At the 1989 Academy Awards ceremony, the show opened with a 15-minute production featuring Snow White, Rob Lowe, and Merv Griffin singing and dancing along with disembodied stars and tables. It was such a disaster that its producer, Allan Carr, never worked in Hollywood again, and Disney sued the Academy. Twenty-four years later, actress Eileen Bowman talks about what should have been her big break, but instead became a Hollywood joke.
As a costume-clad Bowman made her way through the Shrine Auditorium, chirping a high-pitched take on "I Only Have Eyes for You" and greeting such mortified stars in the audience as Tom Hanks, Dustin Hoffman, Michelle Pfeiffer and Sigourney Weaver, it quickly became obvious that Carr had laid a dinosaur-size egg.
"She had a look on her face, if I remember correctly, of pain," Martin Landau tells THR. Nominated that year for best supporting actor for Tucker: The Man and His Dream, Landau, now 84, was one of the few who gave Bowman a warm reception. "It wasn't her fault," recalls Landau. "I empathized with her. Poor Snow White. She didn't have the dwarves to support her."
There's also a mercifully short video of the act's highlights. Link -via FilmDrunk
(Image credit: AP/Reed Saxon)
The worst part was her singing, to the tune of "Proud Mary," lines like "Used to have a job with Disney..." and it went down hill from there.