OSCAR SO SAD
Last hostless night, in 1989, was disaster
The Academy Awards better hope its decision to televise Sunday’s ceremony without a host doesn’t come back to bite Oscar on his gold-plated backside.
The last time the show went without an official emcee was 30 years ago — and its interminable opening number highlighted by a disastrous song and dance duet with actor Rob Lowe and an unknown dressed as Snow White resulted in the most cringeworthy moment in the history of a show known for its myriad of cringeworthy moments.
The 1989 ceremony climaxed with “Rain Man” winning best picture, its fourth Oscar of the night. But viewers had to first endure Lowe – then 24 and better known for appearing on a sex tape with a 16-year-old girl than his movie credits – crooning an off-key rendition of “Proud Mary” with “Snow White,” who performed in an annoyingly high-pitched voice that sounded like Betty Boop on helium.
The opening was 11 minutes of televised torture for more than 1 billion viewers worldwide, yet the nowinfamous duet was hardly the only lowlight.
As the set transformed into a facsimile of L.A.’s famed Cocoanut Grove nightclub, TV talk-show host Merv Griffin sang the cheesy “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts” in a British accent while Old Hollywood icons like Vincent Price, Cyd Charisse, Roy Rogers and Dorothy Lamour were trotted onstage like aging show ponies amid high-stepping dancers dressed like theater ushers.
It took years for the industry to look back and laugh at the Oscar night debacle, which was the brainchild of “Grease” producer Allan Carr, who was bent on shaking up what he saw as a staid, outdated event.
But while the concept of honoring Hollywood history with a singing Snow White seemed harmlessly dopey, it made the movie establishment pretty darn grumpy.
Not only did critics pan Carr’s misguided vision — which put a permanent black mark on an otherwise successful career — Disney promptly filed a copyright infringement suit against the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for using Snow White’s image without permission.
It got worse — a letter slamming the ceremony as “an embarrassment to both the Academy and the entire motion picture industry” was signed by 17 prominent Hollywood heavyweights, including Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Julie Andrews and Gregory Peck.
“It is neither fitting nor acceptable that the best work in motion pictures be acknowledged in such a demeaning fashion,” the letter said.
In a newspaper interview last year, Lowe recalled the moment he realized the number had gone off the rails.
“I remember vividly looking out in the audience and seeing (director) Barry Levinson, who on that particular evening was the belle of the ball with ‘Rain Man,’ and I could see him very clearly pop-eyed and mouthing, ‘What the (expletive)?’” Lowe told The New York Times. “But to be a successful actor, you have to have a big dollop of selfdenial, so I managed to convince myself that I’d killed it.”
Lowe’s career did actually survive the fiasco (not to mention his sex tape scandal). But the actress who played Snow White — San Diego native Eileen Bowman, then 22 — wasn’t so lucky. She never recovered from what should have been a huge break and has appeared in a smattering of small TV and film roles over the years.
“These poor people were like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ ” Bowman said in a magazine interview years later about the movie stars sitting in L.A.’s Shrine Auditorium that night.
“I remember sitting in my condo ... watching the news — and the Snow White number was all that was on the news. I had no idea,” Bowman said. “My phone never stopped ringing. It was awful.”