Bob’s ideas come from something within him that is not the everyday man,” Gwen Verdon told the New York Times in 1979. “The creative person is an absolute monster who tries to destroy Bob Fosse. His face changes. He gets ropey looking. His eyes sink into his head and it looks like a death mask. I’ve worked in insane asylums and the inmates don’t look as weird as Bob. He’s driven, jumpy, crazed and psyched up. Raw. He’s like those safecrackers in old movies who file their fingertips down to keep them sensitive.”
Sensitive fingertips is an accurate metaphor for All That Jazz, Bob Fosse’s twitching cinéma à clef. Times film critic Vincent Canby once heralded it as “an uproarious display of brilliance, nerve, dance, maudlin confessions, inside jokes, and, especially, ego,” while New York Magazine’s reviewer David Denby dismissed it as “a characteristic product of our confessional age. . . . It’s as if the film had been put together by an editing machine free-associating wildly on a psychoanalyst’s couch.”
Like it or hate it, All That Jazz was exactly what Fosse intended it to be: a haltingly autobiographic, expensive, studio-produced home movie about the travails of a sought-after Broadway and film director-choreographer named Joe Gideon who chases pills, liquor, and skirts. Between bouts of self-destruction and self-degradation, Gideon attempts to finish an elaborate new Broadway musical that sort of resembles Chicago in creative process, and a film that very much resembles Lenny in content. Then there are the three “leading ladies” in Gideon’s life vying for attention between his rehearsals and heart attacks: Audrey (Leland Palmer) and Michelle (Erzsebet Foldi), who in look and/or attitude bear uncanny likenesses to Gwen Verdon and Nicole Fosse; and Kate, who is played by Ann Reinking herself.
But was All That Jazz about Bob Fosse? Fosse vacillated wildly in admitting and denying that it was—though resemblances to Bob Fosse were not purely coincidental. “I’m afraid of saying, yes, there is a lot of me in Joe Gideon,” Fosse grudgingly confided to the New York Times, “because people have used the word ‘self-indulgent’ about the film. But critics are constantly saying that an artist should draw more from himself and use less of others. This is what I’ve done. So why do I get this reaction? It frightens me. That is why I keep disclaiming.”
While Fosse was recuperating from his multiple heart attacks in New York Hospital in 1975, he read Hilma Wolitzer’s novel Ending, about a woman whose husband is dying of cancer, and bought the film rights. The book’s personal relevance to his own precarious existence hit a nerve. Fosse’s brush with death had, of course, been his own doing—popping Dexadrine, smoking five packs of cigarettes a day, and drinking Scotch chased down with Valium to offset the Dexadrine had finally taken its toll. Although Fosse had toyed with the idea of suicide as a young man, the birth of his daughter in the early Sixties gave him a new perspective on life. If his films and stage musicals continued to explore the dark side of humanity and freely associate sex and death, Nicole Fosse—a beautiful blonde, blue-eyed child who, by the late Seventies, had matured into an attractive and talented dancer, thanks to obligatory dance classes, North Carolina School of the Arts, and, of course, those genes—was her father’s escape from his own cynicism.
“It was hard for me to lecture her about pot when I was standing there holding a glass of booze,” Fosse admitted to Life in 1979. “I’m saying, ‘You know it’s bad for you, better not smoke that stuff.’ And I’ve got the worst drug in the world in my hand. The worst.”
The do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do routine Fosse used to warn Nicole may well have sounded half-hearted; by 1979, only four years after his near-fatal heart attack, he had already regressed to former bad habits. “When I thought I was going to die,” he told Life, “I made a lot of resolutions. I promised, ‘I’ll be a good boy. I’ll cut out smoking. I won’t drink so much. I’ll try to eat better, think of the other person’s side of a situation. I won’t be selfish.’ That lasted for about four months. I’m not very good at keeping promises—even to God.”
And so he made All That Jazz, Fosse’s reminder to himself that life is not a dress rehearsal. With his friend Robert Alan Arthur (who died midway through production), he wrote a script that, in tone, may bear passing comparison to the confessional films of Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, and Woody Allen, but in style is distinctly Fosse. In fact, rather than trying to copy the work of these three contemporaries—directors he admired greatly—he claimed the greatest visual influence on All That Jazz was John Huston’s Moulin Rouge, one of the first film musicals to break away from full-body shots and capture glimpses of legs or fractured sequences of a dance. The jagged, almost abstract, presentation of movement, Fosse believed, conveyed the energy and vitality of dance far more effectively than head-on shots of bodies whose choreography was so literal as to be predictable.
“Sometimes the razzle dazzle doesn’t mean very much,” Fosse once said to the New York Times; but in All That Jazz, razzle dazzle takes on a weightier role. He told the Times, “I wanted music and dancing in it. I wanted to try and move people in different directions. I wanted to show the fear and anxiety a person goes through in the hospital, and the stress of someone under business pressure. Many people are under this stress. They are trying to do something with their lives but instead become self-destructive with pills, alcohol or in psychological ways.”
As cinema, All That Jazz has often been compared to Fellini’s 8½ and Woody Allen’s Love and Death. Like All That Jazz, 8½ is Fellini’s summation of his life and work. Fosse even used Giuseppe Rotunno, Fellini’s director of photography, to film the picture. And Allen’s Love and Death, like Fosse’s film, finds obvious connections between falling in love and dying. But All That Jazz might be better contrasted to the many ballets in which the mythic figure of the ballerina is seen as a mystery to be solved, the fantasy of the soul. As poorly as Joe Gideon treats women, the movie is most sympathetic to them. Gideon’s ex-wife Audrey becomes his confidante, the only one who will tell him the truth about how good (or bad) his last dance really is. Michelle, his pubescent daughter, confronts him with his ineptitude as a father in a loving, forgiving way that perhaps her utter devotion to him is the only thing stronger than his guilt from putting work over family. His girlfriend Katie has an equally incisive insight into Gideon. Part of her power over him stems from her mesmerizing gifts as a dancer. As Ann Reinking, who plays Katie, put it in a 1979 Playboy interview: “He’s in love with talent.”
The most disturbing figure in the film is Angelique, an ethereal blonde cloaked in a black hood and played by Jessica Lange. Cast as Fosse’s girlfriend at the time she was cast, Angelique is Gideon’s apotheosis, a death figure whose allure threatens to bring him closer and closer to relinquishing his own life. Like the Dark Angel in George Balanchine’s ballet Serenade, who covers the male dancer’s eyes and points over his shoulder to a direction impossible for him to follow, Angelique hopes to lead Gideon to a place he cannot ascertain—the afterlife. And to a hedonist/death-monger like Joe Gideon, the sexual appeal of Angelique is ultimately irresistible.
“Casting Jessica Lange as the Angel of Death comes from a personal fantasy,” Fosse told Playboy. “For me, many times, Death has been a beautiful woman. When you think something’s about to happen to you in a car or on an airplane, coming close to The End, this is a flash I’ll get—a woman dressed in various outfits, sometimes a nun’s habit, that whole hallucinatory thing. It’s like the Final Fuck.”
For Fosse and Lange, All That Jazz proved to be exactly that. However frequently Fosse may have committed indiscretions with his numerous wives and girlfriends, he could not condone the same treatment from them. When Lange began seeing American Ballet Theatre’s superstar dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1978, it was a double blow for Fosse; not only was his competition a younger, attractive man, he was also a ballet dancer.
“Jessica, well, I mean, she’s so damned smart,” Fosse told the Boston Globe’s Kevin Kelly. “After she made King Kong, she couldn’t get arrested [Fosse was fond of that expression]. They said she was just the usual dumb blonde, that she couldn’t act, all that stuff. Well, I wish I was dumb like Jessica Lange! When she and I were going together—there was a time when we saw each other a couple nights a week—I always had this feeling there was Someone Else. Had the feeling I wasn’t her Number One Man. And, see, I got this idea: I thought if I could just get her into the studio… get on my little dance shoes… strut around, then she’d just, y’know, fall.
“Well, I couldn’t figure out who these other people were she was seeing. Then I started hearing names like Misha. Misha this. Misha that.” She’d say it a lot. Misha. So I put it together, and, sure enough, found out that it was Baryshnikov. Here I had been inviting her to watch me dance! Then she finally said, “You at the studio, how about tonight?” I yelled, “Forget it!”
Casting his estranged girlfriends was only one indication of the film’s cinema verité quality. Fosse dancers, tech crew, friends, colleagues, even family appeared in All That Jazz. Longtime stage manager Phil Friedman played himself, as did Kathryn Doby, as Joe Gideon’s dance assistant. In leading or cameo roles, Leland Palmer, who played Fastrada in Pippin, was cast as Gideon’s estranged wife Audrey, and Ben Vereen cannibalized his own image as an obsequious, mugging nightclub singer named O’Connor Flood. Although Cliff Gorman, who starred as Lenny Bruce in the Broadway show, lost out to Dustin Hoffman in Fosse’s Lenny, Gorman played a Bruce look-alike in All That Jazz’s film-within-a-film, The Standup.
Alumni dancers Sandahl Bergman, Jennifer Narin-Smith, Vicki Fredericks, and Gene Foote either danced or assisted Fosse with his choreography. Jules Fisher, Fosse’s lighting designer and sometime-producer, played himself, as did music supervisor Stanley Lebowsky. One of Fosse’s favorite celebrity reporters and critics, Chris Chase, appeared as television movie critic Leslie Perry (who, using her “four-balloon rating system,” gave Gideon’s film The Standup “half a balloon”). Even Nicole Fosse, then sixteen, put in a brief appearance as a dancer stretching against a Coke vending machine. But Gwen Verdon was conspicuously absent.
“I think it’s a magnificent film,” Verdon said judiciously in a 1981 New York Times interview. “I think it has nothing to do with our life or his life. I guess the way I truly acted was not theatrically right for the story that Bob was telling.” Ann Reinking, who auditioned for the role of Katie along with several other actresses, also took exception to Fosse’s presentation of their relationship. “Bob had me dating other guys while he was in the hospital,” she told the Times in 1979. “I never did that.”
But Tony Walton, who won an Oscar as All That Jazz’s “fantasy designer,” says, “It was very precisely scripted, and much of the dialogue was based on interviews he had done with those of us he’d worked with. The events depicted in the movie actually occurred while we were rehearsing Chicago, when he had his heart attack. Everyone around him at that time was intensely interviewed and tape recorded. He made no secret about why he was doing the tapes. . . . It usually took about two years for me to recharge my batteries after working with Fosse. He was a very intense and demanding man.”
Others found the art-imitates-life film troubling. Kathryn Doby, who admits that “playing myself was the most logical thing for me to do,” also says that shooting the scene in which Audrey informs the cast of Gideon’s latest musical that he’d had a heart attack was “spooky, having already gone through it [in Chicago]. Stan Lebowsky, Phil [Friedman], and me . . . there was something eerie about all of us being in a movie about us. What makes an artist put his personal life on the screen?”
Sandahl Bergman was hired as the lead dancer in the explosive “Airotica” dance in the film after another woman previously cast in the role refused to shuck her bra at the number’s climax. Bergman was on vacation from Dancin’ when Fosse called her about his dilemma. “He was in a pinch and asked me to do this nude scene. I told him, ‘You know I trust you, Bobby, but I’m from Kansas. I’m not sure my mom and dad can handle it.’” But Fosse persuaded her and, after three days, Bergman made her film debut in the controversial number. Today she acknowledges the part has been a mixed blessing. “That movie changed my life, for better and for worse. Because of All That Jazz, I was immediately thought of as just another beautiful blonde dancer and a so-so actor. I’ve been trying for years now to live it down.” But the role also brought her instant attention, and shortly thereafter Bergman was starring opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in the first of his successful Conan films.
In another key supporting role, John Lithgow was cast as Lucus Sergeant, whom producers of the musical in All That Jazz ask to replace Gideon after his heart attack. Sidney Lumet was originally to have played the part, but Fosse lost the esteemed director when All That Jazz went over schedule and conflicted with Lumet’s own filming schedule. Lithgow, who says he “auditioned [his] heart out” for the role of Billy Flynn in Chicago, had met with Fosse to discuss early drafts of All That Jazz, then called Dying.
“I don’t know if the character was based on someone who intervened during his heart attack in Chicago,” says Lithgow, “or if he had a specific individual in mind. But he used to make little jokes about the character; once, he told me, ‘Just imagine Harold Prince and Mike Nichols shaking hands.’ I didn’t even know these people, but it was inferred Lucas was modeled variously on Nichols, Michael Bennet, and Gower Champion. I realized the character was the embodiment of every rival for a top-dog position in America. Bobby’s view of anyone up against him was that they were a snake,” Lithgow laughs. “It was my function to embody all the jackals nipping at Bobby’s feet.”
In the role of Audrey, fashioned unmistakably after Gwen Verdon, Fosse had two women in mind. “For a long time, Bobby wanted me to play Gwen in All That Jazz,” says Shirley MacLaine. “I got the famous Fosse pressure to do it: ‘Oh, I really want you to do this for me, it’s my life. It’s really true. I’m trying to be so honest with myself.’ I said, ‘But Bob, the man dies in the end. How can it be true?’ And he replied, ‘I promise I’ll die at the first preview.’”
But MacLaine didn’t think she was in good enough shape to undertake the dance requirements of the picture, and she also realized playing Audrey would mean heavy “tell-all” confessions with Fosse about her own life. “He always wanted to know if I’d been to bed with Castro,” she laughs. “Bob was interested in personal things, and I didn’t feel like I could tell him everything he wanted to know. . . . Our relationship was him using me at certain times in his life to help him figure out who he was. But I was not one of the people he would call up and ask to tell him why he was terrible so he could tape record it and use it for some in-development project.”
“He called me on the road several times, . . .” recalls Leland Palmer, whom Fosse also pleaded with to accept the role. “Once he called me late at night because he was lonely. I don’t remember the conversation. I think he just needed to talk to a friend.” In years past, Fosse had tried to persuade Palmer to take over Verdon’s roles in Sweet Charity and Chicago. But Palmer was fighting showbiz burnout. After sporadic film work, including dancing opposite Rudolph Nureyev in Ken Russell’s Valentino, she unofficially retired in 1977. “I was tired,” she says. “I didn’t like Hollywood. I went to a lot of auditions and wasn’t successful. The things I was doing seemed degrading to someone who wanted to act and dance. I just needed to explore and teach a little, do different things.” But, after much coaxing from Fosse, she read for the part of Audrey and was hired. “During rehearsals [for All That Jazz],” she says, “I became good friends with writer Robert Alan Arthur, and he told me that Bob was disconcerted I’d turned down Chicago because he’d wanted me to do Gwen’s role to see if I could do her in the movie.” After three years, Fosse’s attempts to cast Palmer as Verdon finally paid off.
In the lead role of Joe Gideon, Fosse first had cast Richard Dreyfuss, but “artistic differences,” along with Fosse’s belated misgivings after Dreyfuss was cast, led to Dreyfuss leaving the project. “He wasn’t built for [the part] physically,” Fosse told Life in 1979, “but he had such drive, such recklessness, I thought, ‘Well, somehow I’ll fake around the dancing. There are choreographers that sit on chairs, maybe that’s the kind I’ll make him.’”
Fosse, of course, was not the kind to sit around on chairs. “Bob was always riding the camera like this wonderful horse,” says Palmer. “He hung around the dancers’ necks, under their armpits, crawled between their legs. He was the dancers; he was the audience, loving it and working hard, standing back and judging it.” When Fosse realized he could not envision Joe Gideon as a sedentary choreographer, problems began between him and Dreyfuss. Other actors considered to replace him included Jack Nicholson and Keith Carradine. Fosse even contemplated playing himself, but discovered he was uninsurable after his heart attacks. Finally, he cast Roy Scheider, then forty-six, best-known for his tough-guy roles in films such as The French Connection, Klute, and The Supercops.
Scheider was not a dancer, but he had an athletic, wiry body and, after he grew a goatee, bore more than a passing resemblance to the gaunt choreographer in black everyone knew as Bob Fosse. “Going through the script before we began to shoot,” Scheider told Playboy, “Bob would tell me what was true and what wasn’t true. But the stuff that was factual was the first stuff that went out of the script . . . the character we created is a combination of Fosse and myself and any number of artists who live that way. . . . When the girl played by Ann Reinking says to him, ‘If you weren’t so generous with your cock,’ he immediately thinks, Hey, y’know, that’s pretty good . . . I can use that later. He’s a guy who has removed himself several times, to watch his life unfold. So it becomes tough for him to see reality, to feel. . . . An expression Bob uses a lot is flop sweat. That’s what you get when you think you’re bombing out. That’s the real autobiographical link between Fosse and this film—that doubt, which I think all great artists have.”
Fosse was especially sensitive to management intervention in his picture. From the beginning, All That Jazz was a hard sell. Even with the critical and popular successes of Cabaret and Lenny behind him, it took him over a year to convince Columbia Pictures to take the risk on a dance with death. Originally budgeted at $6 million, the film quickly consumed every penny as Fosse overshot production numbers in the Astoria Studios in Queens, New York. When the money was gone and the picture was only halfway finished, Columbia threatened to pull the plug and close down the picture. Executive producer Dan Melnick took forty minutes of the film, put the reel in his suitcase, and, one weekend, met with producers at other studios to try to convince them to bankroll All That Jazz. The following Monday, he’d shaken hands on a deal with 20th Century–Fox to finance the other half of the picture. Estimates are that All That Jazz cost between $12 million and $20 million between the two studios—one of the most expensive funerals ever.
Fosse’s mistrust of producers, lawyers, and doctors did not go unnoticed in the film. Part of All That Jazz’s comic appeal is its ruthless ribbing of “legitimate” professions, contrasted with the carnivorous milieu of show business. “There was a moment in my first scene where Lucus is sitting in the auditorium with his feet up on the back of another seat,” recalls Lithgow, “and he asks, ‘How much is Joe getting [to do the show]?’ And Bill [William LeMassena, who played producer Jonesy Hecht] reads these staggering figures. Well, I had this idea to cross my legs while he’s reading the numbers, as if the thought of all that money was giving me a hard-on. Bob, who saw a sexual dimension in everything, thought that was just fantastic. He believed people were driven by sex, greed, and the fear of death. That was his gritty, streetwise view of life.”
This point was conveyed emphatically in a scene where the producers, meeting with insurance executives and lawyers for Joe Gideon’s postponed Broadway musical, learn that because the $480,000 show has been insured for $1 million, they could earn a profit on it of $519,000 without opening. This revelation is intercut with graphic scenes of a real open-heart surgery operation (supposedly Gideon’s), performed by Dr. John E. Hutchinson III, who gets his own credit at the end of the picture. Hutchinson consulted with Fosse while a patient scheduled to undergo the surgery, and got permission from him to have the operation filmed for All That Jazz. Although some reviewers cried “snuff!” Fosse effectively showed how Gideon’s producers (and his own?) were literally bleeding him dry. The sardonic tone is maintained throughout the film, as Gideon nears his call to receive death. In one scene, where he flees his hospital bed and cavorts around the hospital in his nightgown, Gideon is seen running barefoot in about five inches of water in the hospital’s boiler room. Suddenly he looks up at the camera and addresses the audience and/or God: “Whatsa matter? Don’t you like musical comedy?”
“What is death with dignity?” the standup comedian in Gideon’s film asks his audience. “You don’t drool.” As All That Jazz builds to its climactic grand finale—Gideon’s death—there is little doubt that Fosse is using all of his music-hall no-holds punch to trump up death as the biggest showstopper of them all. The five stages of death recounted in the film—anger, denial, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—are made manifest in distinctly theatrical ways. As in Pippin, which also associates sex and death, the audience is presented with nothing less spectacular than a twenty-one-gun salute farewell to Gideon. His surrealistic hospital production number, in which Ann Reinking, Leland Palmer, and Erzsebet Foldi pay their respective tributes to him, is staged to vintage songs with ironic titles: “After You’ve Gone,” “There’ll Be Some Changes Made,” and “Some of These Days.”
At Fosse’s 1987 memorial at the Palace Theatre, where the brilliant “cattle-call” auditions were filmed for the opening of All That Jazz ten years before, Roy Scheider spoke of Fosse’s own reactions to his fictitious death scene in the picture. “While staging All That Jazz, Bobby would sometimes say inadvertently something very profound and moving about himself. I remember when we were filming the finale to the movie. . . . We had gotten to that section where Joe Gideon, whom I suppose represented the best and the worst of both of us, was running into the audience saying goodbye to all of his friends and getting all that love back. We did it a couple of times and then I came down to Bobby and he said, ‘You know, that must be kind of exhilarating,’ and I said, ‘Yes, Bobby, it is.’ I smiled and said, ‘Why don’t you try it,’ and he said, ‘Naaaah . . .’ in that way he always said naaaah. But finally he agreed. The band started playing and off he went into the audience, hugging and kissing all his associates and co-workers, lovers, and friends. When he got back he was puffing, and he said, ‘Jesus Christ, that’s terrific!’ And I said, ‘Yeah, Bobby, it is.’ And then he said softly, with tears welling, ‘And you know, Roy, the best part of it is that they forgive me, too.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, Bobby, we do.’”
Shirley MacLaine was stunned after seeing a screening of All That Jazz. “It was like Ibsen, the ultimate American musical tragedy. I thought it was the work of a complete genius, someone who had truly mastered his craft. Later, the projectionist rewound the film, put it in the can, and left the theater. I saw him on the street, around Forty-seventh and Broadway, with All That Jazz in his hand, and I thought everything that’s gone into this genial, tyrannical, vulnerable artist is in that man’s hands.”
* * *
Not surprisingly, All That Jazz fared better with European audiences and critics than it did in America. Before it was released in the States, the film was shown at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, where it shared the Golden Palm award for best picture with Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha. Although it was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including best picture, best actor (Roy Scheider), and best direction, Kramer vs. Kramer swept the major awards that year. For its technical achievements, All That Jazz won four Oscars, including costume design, art direction, editing, and music. When it opened, it was an extremely popular film, especially in urban areas, and has gone on to attain cult status for its unorthodox subject matter and superb cinematizing of dance. As Fosse’s last film musical, it remains unchallenged ten years later in its magical blend of old-fashioned song and dance with state-of-the-art technology—and, of course, Fosse’s own distinct ironic humor. Despite moments of film-dance brilliance in Saturday Night Fever, Flashdance, and A Chorus Line, the definitive film sequence of struggling dance hopefuls remains the opening five minutes of All That Jazz, in which hundreds of Broadway gypsies are winnowed down to the ten chosen for Gideon’s show as George Benson’s “On Broadway” is heard in the background.
After All That Jazz had wrapped, Fosse confessed he was suffering postproduction depression. “I guess I’m very tired,” he told Life. “I sit there like some brainless thing watching game shows. People win prizes and jump on each other and kiss, and it makes me sad that they’re so happy. I get all weepy. I don’t know what the hell’s going on. It suddenly breaks my heart, like there’s something I’m missing out on.”
“I hate show business,” Joe Gideon tells his girlfriend Katie from his hospital room in All That Jazz. “But, Joe, you love show business,” she counters. Gideon pauses a beat. “That’s right,” he says. “I can go either way.”
Kevin Boyd Grubb, Razzle Dazzle: The Life and Work of Bob Fosse, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989, pp. 215-228
