Can't Stop the Directing Career

The Village People

Meet Rhoda's Mom

In 1980, Nancy Walker became the first woman director ever entrusted by Hollywood with a twenty million-dollar budget-- a feat not equaled until Barbara Streisand wrangled the same amount out of Columbia to direct The Prince of Tides.

But Walker's tale of feminist empowerment is much more bizarre, considering she had never directed so much as a paper towel commercial when Hollywood came running with its wallet wide open.

Walker's dramatic legacy was pretty heavy she was a veteran Broadway performer of the 1950s whose work so enchanted Montgomery Clift that he watched her performance in Fallen Angels for five straight nights before introducing himself backstage. She was one of Clift's best pals through his death in the mid-60s, and she occasionally hung with Marilyn and Liz and Truman and Tennessee as a result.

In the 1970s, when her exaggerated Jewish looks and her tiny stature made it impossible to play anything but a character comedienne, Walker nabbed an Emmy for her portrayal of mother Morganstern in the television sitcom "Rhoda" in the TV family tree that makes her grandma to Bart Simpson and David Hogan.

In 1979, with her career floundering, Walker took the helm of MGM's favored film project the old-fashioned way by knowing the right person in the right place-- red-hot producer Allan Carr, a friend of Truman and Tennessee's. And her film would be the most eagerly-awaited of 1980, a rare big-budget production after Francis Ford Coppola had run wild with Apocalypse Now the year before.

Discoland Where the Music Never Ends was partly to be an introductory vehicle for Bruce Jenner and a spread-your-wings vehicle for the ample-bosomed Valerie Perrine. But more than anything else, from the start it was mainly intended as a superstar vehicle for the Village People.

MGM was putting its money on a danceable dramedy about a temperamental songwriter; seven heterosexual, thickly-mustachioed disco band members who dress as construction workers, bikers, cowboys, etc.; their busty manager; and an evil St. Louis lawyer, played by Jenner at his method-acting silliest. When the studio became aware of a severe disco backlash after production started, the film's name was smartly changed to

Can't Stop the Music.

Time has forgotten that many Village People fans were teenage and pre-teenage girls who made "YMCA" one of the five biggest singles of the '70's. The cornerstone of the film is a lavish Esther Williams rip-off, with hundreds of muscled, bikini-clad YMCA-ers calisthenicizing by a swimming pool before diving in, one by one.

"What I'm working for is a sense of rhythms," Walker said of her most difficult scene. "And our cinematographer, Bill Butler, is unbelievable. How he handled all those nude dancers in the 'YMCA' number is a study for psychologists in people management. . . . this whole film is just a gorgeous love affair."

Walker handled her task like a pro she brought in the movie on budget, on time, and without major fights among the country's sleaziest major disco band, Hollywood's sexiest actress and America's reigning Olympic hero.

On the contrary, Perrine and a few of the Village persons soon discovered a mutual interest that eventually landed Perrine a spot in Unnatural Quotations, a 1990 best-selling compilation of (relatively) famous quotes. Perrine's zinger "Most of my male friends are gay, and that seems perfectly natural to me. I mean, who wouldn't like cock?"

It's no wonder that the wooden Jenner seems somehow lost in the production. One could blame Walker's direction for Jenner's stiff portrayal of the evil lawyer who, indeed, tries to "stop the music," until the fateful night when someone hands him a tambourine in a New York disco. But it may be that his concentration was broken by shenanigans on the set that, by some accounts, Walker let get out of hand.

Values-exhorting film critic Michael Medved, in the book The Hollywood Hall of Shame, cites the following report by a "veteran studio employee" at MGM "Usually, studio people are a hardened bunch. I mean, we've seen everything. But the group who worked on that movie was just too much. The costumes! We were used to seeing Nazi soldiers or spacemen on the lots, but not this! Every day it was like Mardi Gras at New Orleans. It was a stomach-turning experience . . . all the pals and hangers-on they brought along. We were just inundated. After a while, we started calling the film, Can't Stop the Faggots."

In retrospect, a film that could have been a historic jumping-off point for woman directors was doomed almost from the start. Even though the Village People developed its initial core audience playing gay bathhouses in New York City, MGM wanted to cater to the audience that made the band million sellers. So when construction worker David Hodo daydreams into surreality in the film, his fantasy involves women, women, women.

"When I first read the script, I threw it across the room," Hodo said after the film's release. "I thought it was a piece of crap. We didn't believe in the movie but no one would listen to us."

Bad vibes are not what a director needs when preparing a disco extravaganza. So to finish the film off, Walker ordered up a special concert at San Francisco's Galleria in which Carr and the Village People could bring in their crowd and boogie-oogie-oogie until their amyl nitrates were spent.

According to Medved, "a disturbingly high percentage of those close friends turned out to be drag queens in feathers and finery . . . requiring extensive cutting and splicing and the utilization of various cunning camera angles to emphasize the presence of a few 'ordinary' teenagers." As a testament to Walker's skills, the crowd looks like it came for an Eagles concert and was pleasantly surprised when the Village People showed up as unannounced guests.

If this celluloid remembrance had a happy ending, Can't Stop the Music would have grossed a hundred million, Walker would have been put in charge of The Color Purple rather than Steven Spielberg, Streisand would be ruling Hollywood after her zillion dollar remake of Night of the Hunter, with Babs herself as the Jung-knuckled killer preacher, and powerful Bel Air women would've told the men where to put their Basic Instinct scripts.

But if that were the case, we wouldn't have been quoting from The Hollywood Hall of Shame. Walker's big-budget debut was an unprecedented disaster.

Variety said "It's true, you really can't stop the music, no matter how much you want to. And at times you'll want to very, very much." Variety also said, months later, that the film barely grossed one million.

Just as Hollywood had giveth, it also soon tooketh away any chance that Walker could again direct. She died in 1991 with Can't Stop the Music her only experience as a film director. Hollywood be damned, yet again.

--- Gail Gimlet