Yahoo News The Village People film flop that proved too gay for America
One of the more unexpected aspects of Donald Trump’s re-election campaign has been his close association with the American disco group the Village People. The 45th (and now 47th) inhabitant of the Oval Office has frequently played their songs Y.M.C.A. and Macho Man at his rallies, bringing the band’s music to the widest audiences that they have had since their Seventies heyday. Trump himself positively embraces the high-camp aspects of the ever-popular tunes, enthusiastically moving to their hits.
The Village People initially attempted to distance themselves from Trump around the time of his previous attempt to become president, with the lead singer, and sole original member Victor Willis saying in June 2020 that “I don’t endorse Trump…I’ve never endorsed him, nor has the Village People, and we’ve even asked him to stop playing (Y.M.C.A.) at his rallies”. Four years later, and one successful election victory, it’s a rather different story.
Willis and his reconstituted band played their signature song at a pre-inauguration rally in Washington, as Trump danced along with the kind of tentative, shuffling moves that may have led some of his devoted Maga fans to wonder if he was quite alright. They will perform again at one of his inauguration events, thus making a further connection between their light-hearted disco and the next presidential term. It will be hard, from now on, to listen to their music and not think of Donald Trump.
Whether or not this is an appealing idea, it’s undeniably true that the boost that the Village People have received from this unlikeliest of associations will have transformed their financial, if not necessarily reputational, fortunes. In the late Seventies, they established themselves as a popular cult band, both for their clearly denoted on-stage personae – Willis dressed as a policeman, admiral or gigolo, depending on the number being performed, while other Village People wore the attire of cowboys, Native Americans and soldiers – and for a series of albums that seemed to tap into the zeitgeist for high-energy disco music, often with homosexual overtones.
Such LPs as Macho Man, Go West (which spawned the famous single of the same name) and, especially, 1978’s Cruisin’ were all influenced by the gay subculture of the East and West coasts of the era, and became required listening at the clubs that inspired them. The group enjoyed significant commercial success, with both Cruisin’ and Go West becoming multi-million selling records, and their best-known singles crossed over into the mainstream. So men and women who would never have dreamt of going into New York or San Francisco’s sleazier dives found themselves enthusiastically dancing along to Y.M.C.A. at weddings and Bar Mitzvahs.
This led to a certain amount of mainstream homophobia – when introducing them on Top of the Pops, The Who’s Roger Daltrey quipped “Mind your backs”, a remark edited out of subsequent broadcasts – which belied their (admittedly absurd) later statements that “Our songs were never gay, we were just a party band!” and “There was not one double-entendre in our music. In the Navy was just about enlisting.” Up to a point, Lord Copper.
It was almost inevitable that the Village People would be asked to make a film, given their larger-than-life and theatrical on-stage personae. There was also a risk that the film would be an artistic failure, given that it was following in the wake of several other high-profile musical disasters, which included the 1978 Wizard of Oz re-imagining The Wiz and Peter Bogdanovich’s near career-ending 1975 misfire At Long Last Love.
Yet there were also enormous successes during the same period, including the John Travolta one-two punch of Grease and Saturday Night Fever. Allan Carr, who had overseen the marketing for The Who’s rock opera Tommy and Saturday Night Fever, had been promoted to producer for Grease, which he had also masterminded the advertising for. Carr micromanaged it, even down to overseeing the premiere party and television specials, and the result was a massive hit. He became the toast of Hollywood and a man who, apparently, could do no wrong.
The combination of Carr and the Village People, then, seemed an exciting one. Reuniting with his Grease screenwriter Bronté Woodard, Carr produced a script that was originally called Discoland…Where the Music Never Ends. It revolved around the character of Jack Morrell, a priapic – and, bizarrely, aggressively, performatively heterosexual – songwriter, who was a sanitised version of Jacques Morali, who died of Aids in 1991. He becomes involved with the Village People, playing themselves, albeit without Willis, who had by then departed the group (one of the best decisions he ever made).
Although Carr was himself gay – albeit closeted – it was swiftly made clear that Discoland would not embrace the obviously homosexual themes and subculture that the Village People addressed, for fear that this would limit its audience. It thus became a straight love story, albeit with bewilderingly, insistently camp elements.
Carr, excited by this, announced that the film would be “Singin’ in the Rain for the disco crowd” and that it would be the first of a three-picture deal that he had struck with EMI, to be followed by an adaptation of Chicago and a biopic of the singer Josephine Baker, planned to star Diana Ross. When EMI’s British owner Barry Spikings – then best known for the more artistically respectable likes of The Deer Hunter and The Man Who Fell to Earth – was asked about his hopes for the picture, his response was equivocal. “I hope it is different. The film breaks new ground.”
Can’t Stop the Music, as Discoland was retitled, certainly was different, and it also broke new ground, albeit not in the way that Spikings had intended. Carr was given complete artistic control, and made a series of baffling artistic decisions, beginning with the hiring of Nancy Walker as the film’s director. Walker was a well-known comic actress who had been a regular on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, as well as directing some episodes of it.
But making a big-budget feature film (its cost has been estimated as being as much as $20 million, compared to Grease’s $6 million) was a wholly different endeavour, and it proved a miserable experience for her. She clashed with the film’s star Valerie Perrine, and in one of the few interviews that she ever gave, intimated that working with non-professional actors, in the form of the Village People, made for a difficult experience. Yet this was barely the half of it.
Carr’s likening of the film to Singin’ In the Rain may have been a ludicrous one, but there was one point of comparison with the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood that stood up. Robert Hofler’s 2010 biography of Carr, Party Animals, revealed that the producer operated a casting couch system for attractive young men, and asked potential conquests “Cash or career?” when he first met them. He became fixated on Guttenberg, with whom he developed a near-obsession, despite the actor’s obvious heterosexuality.
Whether or not he ever made an overt advance towards Guttenberg, the tension, such as it is, that lies within Can’t Stop the Music is that of a gay impresario and gay-friendly band feeling their way into a nominally heterosexual story, with all the ludicrousness that that entails. As the film critic Nathan Rabin so aptly described it: “Can’t Stop the Music feels like the product of a bag of cocaine that became sentient and decided to break into show-business.”
To list all the film’s absurdities would be an impossible task, but one of Carr’s most bizarre ideas was to offset its enormous budget with obvious corporate sponsorship from entities that included Baskin Robbins, Dr. Pepper and, of all companies, the American Dairy Association. The involvement of the latter meant that one of the musical numbers, for which they paid $2 million, was simply called Milkshake, whereas Baskin Robbins (perhaps innocently) released a promotional tie-in flavour of ice cream called Can’t Stop the Nuts.
Therefore, the endless scenes of half-naked – and indeed fully naked on occasion – well-built men were juxtaposed with the unconvincing love story between Perrine and the athlete Bruce Jenner, who would later become best-known as Caitlyn Jenner, but was then famous for having won a decathlon gold medal at the 1976 Montreal Olympics.
Jenner fancied a film career, and Carr, never a man given to understatement, announced that he would be “the Robert Redford of the 80s, and this film will do for [Perrine] what Carnal Knowledge did for Ann-Margret”. Warming to his theme, Carr suggested that Can’t Stop the Music would signal a sea-change in Hollywood. “This movie’s a revolution,” he said. “I mean this movie is launching whole new careers and we need new stars today. Warren [Beatty] and Ryan [O’Neal] and [Robert] Redford – these people are way over 40.” He also tried to recruit his Grease star Olivia Newton-John, but she refused, instead signing up for the musical extravaganza Xanadu instead: a classic case of jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Carr hired Arlene Phillips to choreograph the picture’s many musical numbers, and at times she ended up essentially directing the film, as Walker proved unequal to the task. Production was unpleasant and gruelling, because of the intrinsic personality clashes – which saw cinematographer Bill Butler step in to direct scenes involving Perrine, who had fallen out with Walker – and Carr’s determination to micromanage every aspect of production.
Hilariously, given the picture’s determination not to be a gay film, its filming was picketed anyway by activists who mistook it for the Al Pacino/William Friedkin thriller Cruising – which had, in part, taken its name from the Village People’s successful album. This caused Carr to grab a megaphone and implore the protestors: “We’re the good guys. We’re the good gay movie. Cruising is filming three blocks that way!”
It is an understandable mix-up: both films, after all, have their central characters dressed up in tight leather trousers and wearing fetching peaked caps, as well as being eyed up by moustachioed opportunists. And for all Can’t Stop the Music’s half-hearted commitment to straightness, Carr was unable to resist putting the most obvious and outrageous of innuendoes into the script. When a character declares “Anybody who can swallow two Sno-Balls and a Ding Dong shouldn’t have any trouble with pride”, they are not talking about the delights of popular foodstuffs.
For all the picture’s crassness and cynicism, it might have been a hit in other circumstances. Carr was as committed to publicising it as he had ever been, and even arranged his own television special, modestly titled Allan Carr’s Magic Night, to promote the film. Yet he was faced with two insuperable problems. When Can’t Stop the Music was released in June 1980, Cruising and another gay-themed film Windows, about a lesbian serial killer, had both come out earlier that year and flopped hard, suggesting that audiences were either uninterested or unprepared for mainstream films with overly camp or homosexual subject matter.
On a related note, the disco wave that Carr had so successfully ridden with Saturday Night Fever had come to an end. Even as the producer declared, delusionally, of the Village People, “they’ll still be hot, [and] if not, I will resurrect them”, he was wholly mistaken. The genre had already peaked and was in decline, meaning that the Village People were now seen as terminally uncool figures of another era altogether. The film received dreadful, bewildered reviews, and was a staggering flop at the box office, making a mere $2 million. As the television impresario Lew Grade, who had wasted money investing in the picture, noted “Our timing was wrong, and in this business, timing is everything.”
The film has not aged well. It is too bad, and too inadvertently homophobic, to be enjoyable even as a guilty pleasure. It ruined the careers of just about everyone involved in it, save Guttenberg, who soon bounced back with the Police Academy series. Jenner did not act again for many years, until post-transition. It also did nothing for the Village People themselves, whose Willis-less presence in the film makes them feel like a superannuated scout troupe in search of a leader; even their musical numbers feel low-energy and boring.
The group’s new association with President Trump may bewilder and bother many, but compared to the ghastliness of Can’t Stop the Music, it makes perfect sense. It’s just a shame that the President is yet to dance along to In the Navy, perhaps their most outrageous song: “Where can you find pleasure / Search the world for treasure / Learn science technology”, etc. But, as with all things in his second administration, there is time.
