Alan Light · CC BY 2.0

Allan Carr produced Grease (1978), which became the year's highest-grossing film, and brought La Cage aux Folles to Broadway in 1983, where it ran for 1,761 performances and won six Tony Awards including Best Musical. He had a gift for spectacle and for launching careers — Mark Hamill, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Steve Guttenberg among them — and pioneered the lavish movie premiere as a marketing tool. That gift failed him badly at the 1989 Academy Awards, which he produced: an opening number built around Snow White drew an open letter of condemnation from seventeen Hollywood figures, and he never worked on a film or television project again.