Everything Old is New Again: Bob Fosse, “All That Jazz,” and the Obliteration of the Movie Musical
The list of filmmakers who could write and direct a movie musical about their own death is short. Shorter still is the list of artists whose vision of the end would be equally brutal and triumphant; self-deprecating and begging for love, recognition, absolution. Are these three the same thing, actually? In Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979), a tour de force that redefined the entire autobiographical genre — and, indeed, the movie musical — the answer is yes. This desperation powered the engine of the brilliant, turbulent, white-hot Fosse, who spent his entire life fixated on death.
More than ever before, Hollywood pops out biopics like candy from a dispenser, a slow march of sanitized, stunt-cast stories of how great people came to be so. Rarely are these films challenging works of art for anyone but the hair and makeup department. At their worst, biopics rehash familiar stories from a safe distance rather than risk something harsher, truer, weirder.
Not Fosse, whose meteoric success in the 1970s sliced him open: after being the first person to win the Emmy, Oscar, and Tony for directing in the same year (1973), he checked himself into a psychiatric hospital, paralyzed by the pressure to keep outdoing himself. Fosse’s work, from his earliest choreography for splashy Broadway hits of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s to his ascension to the pantheon of great directors of stage and screen, was brutally honest, always seeking the rawer, realer version of every step, every flourish, every flick of the wrist. He brought musical theatre dance deeper into the body, mining its potential for sensuous expression, while his peers were selling a wide-smiling lie. So, at the end of the ‘70s, his roller-coaster decade of world domination, he turned his truth-telling dance machine on himself.
“Everything Old is New Again”
All That Jazz is the story of the fictional director-choreographer Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), identical to Fosse from his problems with pills and women down to his dance boots. Gideon’s ex-wife, Audrey Paris (Leland Palmer, who appeared in Fosse’s Pippin on Broadway), resembles Fosse’s third wife and first muse, Gwen Verdon, whom in reality Fosse never divorced, though they separated for the last decade-plus of their marriage. Gideon’s primary girlfriend (the sparkling foam atop a sea of dancers), Katie Jagger, is played by Ann Reinking, Fosse’s ex-girlfriend and second muse. Gideon’s daughter, Michelle (Erzsebet Foldi), is a version of Fosse’s daughter Nicole, a sweetly devoted budding ballerina who, in the film as in life, is the strongest tether her father feels to life on earth. These three women anchor the story, an anxious, throbbing retelling of a particularly busy period of Fosse’s career: Gideon is in the middle of editing a movie and beginning rehearsals for a new Broadway musical starring his estranged wife (based on Fosse’s experience editing Lenny while working on Broadway’s Chicago in 1975), while running himself so far into the ground that the musical’s producers have no choice but to take out a life insurance policy to ensure a hefty payout should he drop out or drop dead. The money men, doctors, and desperate dancers are all pulling Gideon in different directions, stretching him so thin that he snaps: as the real Fosse did, Gideon suffers a heart attack and is hospitalized, sending the production into a frenzy. Throughout, he is watched over by Jessica Lange (another girlfriend) as Angelique, the gauzy, soft-lit muse of death.
Before Gideon is hospitalized, the film’s music and dance sequences are diegetic (really happening): a cattle call audition, a rehearsal room, Katie and Michelle dancing (to Peter Allen’s “Everything Old is New Again”) in the living room to cheer him up. But once he’s confined to his bed, Gideon appears in duplicate, directing the movie of his hospitalization and decline on a soundstage, conjuring visions of dancing girls (his and others) who admonish him for his shortcomings and beg him to stick around. The film flashes from linear narrative to asides between Gideon and Angelique: he, detached, she, coy.
“There’ll Be Some Changes Made”
Through Gideon, Fosse exorcises his formative traumas, his fears, his ego, his inability to be faithful in love, and his obsessive need to work himself to the bone at all costs. Better, he says, to burn out in a blaze of glory than to die with nothing to show for it. Like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer at their own funeral, he orchestrates heartfelt goodbyes with those he holds dearest, culminating in a sequined explosion of song and dance, “Bye Bye Life.” And then it’s over.
All That Jazz is a movie I could watch every day of my life and never tire of. It’s operating on the highest possible level of craft: no dancer unsure of her steps, no pan of the camera or filmic transition anything less than airtight (the film's editor, Alan Heim, deserves credit here too). More than a perfect synthesis of film and theatre, it’s a breathless crescendo, frantic and paranoid and bursting with life. Good art — real art — must get at the core of our darkest fears, and this film not only achieves that, but looks honestly at the consequences for an artist who lived his life on that knife’s edge. Fosse triumphantly transforms his pain into something beautiful, all the beauty and the consequences of show business in one electric package. As they zip Gideon into a body bag under Ethel Merman singing "There's No Business Like Show Business," you realize: the thing he lived for, and his talent to do it, is what killed him.