We’d mix a minute of film. Then Bob would quietly ask to have one frame cut out, that is, one thirtieth of a second, and everything would have to be edited by hand to match up. He’d watch again and politely ask to have the frame put back in, and again the film and the sound tracks would be cut with a razor blade, put back together, rethread on the machine, and run again.
Every change took forever, but it didn’t matter to Fosse. He just sat at the screen, waiting for playback. We’d finish a scene, and then Bob would watch it the next day, hate it, and ask to do it again. And when we did, it was always better. Small changes in volume between the music and dialogue could deepen the emotion of a scene, tender here, hilarious there.
Fosse, like most of the great artists I worked with, was not super-human, or that different, from you and me, more or less. I never saw him captured by some transporting flight of fancy and inspiration. I never witnessed creativity blossom forth in some miraculous, genius-like way. He was never certain. He never made a decision that couldn’t be changed. He was always looking for confirmation from others. This was not the picture of some god-like, all-powerful being who lived in a realm separate from us. He was all too mortal, all too capable of screwing up. What I did see was a guy who showed up every day on time, worked his ass off, and was relentless in demanding more from himself and others. What made Fosse different was that he was willing to die to get something right. That is, the virtue that leads to greatness is thoroughness.
This grueling repetition and obsessiveness was both the burden and the transcendence of the artistic life, which, if you can tolerate it, brings you to a higher state. On one hand, it is torture; on the other, being that deep into a work of art is a path to spiritual revelation. Creating this masterwork became my act of devotion, my bhakti marga.
The circular nature of our work, like the enlightenment achieved with the endless repetition of a mantra, brought me to my own state of twisted nirvana. I achieved a kind of trance-like state, Plato’s divine madness. The deeper I went, the more I found. Eventually, I became one with the film and could see the workings of the cosmos in it.
And no matter how exhausted I got, no matter how spent, Fosse would be there for it all, never flagging. Of course, the speed must have helped.
ACT SIX: THE MOVIE
SCENE ONE:
Exegesis
Now, my education into art, music, film, and the psyche of Bob Fosse was about to really begin. Watching each scene endlessly, I felt as though every frame had become seared into my nervous system. I plumbed ever deeper strata till I was certain I had penetrated the film to its core. Layers of symbolism and meaning glowed transparently. I came to believe that I not only knew what the movie was all about, but what Fosse was about, what all the crazy artists I worked with were about, and maybe even a little bit about myself.
In the film, the lead character Joe Gideon is a choreographer/director who is creating a movie and a Broadway show. He is a workaholic, alcoholic, drug addict, and sex addict. His addictions are killing him. His compulsivity is beyond control, and he is incapable of stopping his inexorable slide toward death. He hurts everyone around him, especially those closest to him: his wife, his girlfriend, and his daughter. But the pain he causes has no impact on him. It is this inability to feel the suffering of those around him that prevents him from doing anything to change his behavior. He lives a perversion of the golden rule. He does treat others as he treats himself; he is willing to hurt himself, and he is willing to hurt others. He does this in answer to a higher god, the god of “show biz.” His morality is of a different sort: boredom is the only sin.
When the film came out, everyone asked if Gideon was Fosse. He would always say no, but of course, in many ways, he was.
During the course of the film, in between sexy dance numbers, Gideon has a heart attack — just as Fosse suffered when he was directing the show Chicago and the movie, Lenny. But unlike the real Bob Fosse, after hearing a bad review of the movie he had been making, Gideon dies. The final scene of the film is an epic thirteen-minute production number of Gideon’s funeral.
SCENE TWO:
The Final Scene
By the time we started working on the final number three months into the re-record, I was completely wrecked, broken, out of my gourd. Fosse, sitting an inch from the screen, smoking thousands of cigarettes, endlessly fussed over syllables of dialogue, door creaks and footsteps, frames of film, and the balance of trumpets to trombones. The nuances became infinitesimal, microscopic, quantum.
I hadn’t slept more than four hours a night for seven years. Every part of my body and psyche throbbed. I was past the limit of my endurance. I had hit the wall and gone through it to an alternate reality. I was becoming Gideon. I was completely nuts. My entire consciousness was possessed by this movie.
The editor and Fosse’s right-hand man, Alan Heim, also lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Going home at the end of another fourteen-hour day, we stood on the bus repeating the same sentences over and over again, ventilating our anxiety. “Do you think Bob likes it? Do you think we got the scene today? How the hell are we ever going to get this thing done on time? Do you think Bob likes it?”
I stumbled into my apartment. It was after midnight. I was anxiously craving the few hours of sleep I could get before it was show time again. Ivy was curled up in a chair in the living room, smoking a pipe, reading Anaïs Nin. I could tell from the way she thumbed through the corner of the pages of the book that she was not happy. Her intellectual eccentricity mixed with a bit of hippie is what attracted me to her in the first place, but with her bad vibe it didn’t seem quite as charming, now. I felt the psoas muscle in the center of my body tighten. I tried to ignore the signal and pretend that nothing was going on.
“Hey. How was your day?” I asked.
“Fine. How about you?”
I couldn’t help myself. It was too late, and I had no filter. “All right. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said, tightly.
“OK. I’m going to bed.”
“I haven’t seen you in months.”
“I know. I’m sorry. We’re almost there. You have no idea how intense this is.” I wish I could get some support around this, instead of shit, I thought.
“Whatever you say. It’s always your way. You always do what you want. And I just have to go along with it.”
I had nothing left. “You know what? Why don’t you just go? If I’m that horrible just leave! You know what else? This is the way it is going to be. Maybe I won’t leave at all. You don’t seem to give a shit that I’m actually working every day, on something important. What the hell are you doing every day? What the hell do you do? You don’t work, and it doesn’t seem like you are writing very much poetry. Maybe if you did something you wouldn’t be so miserable!”
I’d struck the jugular, and Ivy looked at me with those saucer-like assassinating daggers, huge and brimming with the ever-available tears. With malice in her voice, she said, “You are such a self-involved prick.”
She was right of course, but I couldn’t admit it. “Oh. Now here they come! The tears! I am so sick of this! I’m all wrong, always wrong. I don’t have time for this. I’ve got to be back in the studio in a few hours.”
As I walked into the bedroom, I heard her wailing. I laid down in bed, hallucinating in the dark from the lack of sleep and the endless projection on the screen. I began to see all the scenes in the film where Gideon fucks around on his wife and girlfriend. It started to seem like a very attractive idea. I could feel myself getting infected with his disease, like I’d been bit by a vampire. I wasn’t all the way there yet, and maybe I could still escape, but it was starting to twist in my blood. I entertained the idea of just dumping Ivy and going all in with this show biz thing after all.
The next thing I knew, the alarm went off.
Practically sleepwalking, I somehow made it back to the mixing stage. It was time for Joe Gideon to die. Fosse, who was convinced that h
e would die any second, was going to go out with the biggest production number of his life, an extravaganza where he got to direct his own funeral. This number was clearly his swan song, the finale of the great finale of his life, his last chance to go out with the ultimate big finish.
But, by my lights, it was Fosse’s ironic destiny that in the final moment, his pathology got the best of him. Instead of his death producing his most beautiful song, he bombed. In some strange way, it was as if he had to, in the penultimate scene of his life, punish himself, finally, by failing artistically. As far as I was concerned, his last scene was the biggest mistake of his career, and, as it turned out in the end, mine.
What I mean is, he picked the wrong song.
From the opening count-off that began the movie; to the incessant Vivaldi which mocked the hamster wheel of Gideon’s speed-addled life; to the pop songs whose lyrics illuminated the show biz life; to Burns’ over the top burlesque music that provided a counterpoint to Gideon’s self-destructive behavior; to the corny old stuff, done in gleeful arrangements to undercut the seriousness of the messages attached to them; all of his musical choices were spot on, the perfect ironic touches to his dark vision.
But the last song was, well, thin. He decided on a parody version of the old Everly Brothers hit, “Bye Bye Love,” changing the lyrics to “Bye Bye Life.” It’s a slight song to begin with, lacking the resonance of the other choices. At the moment when he needed his greatest inspiration, out of all the melodic and lyrical combinations available in the universe, he chose a turkey. The song had no intrinsic build, no motivic power, no emotion to pull on, no depth of perspective. This was the moment when we should have had something original, written by a genius. We needed an ironic anthem of death, a perfect distillation of razzle dazzle, with the hugest, most remarkable, stupendous finish. And this song was not it. When it really counted, Fosse choked.
He tried to make the most of this chintzy song. He came up with every variation of the arrangement to build this epic production piece, and Burns copped these styles well. But even these arrangement ideas fell flat, as they were too obviously ripped off from tacky sources like Chuck Mangione and Billy Joel.
I tried to soothe myself by telling myself that he was right and I was wrong. After all, he was Fosse, the genius. Then I found a copy of an early shooting script, and I read the following,
NOTE: THE FOLLOWING NUMBER, “BYE BYE LOVE,” IS WRITTEN BY FELICHE AND BOUDLEAUS BRYANT, RECORDED BY SIMON AND GARFUNKEL ON THE ALBUM “BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER.” WE HOPE THAT A NEW SONG CAN AND WILL BE WRITTEN THAT WILL SERVE THE SAME PURPOSE IN THEME AND ENTERTAINMENT VALUE. CONSIDER THIS, THEN, A DUMMY.
Fosse knew it! He’d known it! Why didn’t he get that great new song written? I’ll never know.
But of course, I couldn’t say anything. The movie was done, the choice had been made. As a good soldier, it wasn’t for me to question why, just for me to do or die. The flimsiness of this lightweight choice frightened me, because I knew what kind of emotional impact he wanted the scene to have, and the responsibility to make it work now landed on me. Now, I was in it all the way. There was no turning back, and I was stuck with the material presented to me. I had nothing to do with getting us here, but here I was with no choice but to try to kill this whale with a toothpick.
I threw my whole being into the number. Over the course of a month, we worked on it second by second. I crammed every piece of magnetism onto that pathetically inadequate piece of oxide that I could. If every other scene had its wild dynamic swings, this was the biggest, roller-coaster moment of all.
Finally, we got down to the last scene of the last scene. Gideon was dead, the crowd gone home. Gideon stood in his black sequin jacket, make-up perfect, hair coiffed, a gentle smile. He’d had his big celebration, and now it was time to finally embrace Lady Death.
I faded out the music and applause to silence. I watched a tracking shot of Gideon moving down a corridor, stunningly decorated with black-and-silver mirrored paper by the film’s Oscar-winning production designer, Philip Rosenberg. At the end of the path was a white light, just like those who have been there and back say it is going to be. But no one says that along with the white light you are greeted by the gorgeous Jessica Lange, who plays the angel of death in the movie, and who, by the way, Fosse reputedly fucked, of course.
As Gideon moved toward the light, I faded up the music. I got the pace and timing just right, increasing the volume as Gideon glided down the corridor: louder, louder, louder, LOUDER! When Gideon got to the end, I built to the loudest possible volume. At the peak, there was a sharp cut to silence, then a zipper sound effect to mark the closing of the body bag, with Gideon’s dead body in it. Perfect. At least, so I thought.
Bob turned to me from the screen, squinting, the ubiquitous cigarette dangling. In his typical, serious, gentle voice, “Could we do it again, please, and make the end a little bigger?”
I turned to Vorisek, looking for some help, having been through this a thousand times. He grimaced, as if to say, You know you can’t. You’ve already gone way past the limit of what the medium can handle. If we keep going after this goddamn whale we are going to get eaten.
But I had sworn my fealty. It was December, and the sun had set many hours ago. It was cold outside, but it didn’t matter. We hadn’t seen daylight in weeks. We’d skipped Thanksgiving, and now Christmas was drawing nigh. Pushing through my exhaustion, I told myself that I just had to make it through this one last part.
There had to be a way that I could do the impossible. Make it louder, make it seem louder, while not driving Vorisek, or the gear, nuts. Make it louder, and not louder, at the same time.
“Sure. Let’s do it again.”
I hit the play button, and all the cranky mechanical dubbing machines linked to the film started to roll. I punched into record at the cut to the scene. I pulled the faders as close to the bottom as I could, with barely a trickle of sound. I was into the groove, meshed to the movement of the camera. We had been through the scene so many times, I knew just how long it would be before we reached the climax. I knew just what pressure to use as I pushed up the volume controls. Just a gentle lick at first, then harder, harder, louder, louder, deeper, deeper, more pressure, I watched the needles, I held it back as much as I could, the longer I could hold back, the bigger the explosion would be when it finally came at the end. I put all of myself into it as I thrust the knobs beneath my fingers upwards, this was the big finish, the big finish of the big finish, this was the happy ending, the ultimate rub and tug, the electric piano, the flugelhorn, the strings, I pushed the strings, that pull of tension, I could feel it down to my balls. First the thrust, then, the release, the final blast, the spurting electric guitar, O’Connor Flood’s ecstatic scream. Right in the middle of the scream, silence. Zipper.
I waited. I hit stop. I could hear the machines slow to an exhausted halt behind me. My breath was heavy. I had a sheen of sweat. I looked at the clock. It was three a.m. We’d started at nine that morning, as we had been for weeks. Another sixteen-hour day. I was fried. I just wanted to get out, to go home. All I craved was for the pain, and the tedium, and the repetition, to stop. I had nothing left to give. I couldn’t possibly get it up again. I prayed that Fosse wouldn’t ask for one more time. There was no more I could do.
Fosse came over to the console and leaned on it. “That was great. Is there any way that you can make the ending any louder?”
My stomach burned. I never wanted to say no to this guy. I loved him that much.
Vorisek spoke quickly. “No, Bob. It’s already too loud. We’ll never get this on the optical, as it is.”
Fosse paused and lit another cigarette. “Terrific.”
I thought, great. We get to go home. I can get a few hours sleep before we start again tomorrow. We are almost there. I felt this overwhelming relief and exhaustion descend through my body. I was about to get up and get my coat to leave, when Bob spoke.
SCENE THREE:
The Last Playback
“OK. Let’s do a playback of the whole number.”
Fuck. I knew this was wrong. We’d worked on this mother for a month. It was the scene that was going to make or break this film. And when Fosse asked for the playback, I knew listening to it at that moment would be a gigantic mistake. At the end of a sixteen-hour day, your top end is all gone. Everything sounds like mush. I knew my ears were shot, and so everyone else’s had to be as well. This was not the way to premiere this all-important piece of work.
I had never resisted a request, but now I had to. “Bob, I really don’t think that’s a good idea. I’m sure we’re all fried. Let’s come in first thing in the morning after we’ve gotten some rest, and our ears will be back, and listen then.”
Fosse ignored me. “Let’s give it a listen.”
I tried to insist. “Bob, really, you know I never say no, I really don’t think this is a good idea.”
“One time from the top.”
I looked at Heim, and he shrugged his shoulders. I looked toward Vorisek. He wouldn’t make eye contact with me. I looked at Burns. “It’ll be alright,” he said, unconvincingly.
It took forever to rewind the mammoth scene.
“Bob, at least sit here, in the sweet spot,” I said.
Bob sat behind the console, in the middle of the speakers. Without anyone noticing, I notched up the monitor volume one tick, just to give it all an extra oomph.
I sat behind Bob. My legs twitched with terror. I had that fetid taste in my mouth from having gone too long without dreaming or seeing the sun. I felt that familiar hollowness. I was drained.
I couldn’t do it, so Dick hit the play button. We watched the scene. I had no idea if it was any good. It sounded like someone had thrown a blanket over the whole thing. It was small and soulless.
When the playback finished, Bob turned to us with a look of grotesque panic on his face. I’d seen that look a few times before, like when the distorted test reel came back from Dolby. I was afraid of his reaction and afraid that he would die on the spot. My own heart pounded, as I was obsessively aware of my own heartbeat, having watched this movie about a heart attack too many times.
Never Say No To A Rock Star Page 23