“It’s showtime, folks!”

Looking for connections between an artist’s work and their personal life is a tricky business. No doubt, the connections are there, but generally they’re much more complicated and convoluted than we can imagine. Still, we look for clues to their motives and their manias, their politics and their passions. And at times, the work an artist does seems to reflect their life so clearly, it’s hard not to see it as autobiography.

Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz has many clear connections to the director’s life. The main character, Joe Gideon, is a former dancer who graduated to choreography and then became a director, moving between stage and film. All these things echo Fosse’s own experience. And to take it even farther, Gideon is a compulsive worker who keeps himself going with drugs and booze, chasing one woman after another, madly trying to juggle work and relationships. These things also reflect Fosse’s own life.

In an audio commentary on the DVD I watched, editor Allan Heim says that when he was working on the film with Fosse, he couldn’t help calling the main character Bob. This angered the director, who apparently didn’t want people to assume that Joe Gideon was a surrogate for himself. Heim finally managed to break the habit, but he notes the many connections to Fosse’s own life. In addition to the biographical parallels, a number of the director’s associates, including Heim, are featured in All That Jazz. And how can we ignore the fact that the numerous bottles of dexedrine featured prominently in the film show the director’s home address on the label?

So what are we supposed to make of this? It’s a mistake to assume that everything we see in All That Jazz is a realistic representation of Fosse’s own life. At the same time, it’s a mistake to pretend the connections aren’t there, especially when the tone of the film is so clearly confessional. Fosse felt a need to put his life on the screen, in large part, it seems, to acknowledge his failings. But it’s also important to remember that, like many filmmakers, the director spent a lot of time dramatizing his life. Even if the episodes we see on the screen line up with episodes from the director’s career, they’re stylized and heightened in a way that’s nothing like real life. This is especially true of the last third of the film, which spins off into expressionistic fantasy. There’s no way you can take it literally.

Erzsebet Foldi and Roy Scheider

Fosse loved the amped-up, overheated world of musicals. He worked as a dancer and choreographer at MGM back in the fifties, when the studio was churning out frothy, colorful, wildly energetic fantasies that audiences loved. Some of the best musicals of the studio era were made during this time, but the genre’s days were numbered. Though there were a few musicals that hit it big in the sixties, tastes were changing, and audiences were losing interest in fatuous fantasies that always had a happy ending. High profile flops like Dr. Dolittle and Paint Your Wagon almost killed the Hollywood musical.

But in the seventies, a new generation of filmmakers tried to reinvent the form.* Not buying into the easy optimism of the studio era extravaganzas, these directors approached the genre with a more cynical eye. Martin Scorsese tried to mix the glitter and glamour with a dark, disturbing romance in New York, New York. Francis Ford Coppola took a downbeat look at a doomed relationship in One from the Heart. But it was Fosse who somehow managed to reimagine the movie musical within a contemporary consciousness. He scored his first hit by adapting Cabaret, which had been a hit on Broadway. And seven years later he followed it with All That Jazz.

Leland Palmer

Fosse was never more audacious and never more assured than when he made All That Jazz. Just the idea of putting a character much like himself at the center of a big budget Hollywood musical was pretty outrageous. But pop culture was the stage Fosse chose to live his life on. Showbiz was his metaphor for the world. Of his five films, four of them are centered on entertainers. Fosse was fascinated by the relationship between performers and their audience. He understood the way a dancer or a singer or a comedian could reach out and grab a crowd, creating an electric connection that would hold them transfixed. He also knew how much performers often sacrificed to make that connection, and how damaging the lifestyle could be.

Not that Joe Gideon is a martyr to his art. It’s way more complex than that. Joe can’t stop doing what he does because he couldn’t live without the love and attention that the audience provides. He needs that fix. In spite of his apparent self-confidence, Joe is massively insecure, and constantly pushes himself to do better, because he never feels that anything he does is good enough. And while there’s no doubt he likes women, you have to wonder if he’s driven to chase them, at least in part, because he needs to bolster his fragile ego.

Ann Reinking, center

While Gideon has a number of women in his life, three in particular have a special hold on him. There’s his ex-wife, Audrey, who knows him better than anybody. She still loves him, and she stars in the show he’s directing, but she won’t let herself get drawn back into his web. She’s smart enough and strong enough to keep her distance. There’s Kate, his sometime girlfriend, who loves Joe desperately, and still tries to win his heart, even though she’s beginning to realize it’s impossible. And there’s Joe’s daughter, Michelle, who’s totally devoted to her father, and can’t understand why he never spends any time with her.

Jessica Lange

I should have said there are four women who are important to Gideon. The last is Death, who appears to the director as a female wraith draped in white. They sit together in a backstage netherworld filled with showbiz paraphernalia, Joe right at home at a dressing room table, gazing into the mirror and talking about the mistakes he’s made, the people he’s mistreated. He’s full of remorse, but he doesn’t seem to be able to change his ways. They chat, they laugh, they flirt. Joe is definitely attracted to this beautiful woman in white. For all the film’s high energy and brash theatricality, it’s actually deeply introspective. All That Jazz is a melancholy meditation on life and death.

The director loses patience with his star.

But that’s not all it is. All That Jazz is also wildly entertaining, with energetic performances, breathtaking visuals, and stunning choreography. The first dance sequence, an open audition set to On Broadway, shows Gideon on stage with hundreds of performers, all trying to make an impression. It’s a virtuoso piece of filmmaking, breathtakingly shot and edited, and it pulls us right into the director’s world. Later we see Joe the choreographer take a paper thin song that he would’ve liked to cut completely and turn it into a show-stopper. The producers start sweating as they realize he’s transformed an innocuous ditty into an excuse for an erotic tour de force. Then there are the final hallucinatory dance numbers that close the film, Joe watching from his hospital bed as his wife, girlfriend and daughter perform brutally ironic riffs on Broadway shows. And extending the showbiz metaphor, as the patient lies buried under bandages and tubes, he sees that his visions are directed by himself, a cynical, detached taskmaster, descending from above on a crane to complain that his star blew the last take.

Bob Fosse died of heart failure at the age of sixty. Apparently he saw it coming. One of the most disturbing things about All That Jazz is the main character’s awareness that he’s pushing himself way too hard, and his apparent acknowledgement that he can’t live any other way. While the incidents we see on the screen may not directly align with the facts of Fosse’s life, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he was using the movie to talk about himself. And more than anything else, that’s what makes this film so moving. Through the movie, Bob Fosse is trying to tell us who he was. Whatever faults he may have had, in All That Jazz he was trying to come clean.

*
They weren’t the first. Jacques Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg was an early attempt to rethink the film musical. And on stage, Stephen Sondheim was pushing the genre in a whole new direction.

Death raises her veil.