A day of Greasing the media in Chicagoland
By Paul Wood
You can tell right away that Arnie’s is a classy restaurant because the walls are covered with pictures of naked girls and there’s lots of Tiffany glass around. Those Paramount people aren’t taking any chances - sure, Grease is a wonderful movie, but a little publicity couldn’t hurt in promoting a film that’s going to open in 931 theatres the next day.
There’s a nasty truism in the movie industry that blitz booking (putting a film in, say, 900 theatres in one day) is what you do when you want to get as much money out of it as you can before word-of-mouth gets around that the product stinks. That may be harsh, but it’s clear that Paramount wants good word-of-mouth, and it’s willing to buy every reporter in Illinois dinner just to get it.
So here we are four reporters from one college daily in Central Illinois - sitting in an expensive restaurant on State Street in Chicago, eating copious quantities of cheese (Gouda and Swiss) and bunches of fruit (bananas, grapes and apples). And a couple of tables away, there’s old Don de Blasio of the Champaign News-Gazette. And you wonder why they’re willing to go to this much trouble to buy a couple of good reviews in a college town surrounded by corn and soybeans….
The master of ceremonies (make that ringmaster) is Allen Carr, a non-household word who should be one. After all, everyone knows who Russ Meyer is. And what Meyer is to one specific, however ample, part of the anatomy, Carr is to the whole wide wonderful world of sleaze.
Carr is a chubby young man from Highland Park who started work as a teenager with University alumnus Hugh Hefner and burst into eminence in the sleaze business as the producer of Survive! Now what Carr did with that one was very, very clever: he bought some newsreel footage of the survivors of a plane crash in the Andes (they had survived by eating each other) and added some studio footage of a soccer team coming to grips with cannibalism….
An instant hit
Now he expects to really clean up on Grease. “Coming back to your home town with a hit is one of the most exciting things in your life,” he confesses.
Not that he has deserted without honors.
Another successful business venture earned him the title Honorary Mayor of San Antonio. “That means you get free tacos for the rest of your life,” Carr jokes.
He can afford to joke, because “It’s going to be one terrific summer for movies,” and he has The Big One.
What about the competition? “The Greek Tycoon is pretty sleazy, don’t you think?” a reporter asks. “It’s not sleazy enough,” he answers.
Carr knows whereof he speaks. He’s not above changing Grease - it had already changed when the play moved from Chicago to Broadway and the first thing that went were the songs. He cut several and added four “now” songs, including one by Bee Gee Barry Gibb.
The single that’s playing more than often enough on your radio right now is “You’re the One that I Want,” a duet between John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, and it doesn’t come from the play, either.
“I wanted a Kiki Dee-Elton John duet from them (Travolta and Newton-John),” Carr explains. “Duets are in vogue now.”
That’s enough buildup; it’s time for the star. Carr introduces her as “Olivia Fig-Newton;” she laughs politely. She remains polite while Carr keeps his arm around her waist and sometimes lower during her entire stint at the speaker’s podium.
She appears to be tired of all these galas (they hit New York and Los Angeles before the Second City) and a bit annoyed at the questions, particularly those about her sexual preference. “That was another Australian singer,” she snapped once, referring to a guest on The Tonight Show who had admitted to being a lesbian.
Reporters also bother her with questions about how she coped with the accent as Sandy, an American teen in the 1950s. They haven’t read their press releases; she’s supposed to be an Australian exchange student in the movie version.
Nobody can hear her answer, though, because she has this incredibly soft voice that gets buried under the whirr of the television cameras. Newton-John has little to say, anyway, other than to push her next vehicle. Riviera, a musical with Keith Carradine and Mikhail Baryshnikov, begins shooting on location in late August.
(It was a bad day for Olivia Newton-John. At the Chicago premiere that night, she was mobbed by adoring fans and had to be hospitalized for rib injuries. “I never thought people would get that excited,” she said upon leaving for Malibu. “I love Chicago more than ever now.”)
Meanwhile, the press agents (who outnumber reporters) are bustling everyone around and making sure all are happy. Nobody leaves without an autographed 8x10 glossy. Everyone must say “Hi” to Olivia. And every joke, every piece of trivia must be cleared through somebody named Aaron.</strong>
Aaron sits down right next to me and asks who I am. “I’m just a reporter.”
“So am I,” he says humbly, revealing himself as Aaron Gold, writer of the Chicago Tribune’s Ticker Tower column. Before we can finish the chat, Aaron is rushed off to interview Eve Arden: she’s sitting by herself right now, looking bored and exhibiting not the slightest bit of wackiness the wacky star of Our Miss Brooks and The Mothers-in-Law is known for.
The only celebrity who just seems to want to talk is Dody Goodman, who’s best known for her role as mother of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. She’s doing a play (Kindling) in Chicago; otherwise, she says, she wouldn’t be doing promotion for her small part as Arden’s secretary.
Goodman is a professional. She’s been in the business a long time, so she doesn’t get too tense during interviews. On the other hand, she isn’t big enough that publicity is just a bore. She talks to you like she’s actually interested, albeit in a spacey way. “I don’t mind doing PR,” she says. “There’s a lot of good movies around nobody ever hears about, so they bomb. It’s nice to know people care.”
It does get annoying, though. “Why do reporters always ask the same questions?” she asks. “You’d think they don’t know if you’ve made a movie in 20 years. I keep pretty busy. In fact, I’ll be on stage in a couple of hours”.
“The worst thing is getting misquoted. That’s why Marlon Brando won’t talk (they worked together in Bedtime Story). He really got burned for his politics.”
Has Dody Goodman ever been misquoted? “Sure,” she laughs. “That’s why I never read this stuff any more. What the heck, as long as they get my name right.”
Carr is ushering us out of Arnie’s. Making sure we have all 6 pounds of promotional material, we leave; I take a few slices of Swiss cheese. Our photographer takes an apple.
Grease release -The newly-released movie Grease, starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John has repeatedly drawn large crowds since its opening Friday night at the Co-ed Theater in Campus-town. (photo by Michelle Doty)