What Are Bruce Jenner and Al Pacino Doing in an Adam Sandler Movie?

A funny thing happened to Bruce Jenner on his way from being crowned the World’s Greatest Athlete at the 1976 Montreal Olympics to marrying Elvis Presley’s girlfriend Linda Thompson to becoming a member of “the Kardashian group” to making tabloid headlines in his transition into womanhood up to his recent involvement in a deadly chain-reaction pileup on the Pacific Coast Highway – he wanted to be an actor.

Born in Mount Kisco in Westchester County, New York, Bruce Jenner earned a football scholarship at Graceland College (now University) in Lamoni, Iowa, but a knee injury forced him off the gridiron, and he switched to the decathlon, a grueling test of every muscle in ten track and field disciplines. The title “World’s Greatest Athlete” has been awarded to the man who wins the Olympic decathlon, a tradition started by King Gustav V of Sweden when he told Jim Thorpe, “You, sir, are the world’s greatest athlete,” after Thorpe won the decathlon at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm.

Bruce Jenner finished in 10^th place in the decathlon in Munich at the 1972 Summer Olympics, games overshadowed by the murder of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches and a West German policeman by Palestinian terrorists. At the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, Jenner took the gold in the decathlon. At the 1972 Games, three major Olympic sports with a long history of American victories, including the decathlon, had been dominated by Soviet athletes, so winning back the decathlon made Jenner a national hero.

 

Bruce Jenner was the second sports spokesperson for
Wheaties, preceded by Bob Richards and followed by
Mary Lou Retton, Walter Payton, Chris Evert,
Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods.

In the 1970s, Olympic athletes were considered amateurs and were absolutely forbidden compensation for their positions as sports stars, but Jenner wanted to cash in on his newfound celebrity, and he hastily abandoned his amateur status, appearing on the Wheaties box and becoming the cereal’s official spokesperson. Jenner’s first wife, Chrystie Crownover, told The New York Times, “After all the work Bruce has put in, he’s entitled to make a few bucks.”

Writing for The Washington Post in 1977, Kenneth Turan (later a film critic for the Los Angeles Times) noted, “He simply is a real-life version of the American dream, fairly bursting with honest vitality, infectious health and cheerful good humor. Is it his fault that he’s direct, self-assured, sincere? The type of person we’d all like to be when we grow up?”

In 1977, the Kansas City Kings (now the Sacramento Kings) selected Jenner in the 140^th pick of the NBA draft, although he hadn’t played basketball since high school. Google searches of his roundball career lead nowhere.

Before giving the role to a daytime drama actor named Christopher Reeve, producers considered Jenner for 1978’s “Superman.” Jenner screen-tested in Rome, in tights and cape, and later recalled Marlon Brando (Superman’s father, Jor-El) praising his audition.

The first draft of the screenplay for "Can't Stop the Music"
was written by Bruce Vilanch, an in-demand gag writer for
the Oscars telecasts and a onetime familiar (albeit troll-like)
presence on the syndicated game show "Hollywood Squares."

Instead, Bruce Jenner was cast in 1980’s “Can’t Stop the Music,” a musical comedy supposedly depicting the origin of disco icons The Village People, starring Steve Guttenberg and Valerie Perrine, produced and co-scripted by Allan Carr, an over-the-top showman best known as the producer of the hit motion picture “Grease” (1978).

Early in his career, Carr worked behind the scenes at Playboy magazine and co-created the 1959 series “Playboy’s Penthouse,” which paved the way for Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Clubs. Carr produced the advertising campaign for “Saturday Night Fever” (1975). He later produced the movies “Grease 2” (1982) and “Where the Boys Are ’84,” as well as winning a Tony Award in 1984 for producing the hit Broadway musical “La Cage aux Folles.”

His flamboyant reputation was irreparably tarnished when he produced the 61^st Academy Awards in 1989, notorious for an embarrassing “Snow White” musical parody featuring Rob Lowe and actress Eileen Bowman, which resulted in a lawsuit by The Walt Disney Company. Carr was not invited back to produce the 62^nd Oscars broadcast.

When Carr (above) succumbed to liver cancer in 1999 at the age of 62, The New York Times recalled him as “a party-giver par excellence who favored ‘large-man’ caftans’ “ and “once feted Truman Capote in an abandoned Los Angeles jail.” A familiar face at Studio 54, the disco mecca in New York City from 1977 to 1981, Carr had his own disco at his Hollywood home.

One of the first serious journalistic takes on the disco phenomenon was a September 1973 article in Rolling Stone magazine by Vince Aletti, who subsequently wrote a weekly column about disco for the music trade magazine Record World. In 1974, New York City’s WPIX-FM premiered the first radio show devoted to disco programming.

Noted for their eye-catching stage costumes caricaturing masculine stereotypes – GI, construction hardhat, biker, cowboy, Native American, cop - The Village People formed in 1977. The name derived from New York’s Greenwich Village, at the time known for its large gay population. Noted for a string of dance hits including “YMCA,” “In the Navy,” and “Macho Man,” the group peaked in 1979. Original lead singer Victor Willis left at the end of an international tour in 1979, and a decline in the group’s popularity followed. The Village People’s last album of new material was released in 1985. After a two-year hiatus, they reunited in 1987.

In “Can’t Stop the Music,” Steve Guttenberg (a few years before true movie stardom in the “Police Academy” and “Cocoon” films) portrays a hyperactive songwriter-club DJ loosely inspired by Jacques Morali, the real-life creator of the Village People. Valerie Perrine (best known for her roles as porn star Montana Wildhack in “Slaughterhouse-Five,” Lenny Bruce’s stripper wife Honey in “Lenny,” and Lex Luthor’s buxom moll Miss Teschmacher in “Superman”) costars as Guttenberg’s supermodel roommate, and screen newcomer Bruce Jenner portrays an uptight lawyer.

 

Valerie Perrine and Bruce Jenner
meet cute in "Can't Stop the Music."

Perrine’s role was originally offered to Allan Carr’s “Grease” discovery, Olivia Newton-John, who turned it down to do “Xanadu,” a roller-disco fiasco featuring movie musical icon Gene Kelly. At one point in “Can’t Stop the Music,” Perrine admonishes the hung-up Jenner, “I don’t judge people, I accept them. There isn’t a person who doesn’t have certain peculiarities. As long as it doesn’t hurt anybody, it’s all right with me.” Which means, of course, that he’ll loosen his tie and fall in love with her while the world embraces The Village People.

 

The less said about Mr. Guttenberg's and Mr. Jenner's short shorts the better.

“Can’t Stop the Music” was directed by Nancy Walker, the daughter of a vaudevillian father, herself a veteran performer on stage, film, and television, best remembered as the sarcastic, hard-drinking maid to Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James in the ‘70s series “McMillan & Wife,” as Valerie Harper’s sarcastic Jewish mother on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” and as Rosie, the sarcastic diner waitress in Bounty paper towel commercials. Publicity for “Can’t Stop the Music” declared that Walker was the first woman to direct a multi-million-dollar musical and had been signed to a three-picture contract. Walker had directed episodes of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” its spinoff, “Rhoda,” and the ‘80s sitcom “Alice,” but “Can’t Stop the Music” would be her only feature film.

During production, tensions between Walker (above) and Valerie Perrine escalated to a level that Walker refused to be present during Perrine’ scenes, leaving the directing chores to the cinematographer. Reportedly, Allan Carr cast and personally directed the athletic male extras for the “YMCA” number, which managed to sneak full frontal male nudity into a PG-rated production.

Two of The Village People's biggest hits, "In the Navy" and "Macho Man,"
don't appear in the film, but Valerie Perrine wears a "Macho Man" T-shirt,
when she does wear something...This is a PG movie?

Half of the film’s $20 million budget (about $57.5 million in 2015 economy) was lavished on an outlandish publicity campaign, which included a one-hour television special titled “Magic Night,” directed by Nancy Walker and featuring Cher on roller skates, Playboy magazine mogul Hugh Hefner in pajamas, and The Village People performing “Ready for the ‘80s,” a song cut from the finished film.

 

Bruce Jenner and Cher eye each other's coiffure.

Producer Carr trumpeted the picture as “pure entertainment in the great MGM musical tradition” and boasted that Steve Guttenberg and Bruce Jenner would be “the Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford of the ‘80s.” On another occasion, he gushed that Guttenberg would be the “John Travolta of the ‘80s.”

Advertised as “The Movie Musical Event of the ‘80s,” “Can’t Stop the Music” was chosen by PBS “Sneak Previews” hosts Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel as one of their “Dogs of the Year,” while the film became the first winner of the Worst Picture Golden Raspberry Award. In fact, “Can’t Stop the Music,” along with the previously mentioned “Xanadu,” inspired John J. B. Wilson, a movie publicist and copywriter, to create the Razzies. Wilson later listed “Can’t Stop the Music” as one of “The 100 Most Enjoyable Bad Movies Ever Made” in his 2005 book The Official Razzie Movie Guide.

A box office bomb, “Can’t Stop the Music” garnered a measly 10 percent of its $20 million budget. Bruce Jenner would joke that the film’s title should have been “Can’t Sell a Ticket.”

In a case of bad timing, “Can’t Stop the Music” premiered in 1980, on the cusp of the end of disco and the dawn of the AIDS epidemic. Already by the late 1970s, a fervent anti-disco movement was underway. Slogans such as “Disco sucks “ and “Death to Disco” became common, while rock musicians like Rod Stewart and David Bowie, who dragged disco beats into their songs, were maligned as sellouts.

“The Day Disco Died,” also known as “Disco Demolition Night,” occurred July 12, 1979 (a year before the release of “Can’t Stop the Music”), when an MLB-sanctioned anti-disco demonstration at a break in a Chicago White Sox double-header at Comiskey Park erupted into a riot, resulting in enough destruction to force the Sox into forfeiting the second game to the Detroit Tigers, who had won the first game.

Aware of the disco backlash, Allan Carr had changed his film’s original title, “Discoland” to “Can’t Stop the Music.”

 

Bruce Jenner meets the real Grambling's "White Tiger," Jim Gregory.

Unscathed by his inauspicious big screen debut, Bruce Jenner starred in the 1981 made-for-television film “Grambling’s White Tiger,” based on the true story of Jim Gregory, the first white quarterback at Louisiana’s Grambling State University, a traditionally black college, in 1962. Produced by Jenner’s newly formed production company and directed by Georg Stanford Brown (who costarred in the ‘70s cop series “The Rookies”), the TV movie featured Harry Belafonte as Grambling’s venerated coach, Eddie Robinson, with Dennis Haysbert (Allstate’s “Good Hands” spokesperson) as James “Shack” Harris and “Star Trek: The Next Generation’s” LeVar Burton as Charles “Tank” Smith.

It was also in 1981 that Bruce Jenner played motorcycle cop Steve McLeish on a half dozen episodes of the popular series “CHiPs” (above), when hotheaded prima donna Erik Estrada took a hiatus over a contract dispute with the network.

 

Lou Ferrigno and Bruce Jenner guest-star on "The Fall Guy," with Lee Majors.

Jenner appeared on “The Fall Guy,” “Murder, She Wrote,” and “The Love Boat,” but when the producers of “Married…With Children” approached him for a cameo, he refused after noticing that the script poked fun at him for being known for everything except the Olympics.

 

Bruce Jenner, Hulk Hogan, and Tim Rossovich pose -
uncomfortably - with the cast of "The Love Boat."

In the 1980s, Jenner also exhibited a passion for racing, enjoying a degree of success in the IMSA (International Motor Sports Association) Camel GT Series (below), while his interest in acting seemingly took a back seat.

In his personal life, Bruce Jenner divorced Chrystie Crownover in 1981. They had a son, Burt, and a daughter, Cassandra. In 1982, Jenner married starlet Linda Thompson, best known as Elvis Presley’s longtime girlfriend (below). The wedding took place at Allan Carr’s Oahu home. They had two sons, Brandon and Brody, but were divorced in 1984. That same year, Jenner had a nose job and partial facelift, “a ‘botched’ procedure,” according to People, “that took a toll on the athlete’s self-esteem.”

Bruce Jenner met Kris Kardashian in 1990, at a point in his life when, as he later told People, “I was drifiting. I had worked really hard and didn’t have much to show for it.” He married her in 1991, after her divorce from attorney Robert Kardashian (renowned as one of the so-called “Dream Team” of lawyers defending O.J. Simpson in his 1995 murder trial).

Immediately, Kris Jenner (above) took charge of her new husband’s faded career. George Wallach, Bruce’s sports agent and manager since the Olympics, as well as his partner in Jenner’s film production company, was unceremoniously dismissed. “There wasn’t a place for me anymore,” Wallach commented. “ I wasn’t happy about it.” Wallach believed that Jenner gravitated toward take-charge women. “He allowed that to happen,” Wallach said. “Maybe it needed to happen.”

Emily Yahr, of The Washington Post, called the Kardashians "America's most
oversharing celebrity family." She noted that Bruce Jenner "is largely a supporting
player on the show...the weary, eye-rolling dad overshadowed by his preening...
wife, Kris, the self-proclaimed 'momager,' and their very camera-friendly kids."

In the fall of 2007, the reality television series “Keeping Up with the Karadashians” premiered on the E! network. The program focused on Kris’ children, Kim, Kourtney, Khloe, and Rob, as well as Kris herself and Bruce, their daughters Kendall and Kylie, and Bruce’s sons Brandon and Brody. On a 2009 episode of the show, Bruce Jenner's face went under the knife a second time to correct the first mistakes. “Despite his family’s approval,” People reported, “Jenner faced plenty of media scrutiny for his changing appearance, even feuding with Jimmy Fallon over the talk show host’s harsh jokes about his transformation.”

Jimmy Fallon had a notorious run-in with Jenner at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. Admitting he acted like “a scared little girl” when he caught sight of the former Olympian, Fallon pleaded with his assistant to veer off in the opposite direction to avoid a confrontation. However, in the network commissary, Jenner suddenly leaned into Fallon and brusquely said, “Stop saying shit about my face!” and promptly walked away.

The following summer, Jenner made an embarrassingly awkward, eight-minute appearance on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” allegedly to mend fences. In an obviously forced cheery disposition, Jenner criticized the comedian for failing to apologize for all his “Bruce Jenner is nuts” jokes but insisted that, as a member of “the Kardashian group,” he was immune to mockery. Saying, “Two can play that game,” Jenner proceeded to display a series of dorky photographs of Fallon (below). When the gold medalist blurted, “I guarantee, Mr. Fallon, that my ass in a good pair of running shorts looks a hell of a lot better than your ass,” Entertainment Weekly was prompted to report, “Fallon deserves a lot of credit for playing along…and only shooting a handful of ‘Is this guy for real right now?’ looks to the camera.”

A year before that encounter with Jimmy Fallon at the London Olympics, Bruce Jenner made a brief appearance in 2011’s “Jack and Jill,” in which Adam Sandler plays both an advertising executive and his annoying twin sister, with whom Al Pacino, portraying himself (in what critic Leonard Maltin called "one of the most ridiculous and oddly entertaining roles of his career"), falls in love. One reviewer rightfully wondered, “What is Al Pacino doing in an Adam Sandler comedy?”

Like the six previous collaborations between Sandler and actor-turned-director Dennis Dugan (they reteamed for the eighth time in 2013’s “Grown Ups 2”), “Jack and Jill” bears the comedian’s familiar blend of family-friendly sweetness and moronic raunch. The film featured fleeting cameos by Johnny Depp, Drew Carey, Dana Carvey, Regis Philbin, Shaquille O’Neal, Dan Patrick, John McEnroe, and Jenner.

Bruce and Kris Jenner announced their separation in October of 2013, although they had actually split a year earlier. (Finalized in September 2014, their divorce won’t be official until March 23, 2015.) By February 2014, Jenner, according to People, was “sporting a new look, one that’s raising eyebrows again…growing his hair long, manicuring his nails, and, most controversially, he has undergone a tracheal shave, flattening his Adam’s apple.” (An unnamed Jenner “source” claimed, “He always hated his Adam’s apple.”)

In 2014, an unsettlingly bizarre-looking Bruce Jenner popped up in a sophomoric comedy called “The Hungover Games,” ostensibly a spoof of “The Hangover” and “The Hunger Games” film franchises, with parodies of “Ted,” “The Lone Ranger,” “Django Unchained,” “The Human Centipede,” and countless other popular movies tossed into the mishmash. Armed with scattershot toilet jokes and scenes of gratuitous nudity, filmmaker Josh Stolberg trespasses into comedic territory usually exploited by the director-screenwriter team of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, whose grab bag of screen send-ups includes “Date Movie,” “Epic Movie,” “Disaster Movie,” “Meet the Spartans,” and “The Starving Games,” most of which featured former “Baywatch” beauty and ex-Mrs. Dennis Rodman, Carmen Electra.

 

Former NFL wide receiver Hank Baskett joins Bruce Jenner
in a scene from "The Hungover Games."

In a February 4, 2015, article in The Washington Post titled “The Forgotten History of Bruce Jenner and How He Ended Up Here,” writer Emily Yahr recounted a day in 1977 when Jenner met his friend, Sports Illustrated writer Barry McDermott, to play tennis, not at a private club, but in Central Park. Yahr emphasized, “Privacy was never his priority,” but it wasn’t a publicity stunt. According to McDermott, “It was more of a ‘Let’s hang out with the people instead of the elitists.’ “ Vince Stryker, a decathlete himself and Jenner’s training partner in the ‘70s, recalled, “Bruce was like a big kid. He just wanted to have fun and enjoy life. He liked company…he was a really happy-go-lucky guy.”

Yahr wrote, “Four decades later, Jenner is still hanging out with the people…But now the buff heartthrob of America’s disco era is poised again to be the center of attention, in a way very few fans could have imagined in 1976.”

In late January 2015, a “source close to the family” confirmed to People magazine, “Bruce is transitioning to a woman. He’s finally happy and his family is accepting of what he’s doing. He’s in such a great space.” The 65-year-old Olympian was reportedly filming his transition as part of a future documentary series. The Jenner “insider” said, “Instead of completely shocking everyone, his changes have been subtle, and his family has had the chance to slowly get used to his new looks and life.” His children’s concern “seems to be Bruce’s happiness…This is his story and they want him to tell the world the way he wants. They really want to empower him to tell his story so that hopefully he can help other people, too. That’s his goal.”

 

Onetime friend George Wallach said, "I think he'll do what
he feels what his heart is telling him..."

On February 7 of this year, Bruce Jenner was involved in a chain-reaction auto accident on the Pacific Coast Highway that ended tragically when the Lexus he rear-ended was struck head-on by a Hummer, killing the driver of the Lexus. After passing a field sobriety test, Jenner agreed to a blood test at a hospital, where he was asked if he was taking any medication. He reportedly confirmed to medical staff that he was taking hormones to enlarge his breasts. An anonymous source said Jenner wanted to look more feminine before reassignment surgery.

In light of Jenner’s plans to document his transition, Danielle Moodie-Mills, an LGBT policy and racial justice adviser at the Center for American progress, stated, “If this show documents the emotional and physical impact of his transition…in a very thoughtful and sensitive way that is more educational as opposed to sensational, then it could have a tremendous impact.” She warned, “Going through this type of transition is not something to use as a gimmick to raise your profile and increase your brand and ratings.”

 

Before the transition, Tur was known as "Chopper Bob." Zoey commented,
"There's diversity in nature, why not the media?"

Zoey Tur, billed by the syndicated news magazine series “Inside Edition” as “America’s first transgender television reporter,” claimed the manner in which Jenner has announced his transition is “terrible” and hurts the transgender community. As Robert Tur, the helicopter pilot was famed for covering the beating of white truck driver Reginald Denny during the LA Riots on April 29, 1992, and the notorious slow-speed chase of O.J. Simpson’s white van in 1994.

Describing Jenner as “a national joke,” Tur, who underwent sexual reassignment surgery in June 2014 after 14 months of hormone replacement, said the story “looks like part of the Karadashian train wreck."

Transgender advocate Janet Mock, who came out publicly as a trans woman in 2001, believes Jenner is helping educate America, a process facilitated by the Amazon Studios series “Transparent,” starring Golden Globe Award winner Jeffrey Tambor as Maura.

Bruce Jenner is not, of course, the first celebrity scrutinized by the media as a transgender, nor, obviously, will he be the last. An early, highly publicized transition occurred when ophthalmologist Richard Raskind underwent sex reassignment surgery in 1975 to become renowned tennis pro Renée Richards. Her 1983 autobiography, Second Serve, was adapted as a made-for-television film in 1985, featuring a Golden Globe Award-nominated performance by Vanessa Redgrave.

(Left) Chastity Bono; (right) Chaz Bono

Chaz Bono, paired with professional ballroom dancer Lacey Schwimmer, competed on the 13^th season of “Dancing with the Stars” in 2011, the first time an openly transgender man was featured on a major network program for something other than being transgender. Born Chastity Bono, the only child of entertainers Sonny and Cher, he underwent a female-to-male transition between 2008 and 2010, and in May 2010, he legally changed his gender and name.

 

Alexis Arquette is a fourth-generation member of a show business dynasty, which includes a vaudevillian great grandfather, grandfather Cliff Arquette - a comedian better known as Charley Weaver - and father Lewis Arquette, a character actor and longtime manager of The Second City Theater in Chicago. The 2007 film “Alexis Arquette: She’s My Brother” documented her sex reassignment surgery.

(Left to right) siblings David Arquette, Rosanna Arquette, Alexis Arquette,
Richmond Arquette, Patricia Arquette

On a recent “The Martha Vieira Show,” actress Patricia Arquette, who won Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards for her supporting role in “Boyhood,” said, “I feel like Alexis, my sister, has taught me so much about love and acceptance. It’s a very difficult things to be a transgender, especially 20 years ago when Alexis started talking about it.”

Asked about Bruce Jenner, Patricia thinks his public transformation will do a lot for those struggling with identity issues. She said, “You have to be so brave to live this truth of who you are…(Jenner’s) fighting a fight for a lot of kids that are being kicked out of their own homes. Society turns their back on these kids. It’s really brutal.”

“He has come out to those closest to him,” a family source told People. “He’s so happy and excited. He gets to lay down a huge bag of bricks. He’s been through a dark period and is coming out on the other side.”