by Wasson, Sam
They shot the scene in the cramped underground dressing room at the Village Gate, mostly unchanged since the forties. Keith Gordon played the young Joe Gideon (Danny Ruvolo, originally cast in the part, had been killed in a car crash). This was Gordon’s biggest and best role yet, and he was incredibly nervous the day of the shoot. On top of the nervousness, he felt unworthy. And he sensed Fosse was doing it—he was making him feel bad. He hadn’t said anything to Gordon all day, and the kid was beginning to blame himself. Had he done something wrong? Wasn’t Fosse supposed to be engaging him, pushing him farther and deeper, the way he had, so famously, pushed Valerie Perrine to her Oscar-nominated performance in Lenny? Gordon knew better than to interrupt Fosse, who was whispering to Peppino in a corner of the set, but if he didn’t ask for direction, he might fumble the scene and end up alienating his director even more.
The sexual nature of the scene intensified Gordon’s anxiety. Of the three naked strippers, one was actually a man, and one—a haggard, drunken actress in middle age—told him, between takes, exactly how she was going to fuck him when the shoot was over. Reporting this to Fosse would only make him look even more like an amateur, so Gordon had to keep it to himself and roll with the punches like a pro. But he wasn’t a pro. At seventeen, he hadn’t had any real sexual experience—less, in fact, than most boys his age. Really, he knew more about acting than girls.
Gordon looked up. Fosse, stepping through a cloud of smoke, was coming toward him. Finally, he thought, peace of mind. The guidance he was looking for.
“It would be great,” Fosse murmured, “if you could really get hard in this scene.”
Gordon said nothing.
“It would look more real that way.”
Fosse walked away.
He’d failed before he had even begun. Even if he could get an erection, which he surely couldn’t under those hot lights and with the entire crew watching him, the fear of humiliation would destroy his concentration. So either way—pleasing Fosse or disappointing him—Gordon would be failing, as an actor and as a man. The scene was ruined. “Looking back,” Gordon said, “I realize that was exactly what he was going for—getting that panic on my face.”
“That’s exactly what it was like,” Fosse had said to Phifer. “It was too much for a kid.” And yet he never spoke of Gideon as “me,” and he recoiled when Heim pointed out the obvious similarities. Preempting charges of egomania, Fosse encouraged people to think of his creation as just that—a creation. But his artistic principles undercut the impulse; obsessed with truth, he invited the comparison, even welcomed it, down to the address on Joe Gideon’s bottle of Dexedrine—61 West Fifty-Eighth Street—a made-up address three numbers from 58 West Fifty-Eighth Street, his own.
More footage came in all the time. Struggling to lead his crew through a particularly tricky shot, Fosse called for ten and excused himself from the set to visit the lucky dancing shoes he kept in his dressing room. On his way back he ran into sound mixer Christopher Newman. “What’s going on here? Why can’t we get this?”
“The crew’s tired,” Newman explained.
“Why are they so tired?”
“They don’t take the same kind of pills you do.”
Genuinely surprised, Fosse asked, “How do you know about the pills?”
“I read the script.”
“Well, don’t let it get around.”
Delays persisted to such an extent, Sidney Lumet had to drop out to keep his own film on schedule, and Sam Cohn kept an eye out for replacements. In dailies with Robert Young’s Rich Kids, Cohn tugged at John Lithgow’s sleeve. “Hey, could you do this role for Bobby?” Lithgow didn’t hesitate. “Fosse loved the character of Lucas Sergeant,” Lithgow said, “because it was a devilish parody of every one of his rivals: Mike Nichols, Hal Prince, Michael Bennett, Gower Champion. He would make wonderful withering jokes at their expense as he was directing the scenes.” Rehearsing one of Lithgow’s two scheduled scenes, a “seduction” of Sergeant by a traitorous producer, Fosse caught Lithgow lasciviously drumming his fingers as he contemplated the producer’s offer. “That was great,” Fosse said after the run, “make sure you drum your fingers in the shot.” No one in Fosse’s shot, Lithgow realized, was exempt from choreography. Even sitting, actors were dancing.
“Hey, John,” Fosse said at the end of their second scene. “Do you think you might be able to come up to SUNY Purchase with us?”
“Sure. What for?”
“‘Bye Bye Life,’” Fosse said. “The big rock number in the end. I want you to be in the crowd.”
He wanted everyone to be in the crowd—everyone important to Joe Gideon and, in most cases, important to Bob Fosse—to watch Gideon, hallucinating in reality, sing goodbye in his mind, absolved by all for all in his last moments of consciousness.
There was no time to skip shooting on New Year’s Eve 1979. In between gifts and champagne, the crew filmed every variation on Joe Gideon’s bathroom ritual. Fosse staged his daily round of pills, Alka-Seltzer, eye drops, and—hands out in front—“It’s showtime, folks” directed at a mirror framed in lights, evoking an actor’s dressing room before he hits the stage, and a stage is what Gideon’s life is, where his performance of lies, charm, and denial—of his condition, of reality—rivals the razzle-dazzle it’s his job to create.
Fosse’s clever arrangement of musical numbers describes a feature-length surrender of outer razzle-dazzle to inner. From the opening cattle-call number, “On Broadway,” to Gideon’s imagined “Bye Bye Life,” All That Jazz fades from stage-bound numbers set in naturalistic theatrical environments to performances staged in the cluttered proscenium of Gideon’s mind, a descent from consciousness to the surreal. As Cabaret twisted entertainment to show corruption (and vice versa), and Lenny structured Bruce’s monologues to better “sing” his life (and vice versa), All That Jazz slowly erases the line between onstage and off-, bullshit and truth, finally wedding the creative impulse to death. Death, Fosse’s entertainment says, actually gives life; so-called life is just a vaudeville. And vice versa.
“I hate show business,” Joe says to Katie.
“But, Joe, you love show business.”
“That’s right.” He tips his hat. “I can go either way.”
As Gideon comes to his end and his numbers leave the stage, the “Showtime!” affirmations begin to lose their pep, one by one. Slight variations in tempo and imagery convey the physical breakdown Fosse pairs to Gideon’s mental breakdown, the stripping away of pretense that leads him to recognize the bullshit in his own work. Gideon’s deconstruction of his “Take Off with Us” number—adapted from the airplane orgy ballet Fosse considered mounting for Joffrey—shows his creative and destructive processes to be one and the same, a Möbius strip of relief and despair, death and imagination. Beginning as a light, family-friendly frolic (“Thanks a lot, but it’s not exactly over yet”), “Take Off with Us” shatters into “Airotica,” a dark burst of sexual fragments (“Now Sinatra will never record it”). Death brings him to the light.
With “Airotica” choreographed and ready to shoot, Fosse announced, in front of the dancers, that he wanted the number to climax with Cheryl Clark taking her top off and writhing on the scaffolding. Clark was stunned; she’d already screen-tested in a sexy black top; she’d already recorded the vocals. No one had said anything about nudity. “This was Friday night,” she recalled, “and the number was going to be shot Monday. That was like having a gun to my fucking head.” When she resisted, Fosse escorted her to a back office at Astoria Studios where he could attempt to manipulate her in private. She cut him off before he could.
“Bob, there’s no nudity clause in my contract.”
“There isn’t?”
“You know there isn’t.”
He tried to whimper. “But it will save the number . . .”
“I’ve seen you exploit girls since I was twenty-one years old and you’re not going to exploit me.”
She walked off the pictur
e. With no time to lose, Fosse called Sandahl Bergman in LA and convinced her to get on a plane, right away (“I need a favor,” he said), to dance the topless lead in “Airotica.” It was a bittersweet offer. Bergman had grown up with Cheryl Clark in Kansas—they had had the same dance teachers; their moms were best friends—and she knew filling in for her would be seen as a kind of betrayal. “It was a horrible situation,” Bergman said. “I felt bad for Cheryl, I felt bad for me.” The next morning, a car picked her up at JFK and drove her to Astoria, where she learned the number in three days.
After they shot it, Fosse took Bergman out to a thank-you dinner. Early in the meal, he put on his little-boy face.
“The dailies, they’re really stunning. Everyone thinks you’re really good.”
She nodded, smiled.
“Sandahl, I’m behind schedule. They’re on me.”
This was not a lie. He had shut down production for three full weeks to rehearse “Airotica,” running up further delays and expenses. It was extreme even for Fosse; he used over twenty-five setups to shoot the number, vowing to an incredulous Albert Wolsky that each would make its way into the final cut (they all would). And now he was paying for all of it. Or, rather, Melnick was.
“I’d like to call up Danny Melnick,” Fosse told Bergman, “and I’d like to invite him to dinner with us. I think maybe . . . you and he—”
She knew then he was pimping her. “Bob, if you call Melnick, I’m leaving.”
(Fosse didn’t call Melnick. He didn’t get more money.)
The film’s finale—opening night of Gideon’s NY to LA, which debuts, appropriately, after Gideon’s death—was scheduled to film at the grand concert hall at SUNY Purchase toward the end of the shoot. It would follow “Bye Bye Life.” The film’s sendoff, the opening-night number needed to up the ante on all that had preceded it, and as Gideon’s last testament (for which Lucas Sergeant gets the credit), it needed to be a tour de force for maximum irony. Fosse and designer Tony Walton had the whole thing figured: NY to LA would begin as a Flentrop tracker organ, one of the largest portable organs in existence, is rolled onstage, completely concealed by a scrim of the New York skyline, with a skyscraper hiding every pipe. A dramatic cross-fade would reveal the organ, transforming it into the city, and then, with a mighty chord, the organ was to slide offstage, revealing LA, this time a palm tree hiding behind every pipe. All hail Lucas Sergeant, genius of Broadway.
Columbia president Frank Price, charged with restoring the struggling studio to financial health, had been tracking Fosse’s spending since his first day on the job, in 1978. “Columbia was kind of seat-of-the-pants,” Price said. “I inherited a lot of problems.” Along with Altered States and Annie (whose rights the studio had purchased for a preposterous $9.5 million, à la Sam Cohn), All That Jazz was one of three productions the board of directors deemed “problem pictures.” Price had to fix them. “By the time the [All That Jazz] budget reached nine million,” he explained, “I had to say, ‘Fellas, we’re not operating with a blank check.’” Looking to trim, he asked Fosse to budget his big finale. Fosse refused.
Price appealed to Cohn. “We can’t have this thing going up any more,” he said. “The board is pressing me. I’ve got to have a budget or this will become a nightmare situation.”
Cohn appreciated Price’s predicament, but his allegiance was to his client. The big ending—still a work in progress—could not be budgeted.
“Sam, I’m going to have to come to New York, to Astoria—”
“I’ll bar the door.”
“Sam, I’m going to have to shut you down.”
This was seven days before the completion of photography. (“I thought Bobby was going to have another heart attack,” Scheider said.)
Assemble the picture, Price advised Melnick, and if they needed those unfilmed sequences—“Bye Bye Life,” “NY to LA,” and Gideon’s dialogues with the Angel of Death—then they could shoot them. Price thought this a reasonable compromise.
Melnick thought it highly impractical. “Are we supposed to stop production, take a few months off to edit, then get everyone back together to shoot it?” he asked.
Apparently, yes.
“Excuse me for a second.”
Melnick returned to his office and called Fosse and Cohn. “I want to set up the movie someplace else.”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
Changing studios midstream simply didn’t happen, especially when there was already so much money in the hole and when the footage—only partially comprehensible without the Angel of Death pieces for temporal segues—smacked of the kind of arty, genre-bending, self-indulgence that marketing departments lived in fear of. But Fosse made a feast of studio pressures, and he said yes, let’s do it. Sam Cohn stood with him.
“Fellas,” Melnick said, “I just want to make sure, before we go through with this, that you’re ready to live with the consequences of the poker game we’re about to play”—meaning, if Fosse threatened to leave, he had to be willing to actually leave, to risk his financing, risk finishing the film and not having it distributed, not to mention risking the lawsuits—“Bobby,” Melnick said, “do you want this?”
“Go for it.”
“I’ll call you back.”
But that poker game never got to the table. Striking a compromise, Price and Melnick agreed to take on another studio, a partner. It would put up the money for the unfilmed material and share in the profits. All Melnick had to do was sell All That Jazz all over again.
“Dan Melnick called,” Alan Heim’s mother-in-law told Alan. “From California.”
Heim called him right back. “Dan, it’s Alan.”
“Alan, I want you to prepare an hour of the best material we have—”
“What’s going on?”
“—and get it out to me by Sunday.”
“Today’s Friday.”
Unsure of what this was all about, Heim took an assistant to the cutting room the next morning and assembled, as directed, an emergency reel of cut and uncut footage, using the cattle-call sequence and certain stand-alone dramatic scenes as set pieces. When time ran out, he called in a messenger and arranged to have the canisters delivered to Melnick’s Beverly Hills front door at 6:00 the next morning.
Ten hours later, Dan Melnick’s doorbell buzzed him awake. Instead of answering the door, he fumbled for the phone. “Alan?”
“Is it there?”
“Did it have to be six in the morning?”
A salesman in black shades and a designer suit, Melnick dropped the canisters in the trunk of his car and rode from studio to studio. Warner Brothers liked what he showed them, but their key executive was out of town and they couldn’t commit without him. So Melnick got back in the car and drove directly to Alan Ladd Jr. Among the most admired and well-liked executives in Hollywood, Laddie, as he was known, had independent taste and a sweeping view of film practice and industry, which, as the son of actor Alan Ladd and stepson of actress/agent Sue Carol, he’d been cultivating since boyhood. He had joined CMA to agent under Freddie Fields before setting out to produce on his own, and eventually he landed on top at Fox, giving easy, clairvoyant yeses to projects as diverse and dicey as Harry and Tonto, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and—when no one else would—Star Wars. The Hollywood he imagined had room enough for all. “I just liked it” could have been Laddie’s motto; in an industry of panicked arbitrations, Laddie had a laid-back, eloquent instinct, trusting and forthright, and he had earned his stripes, both in the boardroom and at Chasen’s.
Laddie invited a few people from the studio to join him and Melnick. He was basically familiar with All That Jazz, having turned down Ending years earlier. But now that it was All That Jazz, a Bob Fosse musical, Laddie’s interest shifted back. My God, he thought as the lights went down, if Bob Fosse had been making a musical all along, I never would have passed. The lights came up forty minutes later and Laddie turned to Melnick: “I’ll take it.”
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sp; Triumphant, Melnick drove back to Columbia, to Frank Price’s office. “You’re out of the picture,” he announced. “I’ve laid it off for you.” For you: as if it were a favor to Price.
“Where?”
“Laddie. Fox.”
Columbia and Fox elected to co-distribute All That Jazz, with foreign rights to one and domestic to the other. Who got which was decided by an official coin toss at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Price had tails, Laddie heads.
It was heads. Laddie took domestic.
Back in the game, All That Jazz moved an hour upstate, to a vacant black-box theater at SUNY Purchase, to shoot “Bye Bye Life,” which, due to persistent budgetary restrictions, had to work as the final number. There would be no opening night of NY to LA, no Flentrop organ. Gideon would simply sing bye-bye to life and drift toward death. Then the zipper would close on his body bag and Merman would belt out “There’s No Business Like Show Business” as the credits rolled. All That Jazz was a musical.
Translating the NY to LA design elements into “Bye Bye Life,” Fosse, under deadline, sent Walton and Phil Rosenberg back to the drawing board and closed the door behind them. “It was getting quite frightening,” Rosenberg remembered. “We would bring in models and sketches time after time, and he wouldn’t know what he wanted and we were only about a week away from having to shoot the scene when he finally said, ‘You know, I had a dream last night about cylinders. White cylinders.’” In came yards and yards of silver-coated Mylar—Mirrex Mirror Scrim inherited from the unborn finale, reflective floors, and transparent Plexiglas cylinders with light-bouncing surfaces. Shrouded in black and silver, the intimate five-hundred-seat space did indeed look like a rock concert setting somewhere between life and death.