HOSTS WITH THE MOST
HOSTING the Academy Awards, as Jon Stewart is about to find out, is at once exhilarating, terrifying, rewarding and headache-inducing.
It’s one of the most high-profile jobs a comic can land. But it’s also a thankless gig in front of a distracted, nervous audience, and the truth is the host has very little control over a very long evening.
Stewart will become the 27th person to handle the duties solo. If he’s really good and more than a little lucky, he may just pull off a performance -- or at least a moment or two -- that measures up to the classics on this list.
1. In the soup
In the days leading up to the 64th Oscar show in 1992, Billy Crystal was so sick that he couldn’t come to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to rehearse.
Contingency plans were useless -- after all, this isn’t a role that has an understudy -- but bed rest and infusions of his wife’s chicken soup apparently worked wonders, because Crystal recovered enough to have his finest night as Oscar host.
He came onstage strapped to a cart, a la Hannibal Lecter from “The Silence of the Lambs,” and delivered one of the best of his song medleys. Then he took Jack Palance’s feverish acceptance speech, complete with its one-armed push-ups, and turned it into a memorable running gag. According to Crystal, Palance ... “is backstage on the StairMaster” ... “just bungee-jumped off the Hollywood sign” ... “has just won the New York primary” ... and finally, “will be hosting the [Oscars] next year.”
To top it off, Crystal brought the house down with a genuine ad-lib when 100-year-old Hal Roach, who was supposed to stand and bow but not speak, suddenly launched into an unmiked, inaudible speech. “I think that’s fitting,” he said, “because Mr. Roach started in silent films.”
2. Splet decisions
Alan Splet was simply a sound editor who couldn’t make it to the Oscars, but Johnny Carson turned the man into a household name in 1980. “It always happens,” said Carson when the winner was absent. “First George C. Scott doesn’t show, then Marlon Brando, and now Alan Splet.”
Understand, jokes like this did not necessarily go over well inside the academy, whose non-acting branches can be sensitive about punch lines predicated on the anonymity of their members.
Still, Carson kept it up. Throughout the show, he gave Splet updates -- first saying the honoree had missed his offramp and was “somewhere in Ensenada,” and later adding, “He’s had trouble with his carburetor outside of Barstow.”
3. Martin the mediator
As Michael Moore raged, “We live in fictitious times!” from the stage of the Kodak Theatre in 2003, the audience grew restless. Scattered boos, a rarity on any Oscar telecast, were audible in the auditorium, while backstage, a few of the normally quiet union stagehands got vocal: a shouted obscenity here, a cry of “Get him off!” there.
Standing stage right, writer Bruce Vilanch looked at the angry stagehands and quickly made a beeline for the far side of the stage. Host Steve Martin was sitting there in a small booth with members of his writing team who’d also heard the shouts -- so during the commercial break, the writers quickly crafted a new gag.
Ten minutes later, Martin appeared onstage. “It was so sweet backstage, you should see it,” he said with a smile. “The Teamsters are helping Michael Moore into the trunk of his limo.”
4. Jerry’s other telethon
It was a mess, but Jerry Lewis deserves some kind of medal for trying to manage the free-for-all that was the ending of the Oscar show in 1959. As the show went into its final song, an all-star rendition of “There’s No Business Like Show Business” led by Mitzi Gaynor, producer Jerry Wald told Lewis they still had 20 minutes of airtime to fill.
(Yes, things like that happened at the Oscars 40-odd years ago.)
For the next 10 minutes, Lewis pulled out all the stops. He told jokes, he conducted the orchestra, he danced, he played the trumpet, he offered to show Three Stooges shorts “to cheer up the losers,” he even had an impromptu reunion with estranged partner Dean Martin.
Finally, NBC mercifully took the show off the air, and Lewis was able to give it a rest.
5. Model behavior
The target was too obvious not to take a shot, so early in her monologue in 1996, Whoopi Goldberg turned her attention to “Showgirls,” director Paul Verhoeven’s famously awful ode to strippers, dancers and assorted Vegas lowlifes. “I haven’t seen that many poles mistreated since World War II,” she said.
A few minutes later, the show lurched forward with its first award, costume design, in which the nominated attire was showcased by a bevy of pouty supermodels sucking on lollipops and striding down a faux runway.
The number was silly, awkward and begging to be deflated -- which Goldberg promptly did the next time she took the stage. “They’re getting 10 grand an hour,” she said of the supermodels, “still they look [ticked] off.”
The show was the best of Goldberg’s four appearances as host, and she knew she was clicking. “She was in a Zen state that night,” says stage manager Dency Nelson. “I was in the wings, and it was almost like she was floating a couple of times when she came off the stage.”
6. Monkey business
No, the “Uma, Oprah” bit didn’t really work. And the stupid pet trick, in the context of the Academy Awards, was ... well, stupid. But David Letterman had a few nice moments when he hosted the 67th Oscar show in 1995.
Foremost among them, perhaps, was the film he made about the line that Letterman delivered in his pal Chris Elliott’s big-screen flop “Cabin Boy”: “Would you like to buy a monkey?”
Insisting that he’d won the role after dozens of other actors had read for it, Letterman unveiled what he said was a film of those other auditions. Jack Lemmon played it straight, Madonna cried, Albert Brooks whined that he’d really rather play the monkey, and Rosie O’Donnell gave it her best New York attitude: “You’re buyin’ the [bleep]ing monkey!”
Unfortunately, when it was over, Letterman went back to the “Uma, Oprah” stuff.
7. Hope slings eternal
In a way, it was his signature line. “Welcome to the Academy Awards,” 18-time Oscar host Bob Hope announced as he took the stage in 1968. “Or, as it’s known at my house, Passover.”
Hope used variations on the line several times. One year it was “
The line contained some truth, because Hope had never been nominated for a competitive Oscar. Still, the academy gave its most frequent emcee five special awards over the years, including an honorary Oscar statuette and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
But the Passover joke always worked anyway.
8. The wins of war
With the war in Iraq having started only days earlier, the 75th Oscar show was a difficult one. Some presenters backed out, others balked, and as early as the morning of the show, some ABC execs lobbied for a postponement.
But the show went on, albeit without any crowds of press or fans along the red carpet. It fell to host Steve Martin to find the right tone for the evening, to recognize the unusual circumstances and then move on.
“Well,” he said, gesturing around the Kodak Theatre, and an elaborate, million-dollar set designed to salute classic Hollywood, “I’m glad they cut back on all the glitz.”
He paused. “By the way, the proceeds from tonight’s telecast -- and I think this is so great -- will be divvied up between huge corporations.” The audience laughed, the room relaxed, and the show began to move.
Steve Pond covers the Academy Awards daily in his Oscar Beat blog for TheEnvelope.com