Blogging By Cinema-light: Now I've Seen Everything Dep't : Bob Fosse

"It's Show-Time, Folks!"

Robert Louis Fosse was born June 23, 1927 in Chicago, Illinois and began dancing professionally—as one of "The Riff Brothers"—at age 13. By 15, he was choreographing in a style influenced by his experiences dancing in vaudeville and burlesque halls. After his service in WWII, he moved to New York, where, with an aim to become "the next Fred Astaire," and appearing on Broadway in the show "Call Me Mister" and his dancing—along with then-wife Mary Ann Niles, got him appearances on "Your Hit Parade" and (after being noticed by the team of Martin and Lewis) "The Colgate Comedy Hour." In 1953, M-G-M put him under contract—he can be seen in their films Give a Girl a Break, The Affairs of Dobie Gillis, and Kiss Me Kate. His work in films attracted Broadway, and he began to choreograph musicals, starting in 1954 with "The Pajama Game," and "My Sister Eileen" and "Damn Yankees" (where he met dancer-wife-muse Gwen Verdon) in 1955.

He arranged the dance sequences for the film versions of Pajama... and ...Yankees (where he and Verdon danced on-camera). From there, Fosse directed his first Broadway show, "Redhead" (starring Verdon), choreographed "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" and directed "Little Me", then conceived and directed "Sweet Charity" in 1966, by the end of which he had won three Tony Awards for his choreography in twelve years.

That's a fairly meteoric rise in several businesses for anyone, but Fosse nimbly ascended the ranks, becoming his own brand on Broadway. And the more control he got, the more he gravitated to stories of people starting low and pursuing their ambitions. That cemented when he started directing films where he started making films about those "suffering from an external locus of their identity"—in other words, show people. And their desperation, need, and craving for expression and attention.

They just want to be loved. Is that so wrong?

Sweet Charity (1969) Fosse got the directing gig for Sweet Charity because Shirley MacLaine wanted to star in the film version (as she told Universal exec Lew Wasserman) and she wanted Fosse—and only Fosse—to direct it, over the studio chief's objections that he'd never directed a film before. It was a huge risk, a big gamble, but MacLaine knew Fosse and knew what his capabilities were. He had, after all, conceived the musical, and directed and choreographed it for Broadway. No one else knew the material better.

Take it off the table that "Sweet Charity" (book by Neil Simon) is another example of Broadway's absurd way of making an "all-singing/all-dancing" celebration of a dispiriting subject, adapted from Federico Fellini's The Nights of Cabiria, one of the director's favorite films (mine, too). Take away that it's Fosse's first film-directing gig after years of choreographing for Broadway and for movies—actually the "zoom-out-of-focus/zoom-into-focus" gambit exposes a new director trying to draw attention...or just succumbing to currently "hip" movie trends—and you get a film that is at once dated and timeless.

How does one explain that? Look at the dance numbers (I have the most famous and the one that would determine his directing style for the rest of his films below). There's a power there. A showman's brio, maximizing the music and the performers' relationship to it. At the same time, the wardrobe and make-up owe a lot to Fellini—even though the story is transported from Rome to New York. So, yes, there's a lot of "flower-power" to Sweet Charity, but, at the same time, he's vaulting over what anybody else was doing at the time. At times, the movie feels very loose, but snaps into a rigor for the dance sequences that's far beyond being "with it."

And he sticks the landing...keeping true to Fellini.

There is some clumsiness in Fosse's direction of the non-musical sequences in Sweet Charity, but one couldn't deny the brilliance of his deconstruction of songs like "Hey, Big Spender" and doing it with a flair, with brio, and with sheer audacity. It's like he was making a new version of musicals...which, ultimately, he was probably doing.

Cabaret (1972) His first film didn't do well at the box office, but his second film won him the Best Director Oscar (over Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather).

Once Fosse was hired, he decided to re-think the Broadway version of the musical, deciding to hew it a bit closer to the Christopher Isherwood stories on which the show was based, and worked with hired scripter Jay Presson Allen, and then Hugh Wheeler (credited as "research consultant"). Characters and story-lines were scrapped, and, instead, the film ends up concentrating on the high-lights and low-lights in the relationships of Isherwood stand-in writer Brian Roberts (Michael York) and "Kit Kat Club" performer Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) as well as acquaintance Fritz Wendel (Fritz Wepper), a Jew passing as Protestant, and his pursuit of a Jewish heiress Natalia Landauer (Marisa Berenson). Songs were tossed and new ones—"Money" and "Mein Herr"—were written by original song-writers Kander and Ebb, but for commentary as opposed to telling the story as the original music did. Fosse also chose to include an previously written Kander-Ebb song, "Maybe This Time", as well.

The film's musical numbers—with one significant, arresting exception—all take place at The Kit Kat Club and reflect the not-so-"divine decadence" of the Weimar Republic.

Fosse also doubled down on that dynamic directing/editing style (far different from the full-frame M-G-M musicals) that snapped with the beat. Fosse leaned into the rise of Nazi Germany during the film's period, hiding it behind every corner, down every alley, and during every festival, so that between the two reflected images that begin and end the film, we notice the swastika's pop up.

The one valid criticism of the film is that Minnelli is "too good a performer for Sally Bowles" (actors playing the part now grouse that she ruined the part for everybody else), but still won the Best Actress Oscar with the movie's MC (Joel Grey) winning Best Supporting Actor (over most of the cast of The Godfather).

Cabaret was voted into the National Film Registry in 1995.

Lenny (1974) One would think that Lenny was another Fosse Broadway de-construction, but Julian Barry's play about influential and controversial comedian Lenny Bruce was originally a screenplay commissioned by Columbia Pictures in 1969. And then it became a Broadway play starring Cliff Gorman (hold that thought...it'll become important later)

Starring Dustin Hoffman in the title role, and filmed entirely in black and white, the film is structured, not unlike Citizen Kane, around three interviews with Bruce intimates: His wife, stripper Honey Harlow (Valerie Perrine), his agent Artie Silver (Stanley Beck), and his mother Sally Marr (Jan Miner)—the muffled off-screen voice of the interviewer is Fosse's. As the interviews progress, they lead into details of Bruce's life that are then re-created and interspersed with Hoffman's intricate recreations of Bruce's act, which were more often spontaneous riffing than the standard "stand-up" routine.

Fosse shows the rise and gradual disintegration of the man, raised by another vaudevillian who also started in strip-joints, and gradually learning "the ropes" only to find himself hanging himself with them. Ambition and a compulsive need to "make it" and have what he wants fuels his every move on-stage and off, including marrying his "shiksa goddess" Honey, working "blue" and then working "political," flaunting conventional show-business wisdom and the obscenity laws, then giving into extra-marital affairs, drugs, and a pervasive persecution complex that ultimately doesn't "play" on-stage. Fosse must have seen a kindred spirit. But, what he could not see was that Bruce's self-destructive arc might ultimately happen to him.

“If you want to make something good, like a movie, it matters more than your health. So you trade a couple of years.”

In 1975, after extensively editing and promoting Lenny, Fosse began work directing a new stage musical for Gwen Verdon—"Chicago." During the first table reading, Fosse, whose family had a history of heart problems, complained of chest pains, numbness in his arm, and was whisked to a nearby hospital, where he suffered a heart attack and was scheduled for open-heart surgery. "Chicago" would be postponed.

Eventually, he recovered enough to start working again. And for his next film-project, rather than making a movie about reflections of himself, he decided to take a hard look in the mirror, and started to make a movie about what stared back at him.

I give my relationships two weeks now. Sometimes I bring it in ahead of deadline.

All That Jazz (1979) Fosse's heart attack was a profound enough experience for the director that he decided to make a Fellini-esque film about it (again, Fellini being his favorite director).

Featuring Roy Scheider (cast against type with amazing results) as a not-very-disguised version of Fosse himself named Joe Gideon, he starts his every working day with a cassette of Vivaldi's Concert in G, a long shower, punctuated by a couple rounds of Visine, chased by a couple Alka-Seltzers, a couple dexedrines, a couple of unfiltered smokes, and a preparatory "It's Showtime, folks!" then goes off to simultaneously edit a movie called "The Standup" (starring ...Cliff Gorman—you can stop holding that thought now) and staging a new Broadway musical in prep "NY/LA" starring his ex-wife (Leland Palmer). He's also trying to spend some quality time with his aspiring dancer daughter (Erzsebet Foldi), and his girlfriend (Ann Reinking, who—bless her!—had to audition to play a character based on herself) and the occasional aspiring dancer/actress/young thing who briefly enters his busy orbit...and his bed.

The pace is crippling, and the stress is unbearable, not to mention managing the creative differences, the blocks of creativity, the management subterfuge, and the twin addictions of tobacco and alcohol. We see Gideon casting dancers, whittling down 20 from an open call for hundreds, suffering through song presentations, then being blocked about how to make it "work"—his solution is to take the bouncy tune and turn it into an erotic ballet ("Well, there goes the family audience" grouses one of the film's producers). When he's not in the theater, he's in the editing room trying to find a better way to cut "The Standup" over the constant kvetching of the film's producer. All the time he's running an internal monologue with "Angelique" (Jessica Lange), the movie's white-shrouded representation of Death, disappointing all the women in his life, except her.

Once Gideon's "killer" schedule is gone over, All That Jazz sinks its fangs into the story of his failing health, centering around a sequence in "The Standup" that the director is having a particularly hard time perfecting in the editing stage, centering on Gorman's comic riffing on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and her "five stages of grief" ("without having ever died herself"). For the record, they are:
1) Denial
2) Anger
3) Bargaining
4) Depression
5) Acceptance

It's not that he doesn't know he's pushing himself too hard. His smoker's cough keeps getting worse, he's increasingly checking his blood pressure, and when his arm goes numb after a particularly annoying table reading of the play, he's rushed to the emergency room and told he has severe angina and relegated to bed-rest, and taking it easy, something that he resists by smoking, drinking, having sex...in his hospital bed. Then, a negative review of "The Standup" sends him over the edge and he has a coronary. He's rushed into bypass surgery, which he hallucinates as a musical number.

In an interview, Fosse recalled: “I was in the hospital myself, and had been ill—I had a heart attack and open-heart surgery, and I became very interested in death and hospital behavior, and the meaning of life and death and those kinds of subjects.” Joe is on life-support and his visions become ever-more fantastic, imagining his ex, his girlfriend, and daughter beating him down in song for his reckless lifestyle and the effects it's had on them.

Finally, he tries to escape from the hospital, going through the five stages of death, the "Standup" routine echoing in his head, he has a heart attack, and accepting death, his final hallucination is of an extended musical number, an all-singing/all-dancing Götterdämmerung with fascinating arrhythmias flashing before his eyes, standing ovations and a spectacular final bow that is part third act curtain-closer and horror show. A literal show-stopper (“Joe Gideon...is a man who just never stops directing," explained Fosse). It's dark, but a brilliant conceit, both daring and crass, and one could accuse Fosse of poor taste if he wasn't the subject of this Ultimate Final Tour.

“Well, if you’re gonna go, that’s the way to go, I must say.”

And with one final cut, the music stops and the only thing we hear is the zipper as Gideon is sealed into a body-bag, while slowly the soundtrack sardonically fades up Ethel Merman's version of "There's No Business Like Show Business" as the movie fades to the inevitable black.

One can accuse anybody making an auto-biographical film of narcissism, but Fosse's All That Jazz is not only wisely self-aware, it is unforgiving—excoriating—while giving in to its self-celebratory roots. It is also Fosse's funniest movie, a premature Viking funeral one man threw for himself.

"Audacious" isn't a strong enough term.

Star 80 (1983) Oscar-winning writer Paddy Chayevsky, recommended the subject for his next film to Fosse, who dedicated it to him. It's a good fit, as Star 80 slots into Fosse's interest in characters who covet. Only this time, it's less the main character than everybody else.

The story surrounding the short career of Playboy-model-turned-actress Dorothy Stratten (played by Mariel Hemingway) and her murder by her estranged husband/manager Paul Snider (played by Eric Roberts) when she ascends beyond his small-time expertise and control is a tale of power struggles played out to a deranged, insane conclusion.

By all accounts, Dorothy Ruth Hoogstraten was a sweet small-town Coquitlan BC girl, who met her future husband, manager and murderer while she was 17 and working part-time at a local Dairy Queen while attending High School. Snider was 26 and a club-promoter and pimp for some of the local Vancouver "tarts." They began dating, and within a year Snider already had plans for how he could Dorothy's coat-tails to a better career for himself.

He coaxed her into a nude photo-shoot and sent the results to Playboy magazine, which, for its 25th Anniversary was having a contest called "The Great Playmate Hunt." Her mother had to sign the consent form as Dorothy was underage. She was chosen as a finalist and moved to Los Angeles in August, 1978. Snider moved there in October the same year.

Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner (played in the film by Cliff Robertson) saw potential in Hoogstraten to boost his magazine's (and his) reputation in Hollywood circles—Hefner's organization was seen as more of a playground for entertainment industry types than as something to do business with, and Hefner saw his new employee (name now shortened to Stratten) as an asset that could in-roads to movie and television deals—she was one of those rare playmates who could act. In a whirlwind two years, she made appearances on television, then movies, had been the magazine's centerfold and had been cast in Peter Bogdanovich's They All Laughed. Hefner had produced the director's previous film, Saint Jack, one of his few forays into Hollywood films (and how he got there is a long and litigious story). Before that happened, Snider had quickly married Stratten and inserted himself into any business situation, acting as manager, chauffeur, even acting coach, trying to maintain the controlling interest in his marriage and his meal ticket.

"The Male Gaze" eclipsing its subject.

By the time, filming on They All Laughed had ended, Stratten was living with Bogdanovich—this had previously occurred with Cybill Shepherd while making The Last Picture Show—and Stratten, her profile rising, was named Playboy's "Playmate of the Year." She was a big deal now. Snider was not, and seen as an impediment, and Stratten (through her lawyer) sent him a notice that she was separating from him, personally and professionally. Snider swung between moods where he thought he could win her back and where he would get revenge, hiring a private detective to follow her movements and, after borrowing a handgun, personally stalking Bogdanovich's house with the intention of shooting anyone appearing at the front entrance.

When Snider murdered her, she was barely 20.

The movie is seering, and one walks out of it, thinking that the movie is less about Dorothy Stratten, than it is about the men trying to control her—Snider, Hefner. and Bogdanovich (dubbed "Aram Nicholas" and played by Roger Rees). It paints a world of such rabid misogyny and exploitation that one can't help but think Hemingway's Stratten doesn't stand a chance in that world (this one, actually).

And Fosse takes it very seriously. Where his previous films have a sardonic edge and a mocking tone (especially with himself), Star 80 couldn't be more sober, despite the worlds it portrays. Once again, Fosse was looking in the rehearsal-hall mirror, but this time couldn't laugh at what he saw, with his own history of philandering and using his position of power to seduce (or, rather, persuade). He admitted in interviews that he could see Snider in himself, if he hadn't been a success in show business. The hustler, the wheedler, the guy who expects every win and obsesses over every loss. The bitter little narcissist.

When the film was released, it got mixed reviews, but, in the years since, after the lawsuits have settled and the #metoo movement turned a light on the cockroaches, its reputation has improved.

His next film was to be based on the life of Walter Winchell (another guy who got power and abused it), with a screenplay by Michael Herr, and with Robert De Niro cast to star.

However...

Bob Fosse died of a heart attack at the age of 60 on September 23, 1987, the night a revival of his "Sweet Charity" was opening. Reportedly, he collapsed in partner and estranged wife Gwen Verdon's arms while they were walking near the Willard Hotel.