All That Jazz (1979)

Okay, what we're doing here is important if you want to understand or work in show business. It's also illegal. If Columbia or Fox get wind of this, we're going to jail. I grabbed a bunch of copyright infringing screen shots that are loading at the bottom of this post while we chat for a while about Bob Fosse's over-budget, intensely honest 1979 masterpiece, ALL THAT JAZZ.

A long time ago in Hollywood, when I was an impressionable chump, actor Lonnie Stevens told me privately that we all have exactly one great story to tell -- our own. He probably said that to all the girls. Yet I think it may be true, and Fosse's one great personal story is so complex and comic and candid that it stands as a high water mark in cinematic art, if you view moviemaking as a narrative medium. Qua entertainment, ALL THAT JAZZ won four Academy Awards including Best Music. It has astonishing dance sequences, directed and choreographed by Fosse, easily the greatest of all sculptors who gave flight and heat and meaning to physical human clay.

But there's more. Infinitely more. It has Fosse himself, portrayed by Roy Scheider under Fosse's challenging creative direction, with the living reference of Bob Fosse right there on the set to illuminate what depth of heaven and hell lay beneath a thick layer of bullshit and burlesque.

Acclaimed and hated for revealing his personal story, Fosse shows us the seduction of Death as an exit, the ultimate painkiller and problem solver, portrayed romantically and with stunning confidence by Jessica Lange in surreal clips that punctuate the film from beginning to end, as Fosse lays out his past, present, and future. ALL THAT JAZZ was Fosse's swan song, after suffering a massive coronary and bypass surgery. That's in the movie, too -- clinically, shockingly, maddeningly -- the last thing one would expect to make sense in a musical. As illness claimed Fosse's life after ALL THAT JAZZ was completed and hailed by a jealous industry that hated him for truth-telling, so too, his alter ego autobiographical character, director-choreographer "Joe Gideon" is zipped into a body bag in the film's final shot, to the bawdy schmaltz of Ethel Merman belting out There's No Business Like Show Business. Roll end credits. A brilliant, almost incomparable New York cast and crew, driven to the limit of their individual and combined talents by a driven creator who paid with his life.

Driven by what? Good question. Not money or fame or love. Not happiness. Perfection. The thing no one can do. "Never beautiful enough, never funny enough," Gideon shrugs in confession to the Angel of Death. "When I look at a rose, that's perfect. It's perfect! I want to look up to God and ask, how the hell did you do that? And why can't I do that?"

I understand this movie -- and Bob Fosse's predicament -- not because I had a tenth of his ability or achievements (Best Director, CABARET, 1973); not because I grew up in the Golden Age of show business or tap danced as a kid or faced the intense competitive pressure of working on Broadway. My stuff was shit compared to Fosse. But I understand him.

Drinker. Drug addict. Womanizer. Workaholic. Chain-smoker. No loyalty to anyone or anything except the misery of working with crap to make a miracle, the perfect rose. Feeling barren. Incompetent. Everybody staring at me, full of expectation and respect, willing to do anything I ask as their creative guide, the director -- the one who earned it by walking a tightrope and has to do it again to keep his job -- a job like no other. God on earth, maybe for an hour or two, maybe a minute, a few seconds that send us to heaven and hell and astounds by being original and exquisite.

Joe: "Oooo, I don't think they [the producers] liked it."

Audrey: "I don't know about the audiences, but I think it's the best work you've ever done -- [then, with anger and agony] You son of a bitch!"

Since there's no best place to discuss this, I want to emphasize the scope of achievement Fosse the filmmaker attained in ALL THAT JAZZ. A single example, one among many, is inadequate but typical of Fosse's command of the potential in a motion picture. Having conquered the insanely difficult job of conceiving and staging the dance numbers, Gideon convenes a first reading of the play's book [spoken lines] with the full cast. It's stupid and trite, worse than the awful music he struggled to adapt. After the first line of rehearsal -- a dull joke that everyone laughs at -- Fosse the filmmaker fades everything from the sound track except Gideon's internal experience: tapping his fingers on the table, crushing a cigarette, lighting another, walking away while the reading goes on, tapping his fingers on a pipe, walking back to the table, lifting his hand to rub his face with a ticking wristwatch, toying with a pencil behind his back, snapping it in half, broken pieces bouncing on the floor. His awareness opens to hear the sound of others as Audrey reads the last line and flops her script shut. Applause. Stupid bullshit applause by ordinary people who want it to be good, who want to cheer each other and celebrate the fact that they've been cast in a Broadway show directed by Joe Gideon. Five quick narrative-laden shots later, Joe's in the ICU. His perfect Angel of Death is waiting for him in the wings. Anger, denial... and visitors.

The Stand-Up: "I'm telling you, Gideon, I got real insight into you. There's a deep-seated fear of being conventional."

The Cardiologist: "You are foolishly and childishly flirting with disaster."

I won't spoil the movie by telling you too much. It's an incredibly rich tapestry of a great man's testament to the challenge of directing or living or dying or whatever the hell it is that makes us stop, look and listen with wonder in a darkened theater. "It's show time!" Joe says in the mirror each morning, another battle to survive the blur of past and present. His ex-wife hates him. She's the star of the show. His daughter needs him. Never enough time. His girlfriend loves him, and Joe's incapable of loving anything or anyone ever again. He hates himself with all the passion he feels for his art.

See this film for any reason that turns you on. It's sexy, funny, bizarre, richly photographed and edited, unique in cinematic history. The DVD has commentary by Roy Scheider and clips of Fosse on the set. If you like dance, it's a gold mine of insight, the real deal.