you know, come back to haunt him months later. And in this moment, he, at least, is not a predator, but a kind of, like, someone who's warning Eileen, like, be careful. Like, Hollywood is dangerous. And I guess he's an unlikely bearer of that message to a young woman.

[Sarah Marshall]

I think I personally would not to project. Would have a sense of, like, all these people seem equally important, and they're all telling me different things.

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah, for sure.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. And you don't know someone's messing with your head. And, like. And it does seem like, you know, succeeding in many entertainment industries. And it's no secret, because it's just something people generally have spoken with about with pride and with some amount of veiled trauma. If you read between the lines. Is that, like, it seems very difficult to get very far if you don't. Basically, when someone says jump, say, how high?

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah, absolutely. And one little ominous last story she told me before the ceremony begins. She said she was hiding in a broom closet right before the show started. Cause she was like. She was like a top secret, you know, like, the announcer on the speaker system telling people to take their seats was saying, the star of all time will be here soon. And she's that star. And she's dressed like Snow White, hiding in a broom closet. And the.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's kind of like Woodstock, too, as well. Like, you can't. You do no favors to someone by hyping them up to that extent.

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah. And the guard, who was sort of a nice guy, who was just, like, making sure she was not, you know, she was, like, safe in the broom closet. She confided in him and said, you know, I'm really scared right now. I could just go right out this door and run down Jefferson Boulevard. And the nice guard said, you could, but you're not going to. And she says, yes, sir. I'm gonna sit right here. So even up until like it was about to begin, she had this instinct to just run the hell away.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, yeah.

[Michael Shulman]

Instead, the show begins. She instantly, she was very nervous. And the part where she walks down the aisle, she had practiced with like headshots on the seats of all the stars faces, but now they were real people. Like for instance, the director told her, don't go to Robin Williams because he'll start to like get involved in the bit. So she's thinking, no Robins, no Robin Williams.

[Sarah Marshall]

No Robin Williams.

[Michael Shulman]

Robin Williams. And then she was supposed to go to Kevin Kline, but the back of his head looked exactly the same as Robin Williams. So of course she goes right up to Robin Williams.

[Sarah Marshall]

I wouldn't have thought of that, but I guess they did.

[Michael Shulman]

She's telling herself, like, abort, abort, abort.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's so funny to be like, I'm filled our show with all of these very bad choices, but we can't give Robin Williams 90 seconds. That would be terrible.

[Michael Shulman]

Meanwhile, the people in the audience later talk about just how uncomfortable they were. Like everyone was flinching. This guy Peter Bart, who was at the time the editor of Variety, said the minute that it started, everybody sucked in their breath and felt something awful was going to take place.

[Sarah Marshall]

These are the things that bring us together, really.

[Michael Shulman]

Oh, and Barry Levinson, who was the director of Rain Man, Rob Lowe, tells this story where he is singing Proud Mary on stage with Eileen Bowman and looks out in the audience and sees Levinson. Rob Lowe said his mouth is agape, he looks almost ashen. He turns to his date, his face a mask of shock and disgust. Even in the middle of singing a duet. I can very clearly read his lips as he says, what the fuck is this?

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh boy. I know that this is a tragedy, but there are, and not in a, I hope in the most respectful way possible. I feel like we need these things to sort of to come to that. They do bring us together in a weird way, you know that like everybody knew, but they just had to do it anyway and they were all realizing it at the same time. And we can all look back and be like, we all knew. Why didn't we do anything? I don't know. It's like fyre fest.

[Michael Shulman]

The number happens. The only person who doesn't seem to realize that it has been a gigantic disaster is Mr. Allen Carr.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, yeah, but he's basically like popping.

[Michael Shulman]

Around, like watching the show from different angles all during, during it, like going, going to the balcony, going to the, going to stage left and like taking a look and he pretty much keeps saying, like, hey, they like that, right? That was good. That was great.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Michael Shulman]

His first inkling that things have not gone great is when he goes to the press room. Jeannie Williams from USA Today asks him, don't you think the Snow White opening was a bit over the top? And he goes, what do you hear the ovations out there? It was magical. And she goes, but, Alan, why Snow White? What's the connection between her and. Well, the whole Coconut Grove theme of the show. And he goes, it's called theatrical.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, it's just true.

[Michael Shulman]

And then he turns to his press rep and goes, get me out of here.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, my God, he's gonna get the last chopper out of Saigon.

[Michael Shulman]

So Alan goes up to the Governor's Ball, which of course is like festooned with chiffon, like a 20 piece orchestra. And on a revolving pedestal, like a classic Alan Carr extravaganza. Everyone's toasting him. It's great. He gets in a limo to go to Swifty Lazar's after party at Spago with Bruce Valanche.

[Sarah Marshall]

What a sentence.

[Michael Shulman]

The show is over. He's feeling great. Except Bruce Valanche did tell me this one line he said when they were. It was like they had a quiet moment in the limo. I guess Alan Carr was thinking about all the sort of, like, egos he had bruised, like Gregory Peck and those people. And he says to Valanche, I burned a lot of bridges on this one, man.

[Sarah Marshall]

That is just one of the fascinating human narratives that I think we're really drawn to the same way. It's like we love love stories and we love power tragedies.

[Michael Shulman]

You know, it's not like the other Academy Awards ceremonies from the 80s were any less tacky and, you know, schlocky than this one. Like the year before, there was a part where Pee Wee Herman presented with RoboCop.

[Sarah Marshall]

I so happy that happened.

[Michael Shulman]

Oh, it's on YouTube. And it is a must watch. After you're done watching things from 1989, plug in. 1988, Pee Wee Herman, RoboCop Oscars. And it is absolutely surreal.

[Sarah Marshall]

Best advice I've gotten in 2025 so far.

[Michael Shulman]

Okay. Given that the other 80s Oscars were basically, you know, a similar level, like within the same realm of like, of tacky, why is this one the one that became so notorious as the worst Oscars ever? And a lot of that has to do actually with what comes next, which is the aftermath. Alan Carr, who is basically expecting a raft of bouquets and congratulatory telegrams to appear at his party mansion, wakes up and reads the reviews. The Associated Press called it a flaming wreck.

[Sarah Marshall]

That. That feels slightly homophobic. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Michael Shulman]

I don't think they meant flaming in that fashion, but, you know.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. First I was thinking of the Ford Pinto, and then I was like, hey, wait a minute.

[Michael Shulman]

The Sacramento Bee called it a flatulent gas bag of a show.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, at least that's not homophobic.

[Michael Shulman]

Janet Maslin in the Times writes that the opening number deserves a permanent place in the annals of Oscar embarrassments. At around the same time, Alan Carr was waking up to bad reviews and an absolute lack of bouquets at his doorstep. The president of the Academy, Richard Kahn, was taking pride in the ratings when he got a call from the president of Disney, Frank Wells, who said, dick, we got a problem. Because apparently no one had cleared Snow White with the studio.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, no. Oh, I wouldn't worry about it. Disney isn't very litigious.

[Michael Shulman]

Of course, Snow White, you know, if anyone's wondering, yes. Snow White is like a classic fairy tale character.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, my God.

[Michael Shulman]

But this was very clearly the Disney cartoon version of Snow White.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. Like, the costume's the same, the look is the same. Like, you look at her and you know who it is. Assume.

[Michael Shulman]

Yes. So Gregory Peck is angry. The Academy is angry. The critics are very unhappy. Carr basically drags himself to lunch at Morton's, which is a kind of industry hangout. He was with his friend Gary Pudney, who told me he walked into Morton's for lunch expecting a standing ovation and said people wouldn't even talk to him.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, boy.

[Michael Shulman]

And in this restaurant, you had to pay your bill at the front before you left, and people were, like, climbing over chairs trying to get out without passing his table.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Michael Shulman]

Since we're on, like, the morning after, just wrap up Eileen Bowman's story because she had fled right after the number. She. Like we should. Someone from the Academy had told her, oh, like, let's get. You know, when we. Let's go to the. The Governor's Ball in your Snow White costume and arm in arm with Rob Lowe. And she was finally just like, no, I am getting the fuck out of here.

[Sarah Marshall]

I love it. Yeah.

[Michael Shulman]

She leaves the theater. The only thing she kept was her fake eyelashes. The next morning, the doorbell rings, and a lawyer in a suit is there with a pile of papers for her to sign. Of course, sweet, young, naive Eileen Bowman has no idea. She just signs. And it turns out these documents forbid her from talking about the Oscars for 13 years. Fortunately, that time had passed by the time I was writing my book so she could tell me all about it.

[Sarah Marshall]

So it's playing the long game is what the historian does.

[Michael Shulman]

So that Thursday, Disney filed a trademark infringement lawsuit. The spokesman said, we thought it was extremely unrepresentative of our creative work and of the quality of our creative work. The Academy and Disney meet the following day to try to resolve the dispute, and eventually they reach a settlement. But part of the settlement is that the Academy can no longer officially use this opening number, which is why it is not on the official Academy YouTube channel, and why it will never be part of any kind of clip show or anything like that that the Academy produces. It is banned.

[Sarah Marshall]

It is the lost Oscars.

[Michael Shulman]

So what does Alan do? The first thing he does once he's sort of like, drunk himself into oblivion and cried in his Egyptian underground disco is he calls Army Archer at Variety and tells him all sorts of lies about how many people have been sending him telegrams. Apparently, he says that he's doing the Euphoria gif.

[Sarah Marshall]

I've never been happier.

[Michael Shulman]

He claims that Ronald Reagan actually called him to compliment him and told him how he. I believe he used to go to the Coconut Grill. He also invites over the arts editor of the LA Times, who describes in this piece he wrote top of the budget floral arrangements and towering sprays of spring blossoms that were all over the living room, apparently from people who had sent them. One of. One of the assistants I talked to confirmed that he had just asked them to send the flowers for him.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, I think this is, like, a nice time to point out that, like, you know, this is the guy who behaved pretty abusively with his performers and that, like, when we tell these stories, you know, dangerous people and pathetic people are often the same.

[Michael Shulman]

That is very true. Just when things couldn't get any worse, another bomb drops, which is a letter. This letter is signed by 17 Hollywood luminaries, including Gregory Peck, Paul Newman, Julie Andrews, Blake Edwards, Billy Wilder, Joseph Mankiewicz, Sidney Lumet, and on and on.

[Sarah Marshall]

You don't want to piss off Julie Andrews.

[Michael Shulman]

Well, she was married to Blake Edwards, who apparently Edwards and Peck were like the people who, like, sort of corralled everyone to sign this letter.

[Sarah Marshall]

Nice.

[Michael Shulman]

They sent it to the Academy. But it's an open letter that calls the ceremony, quote, an embarrassment both to the Academy and the entire motion picture industry, and then says it is neither fitting nor acceptable that the best work in motion pictures be acknowledged in such a demeaning fashion. I really get the Sense that this final rejection from, you know, the echelon of, you know, A list Hollywood in this letter was the thing that really just destroyed him. And I'm gonna read you something that his friend Gene Wolf told me. She said they just froze him out. And it took a while for him to figure that out, but once he did, he was devastated. He was devastated. He talked about being a nerd when he was in school, and he talked about always being the fat kid. The guy who looked like he wanted to be different but wanted to be part of the crowd. If you're wearing a caftan and you're. And if you're on a constant diet your whole life, you want to be accepted. You want to be one of the A listers. And he could feel this ultimate rejection.

[Sarah Marshall]

It also makes me think of. I forget. I think of there being two guys who founded and ran Studio 54, and that being a symbol of 70s excess that got brought down for, I think, faulty bookkeeping in the fraud way. But that one of them said or was asked, would you let yourself into this club that you run? And he was like, no, of course not. You know, and that thing of, like, trying to get into a club that, you know, you can only get by sort of exerting power in a way that people sort of have to say yes to you. And the sort of how, like, even if you get what you want, it's maybe not what you wanted?

[Michael Shulman]

Well, yeah. I mean, and if you've seen the movie 54, where Mike Myers plays Steve Rubell, like, you know, he's sort of this guy who doesn't really belong. And you see him kind of like, I just have this image from that movie of him, like, up in the rafters, watching the party below. And he knows he's not this pretty young thing like Ryan Phillipe, but he sort of made himself the impresario so that he could get into the cool party totally.

[Sarah Marshall]

And that being a real sort of role that people find themselves in and kind of an archetype that you find in these stories.

[Michael Shulman]

I think a couple months later, the Rob Lowe sex tape comes out. Like, the fallout from his career from being in this Oscar number was, like, completely overshadowed by the catastrophe of the sex tape.

[Sarah Marshall]

And was the scandal about the fact that there was an underage teenage girl in it, or was it mostly just about that it was a sex tape and that that was tacky?

[Michael Shulman]

It was kind of all of those things, actually. She was 16. The age of consent in Georgia was 14 at the time.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, boy. Yeah, well, I disagree with that.

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah. The age of consent for being videotaped was 18.

[Sarah Marshall]

That's interesting. Okay.

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah. And then her mother filed a lawsuit. And then of course, like, the tabloids had a. Had a feeding frenzy. And one thing that Bruce Vanche told me is that like, every time the news would cover like the sex tape, like, they'd say, Rob Lowe most recently seen Dancing with Snow White and the disastrous opening number at the Academy Awards. So it actually like, like the sex tape somehow like fed the scandal of the opening number at the Oscars rather than vice versa.

[Sarah Marshall]

And, you know, I tend to suspect that this affected her life a lot more negatively than it did his.

[Michael Shulman]

Oh, yeah. I mean, he bounced back with Wayne's World really, like in the early 90s, you know, he took a few years off and then he was back. So the Academy set up a committee called the Awards Presentation Review Committee to kind of assess what had gone wrong and like, figure out how to fix the show. Because obviously this had been a gigantic turkey. And it was chaired by a very well liked veteran TV director and producer named Gil Cates.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, my God.

[Michael Shulman]

Gil Cates then became the new sort of regular producer of the Oscars. And he was kind of like the anti Alan Carr. Cause he was very like buttoned up, even tempered person who like, didn't seek out publicity.

[Sarah Marshall]

The Victor Fleming of Oscars producers.

[Michael Shulman]

To draw on another 80s metaphor, like the car Oscars were kind of like New Coke. And then in 1990, they were like, this is Coca Cola classic, like back to the, you know, the, you know, like the best of the Academy Awards. And that was the first year that Billy Crystal hosted.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, wow.

[Michael Shulman]

And so of course, he became like one of the great Oscar hosts. And he comes out and instead of doing like a big production number, he does a comedy routine. So it just, it immediately feels like a more modern show.

[Sarah Marshall]

And that was what I grew up with it being was like, somebody comes out and like, does some comedy and then is like, all right, time for the awards now. Thank you.

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah. And it was a clean break from, like, we're gonna put on a lavish production number with like, you know, chorus girls and like, you know, gold spandex. And one of the first things he said in his monologue was, thank you very much. So people are applauding. He goes, is that for me or are you just glad I'm not Snow White?

[Sarah Marshall]

Which I'm sure, like, everybody needed.

[Michael Shulman]

And yet some of the things that he came up with remain, like, they kept the phrase the Oscar and the Oscar goes to instead of. And the winner is.

[Sarah Marshall]

That's a good one. I like that.

[Michael Shulman]

They kept Bruce Valanche, who stayed on and did, like, you know, like, two dozen Oscars, as the writer, as a joke writer. So he kind of became, like, the comic voice of the Oscars. And then, of course, like, the fashion aspect just grew and grew and grew. And along came Joan Rivers and Melissa Rivers at a certain point. And that made the, you know, the red carpet, like, a little more edgy and dangerous and critical, but it also, like, turned it into a show kind of to rival the Oscars itself. So, you know, he left some changes that were positive, but they had to sort of. They had to make a clean break from him.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Michael Shulman]

In the meanwhile, what became of our. Our friend Alan Carr? Yeah, he immediately became a recluse at his party mansion. His parties kind of became like quiet little dinners. He continued with his drinking, popping Percocet, you know, anything he could lay his hands on. Bruce Valanche told me, I frankly wasn't that eager to talk to him because I knew it was coming. I knew there would be a Night of the Long Knives where eventually he would say, you, you fat queen Jew fag. You talked me into that shit with the young kids, which isn't true, but there would be a blanket condemnation or there would be. It was just you and me. We were the only ones who got it. They defeated us, and I didn't particularly want to be there either. So the two of them never saw each other again.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Which, as an avoidant person, I really respect Bruce Falanche's choices.

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah. So some of his friends did feel like there was just a homophobia behind this entire kind of ostracization of him. Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

I feel, like, inevitably.

[Michael Shulman]

Interesting. I feel like there is something inherently gay about this ceremony, but there's something inherently gay about the Oscars. I don't think people were ready to admit that in 1989 Hollywood.

[Sarah Marshall]

Gay. No.

[Michael Shulman]

So as we get into the 90s, he. He couldn't get any of his producing projects off the ground. He had a couple ideas. He wanted to make a movie out of Lana Turner's daughter's memoir about, you know.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, my God. Yes.

[Michael Shulman]

She's the one who, like, who stabbed Lana Turner's abusive boyfriend.

[Sarah Marshall]

He had it coming. He had it coming. He had it coming all along.

[Michael Shulman]

So anyway, he hired a personal trainer who kind of became like, a pseudo boyfriend. And some of his friends I talked to were a little suspicious of all the staff that surrounded him. Like, maybe they were taking advantage of him. He apparently got glued to CNBC and was, like, just screaming all day to his financial analyst. He had one last little moment of glory on the 20th anniversary of Grease in 1998, where he persuaded Paramount to re release the film. And they had a big premiere party, and he showed up in a Grease T shirt. And it was kind of this last hurrah for Alan. But he. You know, he never really was able to produce anything else, so it definitively just ended his career.

[Sarah Marshall]

Wow.

[Michael Shulman]

In 1998, he had a kidney transplant, and he went back and he threw a party for his new kidney. But sadly.

[Sarah Marshall]

I really appreciate that.

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah. And I think actually that that's a good recommendation to anyone who goes through an organ transplant. Once it happens, throw a party for your new organ. Sadly, midway through this kidney party, he had to call an ambulance to take him to Cedars Sinai because he actually had liver cancer. And he died at age 62 in June 1999. I talked to his oldest friend from Illinois, Joanne Simballo, who said he had no family at that point. His parents were gone. He had no brothers or sisters. So it was. It was his staff that made the arrangements. It was very sad. Very odd.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Michael Shulman]

And then his friends. You know, I'll just. I want to just end with this quote from his friend Nicky Haskell, who, you know, after he died, everyone kind of realized that, like, there was this metaphorical death in 1989, and then he sort of lived another 10 years, but. But before he had died of cancer, he kind of. It was like death by Oscars. And his friend Nikki Haskell said that was the end of his life. What did he do that was so terrible that everybody got so hysterical? He made it too much about himself. That was the problem. He made it so much about Alan that when it wasn't flawless, they killed him.

[Sarah Marshall]

Do you feel like this is a cautionary tale in some way, or why do you feel drawn to this story as this chapter of your book, all.

[Michael Shulman]

Of that, the kind of, like, Anatomy of a Fiasco is what really drew me to this story. But I found myself really.

[Sarah Marshall]

That's the difference between a fiasco and a disaster, I guess. A fiasco is a disaster without fatalities.

[Michael Shulman]

Fiasco is a fun word. It's the title of this chapter in the book. But I found myself really kind of caring about Alan Carr. And, yes, he was kind of like a toxic queen who had a really mean side, a really narcissistic side. Yeah. But, like, I kind of understood. I came to understand, like, just the forces that made him feel like he had to overcompensate so much and build himself up so much. I think. I think there was just a kind of emptiness in the center that sort of spread outward.

[Sarah Marshall]

Wow.

[Michael Shulman]

And made him just, like, seek a certain kind of acceptance and, you know, glamour. And it kind of played out through the Oscars. Like, the Oscars were his vehicle for ultimate acceptance. And it turns out that that is what ruined his life. Like, once he got the chance to do the thing he always wanted to do, it destroyed him. That's, like, an aspect of the Icarus story that I find very compelling. It's like Ikaris was doing something amazing. He was flying, you know, in the air, which no human being can do. And if it hadn't been a, you know, total wreck, like, it would have been extraordinary. It would have been fabulous.

[Sarah Marshall]

And then. But, yeah, it's like, you know, you can't use it as a cautionary tale against trying to fly. It's like, just, you know, keep a cool head and play. Test your wing material.

[Michael Shulman]

And, you know, and cut down the opening number. It should not be longer than six minutes at the most.

[Sarah Marshall]

I also feel like there's kind of a sad irony to the fact that he grew up dreaming of a Hollywood life, and what's more of a Hollywood life than dying lonely and surrounded by staff?

[Michael Shulman]

Yeah. There's, like, an undercurrent of schadenfreude to the Oscars, and I think that. And it represents, like, the establishment sort of anointing you as one of their own, but, like, that just doesn't last. And for some people, including Alan Carr, it's actually the thing that destroys you and, like, ends the Hollywood dream that you were climbing for that whole time.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, I'm so happy that you told this story. I do feel, like, a lot of tenderness for everybody involved, you know.

[Michael Shulman]

Well, especially Eileen Bowman. She's doing well.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yes. Oh, my God, that's so good. Yeah.

[Michael Shulman]

She never went back to Hollywood. She actually told me that. That she tried to audition for things, but, like, as soon as people saw Snow White at the Oscars on her resume, they kind of, like, laughed her out of the room. But I think that she realized pretty quickly, as naive as she was, that, like, this town was just not for her.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. I would love to close by asking you, what is your Oscar? Roman Empire. If you can pick just one, I realize this might be it.

[Michael Shulman]

Honestly, one of them has been mentioned already, which is that in 1988, Pee Wee Herman presented with RoboCop.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, I don't think he can top that. Oh, my God.

[Michael Shulman]

Help. Where's RoboCop?

[Sarah Marshall]

You can never find a RoboCop when you need one.

[Michael Shulman]

Oh, my God. Thanks, RoboCop. All right, we it's safe to continue giving the award now. Thanks, RoboCop.

[Sarah Marshall]

Michael, this has been so fun. Is there just anything of yours that you would like people to read? Tell us about your book. What are you, what are you writing about lately? What are you excited about? All of that stuff? Yeah.

[Michael Shulman]

Well, my book is called Oscar A History of Hollywood and Gold, Sweat and Tears. The Alan Carr story is part of it as well as Oscar stories from every other era from the past century. And then, you know, I'm a staff writer with New Yorker and right now I'm covering Oscar season including I just wrote a piece about the whole Emilia Perez, Carlos Sofia Gascon cascade of scandals. And I will be at the Oscars this year and will write an account of my night.

[Sarah Marshall]

And that was our episode. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being with us. Thank you to Michael Shulman, our Oscar correspondent. Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing this show. And thank you for you, the listener, more so than usual because you're going to help us, more so than usual with our next episode. I posed a question on Patreon a couple weeks ago asking people what they were excited about, what was giving them joy, how they were connecting to their communities in this time when a lot of us are trying to think about how to do that and how to feel more connection to the people around us and finding little joys wherever we can. My example was cabbage. I've started some little cabbage seedlings in my laundry room. And so in the morning I wake up, up and I feel excited to go check on the cabbage. And I spent the day reading the responses to that question over on our Patreon and just loved what I read so much. And it made me feel just so lucky to have this community that has grown up around the show that I wanted everybody to get to hear that. So that's why I am asking you to tell us what you're excited about. What's bringing you joy, what's bringing you hope. We set up an email address for this. It's sloppyandalivemail.com we could not resist a Stepford Wise reference. And so that's S L O P p y a N-A-L I v e gmail.com and so basically just send us a three minute or shorter voice memo. That, to me, is the easiest way to make a sound file on a regular phone these days. But any kind of sound file will do three minutes or less and get it in by 6pm Pacific time Sunday, March 2nd. And we are only going to be able to feature a few on the episode that we're going to put out, but we're going to listen to all of them and you're going to share so many views of the world with us. And I can't wait. And I can't wait to bring that back to all of you in a couple weeks. And that's it. I'll see you in two weeks. Talk to you soon.