Allan Carr was Hollywood’s premier party-thrower during the town’s most hedonistic era—the cocaine-addled, sexually indulgent 1970s. Hosting outrageous soirees with names like the Mick Jagger/Cycle Sluts Party and masterminding such lavishly themed opening nights as the Tommy /New York City subway premiere, it was Carr, an obese, caftan-wearing producer—the ultimate outsider—who first brought movie stars and rock stars, gays and straights, Old and New Hollywood together.

From the stunning success of Grease and La Cage aux Folles to the spectacular failure of the Village People’s Can’t Stop the Music , as a producer Carr’s was a rollercoaster of a career punctuated by major hits and phenomenal flops—none more disastrous than the Academy Awards show he produced featuring a tone-deaf Rob Lowe serenading Snow White, a fiasco that made Carr an outcast, and is still widely considered to be the worst Oscars ever.

Tracing Carr’s excess-laden rise and tragic fall—and sparing no one along the way— Party Animals provides a sizzling, candid, behind-the-scenes look at Hollywood’s most infamous period.