All That Jazz (with Demi Adejuyigbe)

And action.

Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a

genre-bending, mind-bending LSD trip of a meta-meta meta

dance and music film.

As always, I'm Chris Winnerbauer, joined by Lizzie Bassett and a special guest.

Lizzie, I'm going to kick it to you, though, so you can introduce our friend.

That's right.

We have an extremely special guest today.

It turns out that this movie we're talking about, All That Jazz, is, I believe, one of his favorite movies.

He is a writer, comedian, podcaster, musician, just extremely funny and smart person.

We are honored to have him on the show.

We've got Demi Adejuibe here, and he's also currently touring with a live show.

Demi Adejuibe is going to do one backflip.

Sir, welcome.

Hello.

Thank you so much for having me.

Of course.

I'm honored.

This is my favorite podcast.

I love this movie so much.

I know so little about it, but I'm also just excited.

I'm excited to be a voice on the podcast, which is going, what?

That's crazy.

And offer nothing else of worth.

Well, we're extremely excited to have you here.

And also, I was so excited to talk about this movie with you.

I didn't know anything about it either.

And then as I was getting into the research, I was like, oh, no, what am I going to do to him?

I mean, I don't think you can ruin this movie for me any more than Bob Fossey ruined it himself.

Well, I won't.

I won't.

Bob Fossey is both the best thing about this and the worst thing about it, as I think we will learn getting through it.

All right.

Well, let's get into it.

Demi, had you seen this movie before?

And what were your thoughts and feelings upon re-watching it?

Yeah, I've seen this movie, I think,

twice before, watching it again the other day with friends and prepped for this.

And

I think the first time I saw it was shortly after like COVID broke out.

And so it was very like, I'm home in a fugue stay already a little depressed and this movie didn't help.

But it is the kind of movie that sticks with you and sort of like leaves a sinking feeling in your gut for a while after it.

And so I couldn't stop thinking about it.

I watched it again with with a friend years later, and I just, I think there's so much of the movie that, like, the second time you watch it just feels even worse.

And you're like, oh, this was happy, and now it's sad.

But I, both times, you're just blown away by the inventiveness and like the sort of the self-reflexiveness of it.

Just to make a movie about your own flaws and have it be a masterpiece and then also succumb to those flaws just feels a little like insane.

It feels mythological in a way.

I've always really admired this movie, and I think it changed my life in many ways in that it inspired me to start dancing again and to quit smoking all at once.

So huge influence on me.

Wow.

Amazing, Christopher.

Yeah, I love all that jazz.

My dad was a big fan of this movie.

You know, the scene where all the sound drops out and it's just the Foley as they're doing the table read.

He, for whatever reason, he would always talk about, oh, that scene's so inventive, blah, blah, blah.

And so I watched it probably middle school, high school, did not fully appreciate it at all.

And then have re-watched it a few times over the year.

And now it's maybe my favorite movie about the cre like the horror of the creative process.

And one of my favorite scenes upon re-watching it is when he's watching the television critic of the stand-up, which is obviously like the Lenny Bruce corollary.

And you can tell he agrees with everything she is saying.

And that I relate to that very much now.

Whenever I get negative reviews, those are the only ones that I know are right.

And all the positive ones are written by idiots on anything.

And yeah, and now as a dad, the scenes with his daughter resonate in a way that they didn't before.

And this movie, the influences are across, you know, television and film are so obvious.

I mean, Demi, we saw that you had written a letterbox review of Malcolm X, uh, referencing our coverage of it.

And there's like this, there's a Malcolm X connection here two ways.

Marvin Wirth produced Lenny, which is Lenny Bruce's film directed by Bob Fossey, which is what this, the movie he's editing in all that jazz is that movie.

And Marvin Worth would go on to produce Malcolm X.

And then obviously you have the Dolly shot leading Joe Gideon.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

I didn't think about that.

Right.

Which is what Spike Lee does in Malcolm X 14 years later as he's approaching.

Well, it also looks very much like the famous Jaws shot, which, of course, is Roy Scheider in both shots.

The Dolly Zoom, yeah, that he does earlier.

Yeah.

And then obviously like the Sopranos and the Dream sequences of Tony match very much the hospital stuff here.

So I love this movie.

It's great.

I loved it upon rewatching it.

I agree.

It's so bleak.

It's like so upbeat and yet bleak at the end.

So fantastic film.

All right.

Well, I agree with both of you.

I'd never seen this before.

I'm thrilled to have watched it.

I watched it twice.

And same thing, Demi.

The first time I was like, whoa, where is this going?

The second time I was like, oh, no, I know where it's going.

And yeah, really blown away by it.

I want to read something that I think really encapsulates what is so bizarre about this movie.

Wild that someone could make a portrait of their own life that is so self-reflexive that it feels unpretentious and wholly critical while making decisions in the process of that project that suggest a total disconnect from the feeling your audience is going to leave with.

It's as magnificent and fascinating as it is truly sociopathic.

Demi, do you know where I got that?

I do.

Halfway through, I was like, wait a minute, did I say this?

I am obsessed with your letterbox reviews.

Thank you.

And honestly, reading your letterbox review of this movie is what made me want to watch it.

And then going back and reading that again, I just think you absolutely nailed what is so strange about this movie.

It is magnificent.

And I just, I think it's very fascinating to think about people who watch this movie without knowing anything of Bob Fosse and are just like, wow, what an interesting fictional story.

And then to be told, no, this is him going, here's where I've been, here's where I'm going.

And then just going, anyway, bye-bye.

Well, get ready for him to deny that.

Oh, really?

Okay.

Well,

interesting.

But yes, 100%.

This is definitely autobiographical, regardless of what Bob Fossey may say.

All right, before we get into it, I do just want to say

I think Bob Fosse is amazing.

I think he is an unbelievable director, obviously, unbelievable choreographer.

Cabaret is one of my favorite movies ever made.

The reason that I'm saying this as like a caveat at the top of this episode is because a lot of what we're going to talk about today is not going to paint Fosse in the most flattering light, but then neither does all that jazz and he made it.

So let's get get into it.

The main sources for today are all his jazz, The Life and Death of Bob Fossey by Martin Gottfried, and Fossey by Sam Wasson.

I also have to give a huge shout out to our researcher, Jesse, who did a phenomenal job on this episode.

She really waded through just so much information.

And she's now a self-described Bob Fossey apologist.

Interesting for this movie to turn someone into an apologist to Bob Fosse.

True, seriously, and especially the research too.

Jesse, what's wrong with you?

All right, basic information directed by, of course, Bob Fosse, written by Robert Allen Arthur and Bob Fossey, starring Roy Scheider, Ann Reinking, Leland Palmer, Ben Vereen, Jessica Lang, and many more.

Produced by Dan Melnick and Robert Allen Arthur, among others.

The IMDb logline is director slash choreographer.

Bob Fossey tells his own life story as he details the sordid career of Joe Gideon, a womanizing, drug-using dancer.

So yeah, I mean, I guess everybody agrees this is autobiographical except for Bob Fosse, as we will get to.

Yeah.

It was released December 20th, 1979, and it's rated R for, I think, obvious reasons.

So many more boobs in this than I had anticipated.

Boobs, drugs, everything.

It's also, I think that's like the funniest use of nudity in movie, in a movie I've seen in a while, which is sort of like, of course, this would never get made.

Why would you do that?

There goes the family audience.

Like, airplane the orgy.

I don't even understand what that show is.

Yeah.

And you don't need to.

All right.

Since all that jazz is, as we are discussing, pretty much all about Bob Fosse, we're going to spend some time going through his biography because it all ties back into what you see in the movie.

So Robert Louis Fossey was born June 23rd, 1929 in Chicago, named after Robert Louis Stevenson.

He was the fifth out of six kids.

And his father, Cyril Fossey, had attempted a career in vaudeville before becoming a Hershey chocolate salesman.

His mother had been an extra in operas.

She literally was like a spear carrier in the background before settling down to sell magazines over the phone.

Now she and Cyril both had heart problems, both died of heart disease, I believe, which Bob and his siblings did all seem to inherit.

Fosse later equated his father to Willie Lohman from Death of a Salesman, saying, he was always a glad hand, always pretending to be up, but he was a very prejudiced man, and we never got along after I started asking questions that went beyond how to catch a ball.

He also revealed later in 1960 when his mother died that they found out his father had been secretly seeing another woman for many, many years.

So hence the Willie Lohman reference.

His father was also hopeful that Fossey would go into show business.

Cyril had briefly had a song and dance act with his own brother.

His brother had died and now he was kind of trying to replace his brother with a very young Bob Fossey.

At nine years old, his parents offered Bob the chance to join a dance school.

He took it and by 13, he was professionally dancing on the vaudeville circuit.

However, it was a lot more Gypsy Rosalie than it was Shirley Temple.

He found himself performing at some of the seedier clubs on the vaudeville and burlesque circuit where strippers would, quote, turn him on right before he got on stage.

Of course, we see a version of this in all that jazz.

And just a reminder, he's a child when this is happening.

Just a warning, like there's going to be more discussion of some of this across the episode.

Sorry, Demi.

No, it's to be expected.

It's in the movie.

Yeah,

what you see in the movie really happened.

Perhaps most disturbingly at 15 years old, he quote-unquote dated a 30-year-old woman.

Of course, that is not dating.

I think it's safe to say this lady was a sexual predator.

When her husband filed for divorce, he cited four boys that she had slept with, including Bob Fossey.

So even though he was earning money as a dancer, he also kept up his grades, had extracurricular activities, and was president of his class.

He told Rolling Stone, once I'd established the standard, I couldn't get out of it.

I was a good kid, so I had to be a good kid.

You're trapped by your own publicity.

I think it's wild that that's how he felt at like 15 years old.

Yeah.

I feel like it's that sort of like early set of expectations that pushes people to be like perfectionists when they decide to create.

Like they think creating starts to become this thing that's like, I'm escaping from getting to do this thing.

I'm getting to do it on my own terms, but because it's on my own terms, it's like, it's got to be perfect.

Like they haven't gotten completely away from the real problem.

Totally.

Well, he also had a tap dance routine with another boy, and that boy was basically just like he was a perfectionist at that point.

Like he would make them practice over and over and over again in the mirror until they were doing the exact same moves.

So awful to

have that curse so early.

I know.

Can I also just say, did Matthew Wiener steal a little bit for Don Draper?

Hersey Chocolate, salesman in Hersey, Pennsylvania, lived in a whorehouse, raised in these CD strip joints, goes on to have a womanizing career in a

demanding industry.

I don't know.

Just

throwing it out there.

I'm like, it just feels like this movie is so influential to entire swaths of Prestige TV that it's like, we'll just be like, wait a minute, that's from this.

That's from this.

Well, I think you even called out Bojack Horseman in your life.

Which is just straight up like, they want you to know it's all that jazz.

Right.

So potentially more similarities to Don Draper, I think.

In 1945, at 17, Fossey enlisted in the the Navy, but before he made it to boot camp, World War II was over.

He transferred to the Navy Special Services and Entertainment Division, where he stayed for about two years.

Then he moves to New York City with dreams of becoming the next Fred Astaire.

He meets and marries his first wife, Marianne Niles, at this point, who is also his dance partner.

However, as I'm sure you can tell from this movie, all of his relationships are short-lived.

They don't seem healthy.

The women are all very happy.

Not, I shouldn't have slept with her.

I should have called you first.

That's always the line.

In 1949, he and his wife were featured dancers in the Broadway musical Dance Me a Song.

A woman named Joan McCracken was one of the stars, and she and Fosse began fooling around pretty much immediately.

She was gorgeous, funny, very talented, and 10 years Fosse's senior.

It's interesting, given the past history.

She was also kind of a big shot.

She had a contract with Warner Brothers and considered Truman Capote a personal friend.

I saw somewhere that she was maybe one of the influences for Holly Go Lightly.

So though they tried to keep it a secret, his wife found out pretty quickly and then had to spend the entire run of the show being upstaged by the woman her husband was cheating on her with.

He and Niles eventually divorced and he went on to marry Joan McCracken in 1952.

She was an enormous artistic influence on him.

She is the one who convinced him to take a year off from dancing, go study at the American Theater Wing, which I think really helped him open himself up to more directing and choreographing.

He continued performing and even had a contract with MGM, which led him to a small role in Kiss Me Kate in 1953, but more importantly, a chance to choreograph a 45-second number.

And this reportedly caught the eye of Jerome Robbins, of course, of Westside Story and New York City ballet fame, who was co-directing a new musical called The Pajama Game.

Fossey got the job as choreographer, his first for a full Broadway musical, and he ended up winning the Tony for it.

However, there is another version of this story.

Robbins' co-director was George Abbott, who had also been McCracken's director on Me and Juliet.

He said she never stopped talking about Bob, and so he gave him the job because of her.

Probably both and, but according to Hal Prince in Lisa Joe Sigola's biography of Joan, he said she was single-handedly responsible for getting Bobby Fosse his first job.

So who knows?

He had a very signature style right away, and here is Bob Fossey himself explaining it to Dick Cavett in 1979.

I started with hats because I began losing my hair very early.

So I began wearing hats and began playing with them.

And I don't have what the ballet dancers call a turnout.

So I started turning my feet in, and I guess that's the style they talk about.

I think it's so interesting that he just chose to accentuate all the things that were technically wrong with him, and that became what he's most known for.

I've also never seen Bob Fosse talk himself, I'm realizing now.

And it like Sam Rockwell was great casting in Fossey Verdon.

I was like, oh, that is, yeah, that's exactly what he looks like.

It's like Sam Rockwell, Jim Henson.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So over the next two decades, Fossey would be nominated for nine more Tony, taking home five, all for choreography.

Also, during this time, he would leave McCracken behind, both professionally and romantically, all while she secretly battled diabetes.

He met and fell for another dancer, Gwen Verdon, played by, of course, Michelle Williams and Fosse Verden, if anybody's watched it, who he was directing in Damn Yankees.

They had an affair, most likely for years, before he and Joan finally divorced in 1959.

Joan died of a heart attack in 1961, and Fosse never visited her while she was sick and didn't even attend her funeral.

Instead, he waited across the street and watched as her coffin was carried out.

That is literally what happens in every...

cliché funeral scene.

I'm like, you can't do that for real.

What do you mean?

He's standing in the rain with a black umbrella just watching her coffin.

Behind a tree.

Yeah.

He's really weird about sickness and death, which I think we'll see across this episode.

And that's so strange because he's obviously fascinated by it.

I mean, that's all this movie is about.

Gwen Verdon would later say, years from now, you'll read how Bob enhanced so many lives, which he did.

But I'm going to tell you Bob's real tragedy.

Nobody, not one of us except Joan, was ever able to enhance his.

A lot of people think The Angel of Death, played by Jessica Lang and all that jazz, is a version of Joan McCracken.

And is the enhancement just the idea that Joan is the only person who got him like what he loved, like a job or work?

I don't know.

I mean, I think that she's one of the first people to really push him or to even make him understand that he could be something beyond just a dancer.

I think she saw the potential in him to be much more of a creator and really pushed him to explore that.

And then he ditched her.

Yeah.

So Fosse and Verden married in 1960.

They had their daughter, Fosse's only child, Nicole, in 1963.

And though they remained married until Fosse's death, they formally separated in 1971 because it was reportedly during the filming of Cabaret when Verden walked in on him with multiple German girls that she had had enough.

Well, that's research.

It's cabaret.

Sorry, you're right.

So Germans are coming.

I love cabaret.

Cabaret is fantastic.

That's one of my favorite movies movies ever made.

Yeah.

After separating from Verden, a young dancer in the chorus of Pippin became his protégé and his girlfriend.

We will come back to Anne Ranking.

So Fosse would later tell Rolling Stone, quote, I like to think I was a pretty good-looking guy, and I cared about the women and had a good sense of humor, but also I'd be a fool if I didn't recognize that I had a certain degree of power over them.

Directors are never in short supply of girlfriends.

I just think this touches on what you put in that letterbox review, Demi.

There's this this weird level of awareness here.

I would not be shocked to learn that some of the things that Joe Gideon says are straight up quote.

Like I, the moment where it's like, I wish you weren't so generous with your cock, and he's like, that's good.

I should use that.

I'm like, there's no way that didn't happen for real in some fashion of this like show or this movie.

I agree.

Yeah, he wrote that down until, and then he's like, now I have the chance to use it in the screenplay.

as the exact scene that it already happened.

Yeah, it's like

the walk-hard, like, wait, generous with theory.

It's like, do not write a song like this.

Yeah, exactly.

So in addition to cheating on every woman he ever dated, Fosse was known for being particularly mean and harsh on young, attractive dancers.

It sounds like most people were willing to put up with this because they felt like the ends justified the means, but this is one thing that I think this movie shies away from a bit more than it could have is that he could be really cruel.

And maybe that's because of Roy Scheider, but I don't know.

I think they, you know, obviously it's it's him making it, so I get it, but they don't show as much of that as I think was present.

I wonder if they wanted it tempered a little bit so you kind of like joke and feel bad at the end.

Because it does feel like there's that one scene where he's like, I can't make you a good dancer or a great dancer, but I can make you better.

And then,

see, it was better.

And it's like, that just feels like the lightest version of a critique that you could give.

And you know that that's not what he was saying.

No.

It's whiplash light.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Like they pull back on that moment for sure with Victoria.

So in 1973, he became the first person ever to win a Tony, two of them actually for Pippin, an Oscar, best director for Cabaret, and an Emmy for Liza with a Z,

all in the same year.

Almost immediately, though, he had a nervous breakdown, checking himself into a psychiatric hospital.

Ann Ranking was there for this episode, and she said that he also had a grand mal epileptic seizure.

She told the New Yorker, there was really a psychiatric issue with him.

You get to a certain point in your life and you think you can do it all and you do do it all and then you have to top yourself.

Doesn't help that his dance style looked a little grandmolly as well.

Sorry.

Is he seizing?

No, he's just dancing.

It's fine.

It does seem like even this early, he was expressing concerns about being left alone, feeling that that may be dangerous.

And yet, just a few days later, he left the clinic to begin working on two massive projects, one of which Chris mentioned at the top of this.

Directing the Lenny Bruce biopic Lenny, starring Dustin Hoffman, and choreography for the new Broadway musical Chicago, which Gwen Verdon was starring in.

By summer of 1974, in the midst of both projects, he had a pretty fun routine to keep up with all the work.

Here's what he told Rolling Stone: I drank scotch, I did cocaine, and a lot of dexedrin.

I'd wake up in the morning, pop a pill.

After lunch, when I couldn't get going, I'd pop another one.

And if I wanted to work all night, still another one.

But it's not autobiographical.

No, Denny.

Yeah, exactly.

It's different.

No, even though Cliff Montgomery plays Lenny Bruce in the stage version before Dustin Hoffman did, and he plays the stand-up in all that jazz.

Cliff Gorman, by the way, Chris.

Cliff Gorman, excuse me.

Cliff Gorman.

It's coincidence.

It happens all the time.

It's like when they do twin films, but one of the films is my life.

One thing I will mention, Lizzie, they never show him eat in the movie.

That's true.

Unless he's like eating a cigarette butt, which is also an option for him.

It's just cigarettes, even in the shower, dexedrin.

He's injected with a lot of morphine by the end, but he never does, he never eats, consumes water.

He never does anything healthy throughout the entire movie.

I think it's a very conscious choice.

Incredible.

Oh, everything is a conscious choice in this movie.

Yeah.

Of course, Fosse was not indestructible.

Apparently, he had a cough so bad that an assistant editor on Lenny thought his lungs were going to come out.

He also would forget he had a lit cigarette in his mouth and had blisters on his lips from butts that had burned all the way down.

People were like afraid he was burning himself all the time.

So they would try to like swat the cigarettes out of his mouth and sometimes they'd just hit him in the face.

I thought we were going to have a glitter and he was going to fall asleep on the couch and light the house on fire with his cigarette.

That did happen in glitter.

I forgot about that.

Do you think at a certain point he was just so used to people hitting him that he was like, I don't know what that one was for, but I probably deserved it.

Yeah, probably.

Still, he thought this seemed like a good time to get going on his next film.

And now, friends, we have finally arrived at all that jazz, except it's not all that jazzy just yet.

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So his agent Sam Cohn and producer Stuart Oslo pitched him on a novel called Ending, published just a few months earlier from first-time novelist Hilma Wulitzer.

It's about a woman in her early 30s with two young kids whose husband is dying of cancer.

Doesn't exactly scream musical film adaptation, especially when he seemed to have a strange relationship with death.

Yeah, I wonder why they were like, this is your project.

I still don't know.

I'm trying to think of like any other movies around that time that were like, you know, successful and they're like, this is a comp for that.

Nothing's coming to mind.

No, for sure not.

And it's a weird one for him, too.

But anyway, they all read it and they were like, this is yours.

So he was on board and he chose screenwriter Robert Alan Arthur or Bob Arthur to write the script.

Now, Arthur was best known for writing teleplays during the 50s, which of course is the golden age of television.

He was a great writer, but not necessarily a big name.

And I think that appealed to Fosse.

I don't think he wanted somebody who could boss him around.

It sounds like right away they start deviating quite heavily from the novel and they're already inventing their own character.

Because you may have noticed all that jazz is not about a woman whose husband is dying of cancer, nor is that woman credited on the screenplay for this movie.

Yeah, I did think that was strange.

Yeah.

So fast forward to November of 1974, just a few days before Lenny's November 10th premiere, and Fosse was at a table read for Chicago.

His teeth started aching and his chest felt tight.

So during the lunch break, he went to see his doctor, who immediately sent him to the ER because he was having a massive heart attack.

He would have to undergo cardiac bypass surgery.

So, Chris, you kind of alluded to this.

I had always thought that he decided to do all that jazz while he was in the hospital from the heart attack.

Not exactly true.

They had started this project prior to him going in.

However, it does sound like this solidified his desire to make this movie.

I assumed it was from the heart attack, too, because I knew that he had had a big health event around Chicago and Lenny, and I assumed that was the inspiration for this movie.

Sort of.

Less than an hour before going into surgery, Fossey called Arthur to say, We sure picked the right subject, didn't we?

I'm getting a lot of material here.

Wow.

So everything you see Joe doing in the hospital in all that jazz, Fosse was doing in real life.

He was partying, eating, drinking, sexually harassing the nursing staff.

He also managed to have another heart attack while hospitalized, which is not a surprise, I think.

By March of 75, he was back at work on Chicago.

Though while he was out, it sounds like the producers did have conversations about whether the insurance policy would cover him dying as you see them have in all that jazz.

Which is one of the, like, that scene, this time it really stuck out how much that scene.

It's just like the idea of you giving your life to something and then being like, it's probably pretty good if he dies for us.

Like, we want him to die.

You can really see how Fosse feels about his financiers and collaborators in that moment.

Yeah.

That he would hang them out to dry in that way.

It's pretty funny.

I didn't realize this one watching it, but as soon as you said that, they're totally, I think, ripping on that in Tropic Thunder too, when they're like discussing, you know, if he's going to die, that it might be better for the production.

Yeah.

Yeah, the insurance payout.

So all through that year into the fall of 1975, he and Arthur would send pages back and forth of their adaptation.

They started adding in elements of his own hospital stay as well as interviews with healthcare professionals and doctors.

But the big question was, how do they make this thing fun?

Because it was reading very clinical.

Later in the spring, while working on another film, he was spotted carrying around a book.

on death and dying by psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, which of course features heavily in the film.

Also, I didn't know that's where the five stages of grief comes from.

So in March of 1976, he revealed that he and producer Stuart Ostro had fronted the $50,000 for the script and book rights because they'd had a very hard time selling it.

Again, not a surprise, but Paramount had finally agreed to produce it.

He said the script was about, quote, the observance of death, the acceptance of death, recognition of it, plus black humor.

I've invented a character who wants to go out big, so he keeps inventing deathbed speeches.

When he goes, it's without a word.

By late spring of that year, on the advice of a friend, Fossey had decided to make the main character a choreographer, adding in fantastical musical numbers to represent the stages of grief and help them make the more documentary-style parts of their script a whole lot jazzier.

So, this is where it starts to become fully autobiographical, I think.

And he suggested it was at the behest of a friend that it's like, oh, I didn't even think about inserting.

Yeah, good point.

Good point.

No, no, no, it wasn't me.

Yeah, my friend Schmob Massey told me that I needed to make this a little more personal.

So he and Bob Arthur start interviewing friends and family about the time when Fossey had had his heart attacks.

And this is around the time they start calling it all that jazz, which of course is a line from Chicago.

However, as Fosse and Arthur were getting more jazzed on all that jazz, Paramount was not.

In 1976, they let their option lapse.

So they brought it to Dan Melnick at Columbia Pictures.

And the head of Columbia Pictures was Fosse's former agent, David Begelman.

So this should be a slam dunk, right?

No problems here.

Depends on how they left that relationship.

I don't think people leave relationships with Bob Fossey very well.

Probably not.

Begelman was painfully aware of what a pain in the ass Bob Fosse could be.

We will cover Fosse's directorial debut, Sweet Charity, at some point.

It was not a smooth production, and they actually pulled him off of it and recut it without him, I think to the film's ultimate detriment.

That was a different studio, but he had quite a reputation.

I think he was in sort of director's jail after that, and Cabaret kind of pulled him back out.

And it kind of ties into the, he's recutting the stand-up in the movie over and over again.

And then the people in California say, all the overages were worth it.

You're such a genius.

You know, every extension was worth it.

If he's, you know, relitigating that first film.

Oh, I think he definitely is.

Also, as we've discussed, this movie does not exactly scream Blockbuster's success.

Regardless, I think Melnick was able to convince...

Begelman to go for it.

And so Columbia was on board.

But it wasn't just the money people, as Fosse called them, who were nervous about the project.

They were also having a really tough time attaching a leading man.

Why do you think this was just really not appealing to so many big stars?

Is it that it's not a likable character?

I don't know, because there are so many of those in the 60s and 70s, and

these auteur-driven prestige pictures that I don't fully buy that necessarily.

I would imagine if you were to read it, it feels like two movies shoved together, right?

The first hour outside of the vignettes with Jessica Lang feel like a pretty grounded

70s new wave sort of film.

And then the back half is a total musical bonanza.

And so maybe it was jarring, you know, upon reading it.

I wonder also, it's like, he probably didn't have the best reputation as a guy to work with.

And it's probably the kind of movie where you're like, so we're not going to have a good time working together.

And I'm not going to have a good time living in this character.

And it's maybe a little too close.

And I'm playing him.

And he's the ultimate authority on him.

So I gotta

follow him and study him.

I mean, it would scare the hell out of me.

I would not want to do this.

Or there could be concerns that it was going to be like a hagiography.

You know, am I going to join this and play a version of him that feels like

he's telling the only version of, obviously it becomes warts and all, but you know what I'm saying?

There could be concern that it would be viewed as some sort of puff piece or something like that.

Yeah.

I also don't know how much the script changed between when these people were reading it and when it happened.

But any guesses on who was considered for the part?

79?

We're in about like 1976, 77 right now.

Robert De Niro?

Yes, Demi, you got it.

You got to consider him for everything at this era.

That's right.

That's right.

However, he was unavailable.

He'd just, of course, done Godfather 2 and Taxi Driver.

I think the Deer Hunter might have even been in production or on the horizon at this point.

Other names, this one's fun, Warren Beatty.

That's, he'd be a little like, wait a minute, am I, is this me also?

Yeah.

Wait a minute.

Well, here's the best part about this.

He reportedly asked if it was possible for Joe Gideon to not die at the end.

Oh, my God.

That's good.

It's very shocking.

He can live, right?

He can still change his ways.

Yes.

Like the ghost of Christmas futures.

Yeah.

They're like, don't worry.

We steal the body bag.

He's still alive.

He winks at the end.

He breathes.

Yes.

Great.

Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, who really liked the script, but still turned down the role because, according to Sam Wasson's biography, once with Fosse was enough.

I was going to say.

Yeah.

Also, Keith Carradine, which is interesting.

I guess he looks more like a dancer than some of the other ones, so I could sort of understand.

He's built more like Scheider.

Like Scheider's really built for it, I feel.

Yeah, he is.

But, guys, by September of 1977, they had cast the role.

Joe Gideon would be played by, and I'll give you a hint, it's not Roy Scheider.

No.

You're never going to guess this because it makes absolutely no sense.

shider's jaws co-star richard dreyfus i almost said richard dreyfus as a joke i swear to god yeah

can you imagine that's crazy maybe he can move i don't know he can't i mean

yeah which is part of the problem

he's not live like shider dancers are i don't remember him at least being so but he can get live sure that's anyone can get life that's right i say again as i refuse to do any kind of exercise Right.

Yeah, Demi, what's your take on this movie with Richard Dreyfus as the lead?

I don't see that.

I don't see the close encounters, Richard Dreyfus doing this at all.

It's that era.

I could see him like, I could see him looking the part.

And again, he doesn't have to dance that much, but I think...

Joe Gideon is a guy that you look at and you are immediately like, I can see that people like him, but I can also see that he is a miserable and like depressed and like ill guy.

Whereas I think Richard Dreyfus is at this era, just I don't believe that of him.

So I don't know.

Yeah.

Well, so a couple of weird things to your point,

he's young.

Like a part of the reason why I think it wouldn't really sell is that he's only 30 years old and Fossey was 50 at this point.

I think he was around 45, maybe when he had the heart attack.

Also, he's best known for Jaws.

Neither the Goodbye Girl nor Close Encounters had come out yet, though I think he had filmed both of them.

And like American Raffiti even earlier, right?

He admittedly did not have the body for it or the experience, but Fosse liked his spirit.

Liked it.

Did Fossey like his spirit?

Because he was like, I can beat it out of this one.

Exactly.

Other important casting.

Leland Palmer as Audrey Paris.

I think we can all agree on Gwen Verdon.

Gwen Verdon.

Yeah.

What's your sort of, I mean, what was your reaction to her in this?

She is unbelievable to the point that I was like, what else has she been in?

And it's this and like one other biopic.

And I'm like, that's crazy.

But I guess she's more of a stage actress.

But she is such, her dancing is incredible.

The way that she engages with Joe feels like it's so lived in and makes me just go a little, like, you can kind of get a little more of their relationship by the way that they interact.

And you're like, I understand why he, why she sticks around.

I also understand why she's like, I fucking hate this man.

But like, yes, I think my favorite scene, aside from when it's like, actually, no, my favorite scene with her is when she is, when we first meet her and she's arguing with Joe while dancing and still doing the routine.

Yes.

Is it's so good.

But then the scene where he's in the hospital and they cross-cut between like her her crying and then telling the cast is like, he's doing fine.

He was joking around in the hospital and like dancing with him.

I'm like, that is someone who has had to parent a child with this person.

It's just like, I know how to lie and keep spirits high.

It felt so, I was like, she's so unbelievable.

I agree.

And she had worked with him quite a bit before.

She'd been in Pippin, so she was familiar with Bob Fossey.

She looks a little like Gwen Verdun also.

She does.

That moment at the end, even she does so much with her face face when she doesn't have dialogue, so much with the connection she has to him.

Like in that scene, you referenced Chris, where there's, you know, really no dialogue, and everyone else is sort of like laughing and focused on the script.

And she is still so laser-focused on him, even throughout that sequence.

And then at the very end, where he says, at least I don't have to lie to you anymore, and she sticks her tongue out.

It's just like, it breaks my heart.

I think she's incredible in this.

So we've also got Urzabet, I'm probably mispronouncing that, Urzabette Foldy as Gideon's daughter, Michelle.

And to cast this role, he did cattle calls where he would tell all the dancers to run across the stage and jump into his arms.

And only about two of the girls actually did it.

She was one.

Then it was down to her, who was, she was 12 at the time, and a student at an American ballet theater and another girl.

And he bent down and asked them each to light his cigarette.

One girl flicked the match and lit the cig like it was no problem, which I love.

Like, what has that girl been up to?

Foldy took the cigarette out of his mouth, gently lit it, and then put it back and he hired her immediately after that i feel like the other girl he was like you've seen too much yeah you know he's like you're me back when i was in these cabaret shows we need someone who hasn't been ruined by a joe gideon type to show them getting ruined by

yeah ben vereen as o'connor flood i love him in this i he's so yeah dude just his like him in that final number i watched it like three times in a row he's just so beautiful beautiful to watch.

I was jealous of him.

I was like, I want to be that guy.

I was just like, I want to play that role.

It's so fun and so, like, in this kind of, it's just showy, and he gets to like sort of have fun with it.

Yeah.

Well, and it's such smart casting, too, because I think Fosse knew he would have to carry the, even though that last scene, right, is about

accepting his faith.

Ben Vereen has to carry it musically and in terms of dance.

Yes.

Right.

And Schneider just gets to kind of exist behind him and enjoy the osmosis of that performance, which is such a smart move and it's such a great scene.

It's so good.

I love it.

Incredible.

Cliff Gorman, you mentioned, as Davis Newman, who I think we can agree is Lenny Bruce.

As you said, Chris, he actually had played the part of Lenny Bruce in the Broadway production, but he lost out to Dustin Hoffman for the film.

So I can't tell if this is like an I'm sorry from Bob Fosse or like a continued embarrassment of, you know, casting him here.

I don't know.

Jessica Lang as Angelique, the angel of death.

This is only her second role after King Kong.

Really?

I think so, yeah.

Wow.

Wasn't it the Dino de Laurenti's King Kong

too from like 76?

Yes.

Yeah.

He told Life magazine about her.

When you think something's about to happen to you in a car or on an airplane coming close to the end, this is a flash I'll get.

A woman dressed in various outfits, sometimes a nun's habit.

That whole hallucinatory thing.

It's like the final fuck.

It is a different approach to the angel of death, you know, in an interesting way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Naturally, she had also had a bit of a fling with Bob Fossey prior to this because who hadn't?

It feels like his casting of this was just going through his little black book and being like, I think she could do that.

Yeah.

Well, literally, which brings me to Anne Rein King, who, of course, we mentioned.

She was a Tony-nominated actress and dancer who had obviously worked with Fossey quite a bit previously and had been his actual long-term partner for six years at this point.

Their relationship had ended in 1978.

I think they had kind of recently broken up when she was auditioning for the role, but they remained close and on good terms.

Of course, even though she is playing a version of herself in this movie, he made her audition over and over and over again.

Oh my God.

What an insane person.

Yes.

I don't know.

That's not how you would do it.

Can you do it again?

Yeah.

To the point where Melnick actually pulled him aside and said, Bobby, you are torturing this girl.

You and I know that she is going to end up doing the part.

Stop doing this because it's very destructive to the character.

Her take was it was just par for the course.

Good for Melnick, though.

Yeah.

Now, too many other people to name, but he had several of his actual collaborators genuinely play themselves, including Lenny and all that jazz editor Alan Heim.

That is the real editor playing himself in this movie.

Oh, wow.

As well as stage manager Phil Friedman and several more.

Now, to audition the strippers that molest young Joe in the movie, Fosse did something very strange.

He had Bob Arthur stand in for him, and he instructed the strippers to be more and more aggressive and sexually disturbing towards him.

Of this moment, Anne Reinking said, he went back in time.

It was like watching someone almost relive it and with a hard edge I had never seen before.

Apparently, Bob Arthur kind of tried to just take it in stride, but it was very weird.

Now, because he's Fossey and he cannot help himself, he took on another Broadway gig, which pushed pre-production back.

Now, why did he do this?

Probably because his arch rival, Michael Bennett, had just done a chorus line, which was a huge success, and he was determined to beat him.

But shortly after that show opened, Fossey again checked himself into a psychiatric hospital, and again, there was concern that he could hurt himself.

But don't worry, guys, he checked out a few days later to start all that jazz.

We we should also mention John Lithgow is very fun and he's so good at this as well.

As I can't remember the character's name, Lucas Sargent playing, I think, is his Lucas Sargent, and he looks

and kind of acts in a way that I'm like, oh, is this John Early doing this?

Yes, I wrote it down.

It's John Early

Lithgow.

It's so good.

I love him.

He was not the first choice.

We'll get to who was shortly.

Early rehearsal started in April with a production start date of 1978.

But there was just one problem.

Richard Dreyfus told his old buddy Roy Scheider over dinner one night, I don't like Fosse and he does not like me.

Why do you think these two characters were not clicking?

I don't know.

That's fair.

You don't have to know a lot about Richard Dreyfus.

I actually, I'm like, I don't know a lot about Richard Dreyfus.

I didn't either.

And I would like to know more because this is an interesting sort of moment in his career.

He was having a terrible time convincing himself he could ever have been a dancer.

To quote him, he said, I can't get up there with my big Jewish ass and try to be a dancer.

The second problem is Bob Fosse was mean.

He was so mean.

Richard Dreyfus repeatedly was asking for a softer approach, not just for himself, but also for the other dancers.

And Fosse's response to that was basically like, so you think I don't know how to direct this movie?

And Richard Dreyfus did have a pretty bad cocaine addiction at this point.

He was kind of barreling barreling towards a personal rock bottom, even as he was ascending to, you know, a professional high.

And there wasn't enough for both of them is the thing.

Exactly.

Yeah.

But I just,

I just wonder, like, shouldn't that have brought them closer?

Yeah.

It's like, we're not so different, you and I.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I think, though, if you look at the successful directors that Dreyfus had worked with before this, specifically Spielberg and Lucas, right?

Between Jaws, Close Encounters, and American Graffiti,

relatively gentle on actors, especially compared to someone like Bob Fosse.

You know, I think Lucas especially was like, a little faster, please.

That was the extent of, you know, a directing note.

Well, I think they're, I think, especially Spielberg, like, he's an actor's director, right?

And Bob Fossey really is not, which is not to say that he's not an amazing director.

I think he is, but I don't think he is trying to inspire you to bring out the best of yourself.

I think he wants you to do exactly what he wants you to do.

Yeah.

He is going to manipulate your body or line reading, however needed, because that's what a choreographer does to get the result.

Yeah.

So Richard Dreyfus starts telling people that he wants out, and everybody is having a conniption fit except for one person.

Any guesses on who does not care that Richard Dreyfus wants to lead the production?

Bob Fosse?

Fosse.

Yeah.

He's like, not a problem.

I will just play Joe Gideon myself.

Oh my God.

There it is.

That's probably why I cast him to begin with.

He's like, this guy will drop out.

It'll be too late to replace him.

And I can swoop in.

Okay, so Richard Dreyfus agreed with you.

He wondered if maybe Bob Fosse had always been hoping to push him out in order to do the role himself.

Interesting.

It's so, he's so weird.

He's so crazy.

Is it like he's the Lucas Sergeant where it's like, you need a backup, you need an insurance person there, but really we want to have Bob do this.

Well, no one else wants Bob to do this, which we'll get to, but I want to point out something similar did happen on Cabaret.

He was adamant about wanting to play the role of the MC, even though Joel Gray had originated it on Broadway.

And the producers were like, no, Joel Gray is doing this.

And then he was a huge dick to Joel Gray for that whole production, which we will cover at some point.

But this is not the first time that he has tried to do this.

It feels like his approach to directing is: I don't want to have to direct.

So I can, I'll just do it so that I don't have to direct.

It's like, I don't have to give instructions if I know it.

Man, did you hit the nail on the head?

Yeah, there's going to be more of that.

It's easier for me to do it myself than try to explain it to somebody else is the energy he has.

Yep.

Now, obviously, everyone else, as I said, thinks this is a terrible, terrible plan.

Even Bob Arthur was pretty unsure of it, but he does back Fossey up, though he was the only one and he caught a bunch of shit for it.

Everybody is like, no.

And he's going to kill himself.

Like, like, just he's going to kill him.

Physically, he can't kill him.

You can't do it physically.

It's insane.

Not only is it creatively a very bad idea, it's also a monetary issue because Richard Dreyfus may not have been a huge name, but he was a box office draw.

And, you know, they're losing that.

But he could not put up with Bob Fossey, so he bailed.

Production goes on hold again as they recast the role.

This time, Alan Alda, Gene Hackman, Robert Redford, Ryan O'Neill, Paul Newman, Robert De Niro again, James Kahn, Warren Beatty again, Jack Lemon, and John Voigt were all considered for the role.

Warren Beatty just flips to the very last page.

No, he still dies.

And he just passes again.

There's some good ones in there.

I particularly think Robert Redford or Gene Hackman could have been interesting.

Yeah.

Could Redford have been cruel enough?

Hackman, I can see, off of like Hoosiers or something like that.

I also think whoever Joe is spends like two-thirds of the movie just looking iller and iller.

So it's like you get this like handsome person as a draw, and then it's like, you're not going to see Redford the way you want to see Redford.

Yeah.

That's true.

Put a lot of white paint on him and see if he looks worse.

You can't.

He's still handsome.

So Sam Cohn, Fossey's agent, had one person in mind, though, Dreyfus's Jaws co-star, Roy Scheider.

Melnick, who at this point, I think, had actually ascended to president of Columbia Pictures, felt that Roy Scheider was not lovable enough.

I think this is kind of weird because I, you know, they point out that, oh, he's best known for like tough guys in the French Connection and Klute.

But you look at Jaws and to me, there's, I think, a lot of like sweetness and humanity in that performance.

Yeah, I think it, it does feel like it's on the back of like, he's playing a little bit of those personas as well there, where it's like, you, you kind of come to see him as a lovable guy, even though you're kind of like, ah, he's, I don't know if he's going to get, if he's going to be able to do this.

I can see where they're coming from.

That's true.

It is weird to me that.

They are like, we want a lovable guy.

I'm like, Joe Gideon's not a lovable guy.

But I wonder if they wanted to counter that.

They're reading on the page how abusive this person is.

And they think, well, if we can get somebody who endears themselves to the audience outside of the picture itself.

Someone immensely lovable like John Voigt.

No nice.

Immensely lovable in Midnight Cowboy, John Voigt.

But Fosse liked Scheider.

He thought he looked like a dancer and he had years of theater experience.

Also, he was 45, so much, much closer to Fosse's actual age.

And Scheider loved the script.

So Fossey told him to come to his house every night for a week, read the script, and he would consider him for the part.

He did.

They traded stories back and forth, infusing the character with some of Scheider as well as Fosse.

So he got the part.

But not everyone was convinced.

Bob Arthur apparently had big doubts, and Scheider later told the LA Times people thought Fosse was committing professional suicide by hiring him.

I don't get this at all.

He's Academy Award nominated at this point.

What's the suicide of it?

Like, is it just people didn't like him or or had worked with him?

No, Roy Scheider is, by all accounts, a very nice guy.

Like,

I don't understand this at all.

And I also think they are lucky to have gotten him because he's one of the only people who seems to be able to put up with Bob Fosse in a very specific way.

To me, it has to be a box office thing.

It has to be Roy Scheider's name alone has not drawn people to the box office.

I do think he's a little bit more known as a character actor than the other folks being considered.

If you think about like a Redford.

Yeah.

And he was supporting in both Connection and Clute.

And Marathon Man, for example, you know, behind Hoffman.

And then Jaws was really his first leading.

Production finally began in October of 1978, and it did not sound chill.

As you might imagine, Fosse was a perfectionist about every element of the production.

Reportedly, he would never leave the set.

They ran over budget and out of time, so much so that Sidney Lumet, who was originally supposed to play Lucas Sargent, dropped out and was replaced by John Lithgow.

Oh,

that would have been so cool.

Yeah.

I mean, I love Lithgow and I'll never turn down a Lithgow villain turn.

I love a bitchy Lithgow, which he is in this.

Cliffhanger and this, just two great bitchy Lithgow performances.

So Fossey also wasn't in the best health, but he reportedly wasn't concerned about that.

If he had a chest pain, he would just pop a pill.

And now, guys, I would actually like to ask you to act out a scene from Sam Wasson's biography for me between Bob Fossey and his sound mixer, Christopher Newman.

So I'm going to show you this.

Chris, please read Christopher, the sound mixer.

Demi, obviously, I'm going to have to ask you to play Bob Fosse.

So rude, but understood.

Okay, let me get my hat.

Yeah, go ahead, get your jazz hands and your top hat ready.

Let me set the scene for you.

The crew has been working for hours and they just can't get the exact shot that Bob wants.

So he asks Christopher Newman.

What's going on here?

Why can't we get this?

The crew's tired.

Why are they so tired?

They don't take the same kind of pills you do.

How do you know about the pills?

I've read the script.

Well, don't let it get around.

The script?

Yeah, don't let people read this.

That's my favorite.

What does he think is happening?

Incredible.

Like 10 minutes of the movie is close-ups of a Dexedrin bottle.

By the way, with an address that is like three doors down from his actual address.

Oh my God.

I know.

I love it.

I guarantee you that in the first draft, it was his real address, and they said, you cannot put your real address in.

So he just changed the door, you know, three doors down.

Do you think there's a page in the script that accidentally says like Bob Fosse and like the find and replace didn't work?

Yes.

Scheider was understandably nervous also.

After all, he wasn't really a dancer or a singer.

So for that opening scene, Fossey actually had Scheider wear an earpiece and he was dictating every single thing he wanted him to do.

Oh, God.

I think it takes a really particular actor to be able to deal with that well, not go insane and still turn in what is, I think, a very generous performance i don't know that would drive me nuts i think he had the confidence on the acting side like he knew he he actually may be superior to fosey on that side that he could that's true subvert his ego to him on the dancing side also if he's someone who is constantly like suggested that oh he's not a big enough self for a movie and then doing this he's probably like i need to get like this is a great script it's a great director it's going to be a huge movie I need to put up with this.

It'll be good for my career.

I think that's true.

And I, like, one of the producers even said that he couldn't believe how much Scheider had kind of humbled himself for this.

And it's like, what a sort of horror show to be an actor, to be as successful as he is and to still feel like you have to kind of prostrate yourself in front of Bob Fossey to get this.

Right.

So that theater space that they shoot the opening sequence in, Fossey said they only had it for a couple of days.

That was his excuse for why he needed to direct Scheider with the earpiece.

I don't know if I buy it.

They ended up shooting for, I think, over seven days.

And he used five cameras on that to really capture the documentary style.

I mean, it looks amazing.

I think that opening sequence is incredible.

He was also still obsessed with upstaging a chorus line with this sequence saying, quote, in this audition, I'm going to do in 15 minutes what it takes Michael Bennett two and a half hours to do every night and without dialogue.

Who does he like?

The way that he talks about everything is just like, I'm going to be better than this.

I'm going to ruin this.

I'm like, I know he's a womanizer.

I think he really likes the women in his life.

I think he really, he does.

And I think one of the things I love about his relationship with Audrey is she is revealed as the first person in the movie who actually seems to know him.

And the only one who challenges him, which I think is a little bit of why he's like, okay, I'll keep you around.

And the moments of meaning in his life.

I had written down, you know,

someone so rich and so poor at the same time, the scene with two scenes with his daughter and the second one with his daughter and Katie performing for him.

He does not care about so many of the things being performed for him throughout the movie, and yet he cares about that dance being performed for him.

Yeah, and also just the notion of them like rehearsing something like that, knowing that it's like this is meaningful.

Yeah,

he's somebody who sees through everything as bullshit, and yet that is meaningful.

I think he likes his daughter, and that's a that may be about it.

Well, no, he, I mean, he likes, you know, in terms of the real women in his life, he did stay very close to both Anne Reinking and Gwen Burden all the way up until he died.

So, yeah, there is something there, and they stuck with him, which is interesting.

While filming the opening sequence, however, Bob Arthur started to have a terrible pain in his side.

He told people that Fossey thought he was faking, that Fossey had said he didn't believe him, but he was very much not faking.

He wound up in the hospital with two broken ribs due to how strong his cough was.

And he continued to try and weigh in as a producer on the film from the hospital bed, but Fossey pretty callously disregarded his notes.

He made no effort to visit him until Sam Cohn finally told him the news: Bob Arthur was dying of lung cancer.

Jesus.

On November 20th, 1978, Bob Arthur died at 56 years old.

Fossey heard the news and took a break to smoke a cigarette and then went right back to work.

Oh my God.

To smoke a cigarette while just after learning that your friend, yeah.

I can't even call him cold.

I think it's like it's so different than that.

It feels like he doesn't want

like he feels like succumbing to emotion in some way would ruin him or like would not is a weakness, but just is like, I can't do that.

It's not going to be good for me to open that door.

Well,

that might be exactly it.

It's not going to be good for me to open that door.

Like when you think about the stuff that he went through as a kid, there's very real trauma there.

And even though he is weirdly willing to show it, I don't know that he's actually willing to like tap into certain parts of himself that may be connected to that.

Yeah.

He also doesn't sanctify his own death.

I know the entire number at the end is is entirely in his head.

And then the actual last shot of Bob Fossey in actual life dying features nobody besides the mortician or coroner zipping up the body bag, you know, at the end.

So,

yeah.

I mean, I mentioned this earlier.

And Demi, I think you touched on this just now, but they do lack some of the coldness and cruelty of him in this movie.

I think because it's Roy Scheider, because he's likable, because they really focused on having that.

But let's talk about some of the stuff that happened during filming that really was not okay.

Let's talk about some of the stuff that happened during filming that really was not okay.

He told Keith Gordon, the 17-year-old playing young Joe Gideon, that it would be good if he could, quote, get really hard during the scene because it would look more real.

Obviously, this made Keith super uncomfortable, who then very astutely realized that the panic he was feeling was exactly what Fosse was trying to elicit.

Also, despite having a non-nudity clause in her contract, Fossey pressured dancer Cheryl Clark to take her top off at the end of the Aerotica number.

She walked, wouldn't do it, and was replaced by Sondal Bergman.

Also, as you may have guessed, the open heart surgery was completely real.

They got permission from a patient to film it, but they actually viewed a bunch of different surgeries when they were scouting locations for hospitals.

And the heart surgery was not Bob Fosse's favorite.

His favorite was actually the hip surgery because that was the bloodiest.

As in, like, he wanted to film a hip surgery or?

No, he liked watching them.

Someone said that his favorite thing was if he could see a hip surgery in the morning before going into rehearsals.

Yeah.

That's a whole other thing that I'm like, I didn't even think about that being part of his.

It's not like a thing of his character.

It's just just a thing of bombing.

He just liked it.

Huh.

So over the course of filming, the budget crept up from 6 million to somewhere around 10 million, probably due to Fossey's meticulousness and propensity to reshoot scenes.

And cocaine budget.

Yep, and cocaine budget.

About a week before filming was supposed to wrap Columbia Head of Productions, Frank Price was like, you need to actually show me a budget for the last chunk of this movie.

He said, stop shooting, see what you have, and then figure out what else you need and what it'll cost.

At this point, they did not have Bye-Bye Life.

They didn't have the Angel of Death scenes or the big premiere of New York to LA, which is plain orgy the musical.

The writing was on the wall, though.

They did not have the money to finish the movie, and Columbia was not going to give it to them.

So poor editor Allenheim pulled together an hour-long reel of their best material in two days, and Dan Melnick drove around to all the other studios showing them the reel, which is interesting because he was the president at that point, or he may leave.

This may be where he left and went to 20th Century Fox.

But Warner Brothers liked it.

They still passed.

However, it was Alan Ladd Jr.

at 20th Century Fox who saved the day, agreeing to co-distribute with Columbia.

This guy is one of the most recurring characters in your stories.

And I'm just like, Alan Ladd, you're back.

Laddie, Laddie's back.

So they actually decided who got it, who got domestic and international rights by flipping a coin at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

I hate that.

I don't.

You want to make a movie and you learn some of it comes down to stuff like that.

Well, Alan Ladd won domestic.

I think he had heads.

Great.

It still wasn't quite enough.

So the New York to LA premiere, which was actually supposed to end the film, was cut.

Bye-bye Life was going to be the second to last moment, and then it was going to show how Lucas Sargent was taking all the credit at the New York to LA premiere.

To top it all off, Fosse was getting less and less precise about what he wanted, particularly when it came to Bye-Bye Life, which now had to function as the grand finale.

According to production designer Philip Rosenberg, quote, it was getting quite frightening.

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.

What?

Yeah, there it is.

So production finally wrapped and the edit began.

Any guesses on how post-production with Bob Fosse was?

Smooth.

Harder.

Harder than production would be my guess.

Yeah, a total nightmare.

The edit took more than a year.

Outside of the pirouette sequence from the opening scene, they did not start editing until they'd shot everything.

Even then, Fossey wanted to cut in chronological order, which for this movie feels insane to me.

Well, also, a lot of it plays non-linear.

So there are flash forwards and flashbacks, and obviously the vignettes with the angel of death could theoretically go in a lot of places so yeah i was like what chronological is in like in the way that we see it in the film in the way that they shot it i believe so he was like i want to pull each reel down like

one after the other lined up on the shelf his perfectionism was intensifying he actually went so far as to record his own cough tap dancing and finger snaps for the sound mix instead of using what the actors had done.

So every time you hear Roy Scheider coughing, it is Bob Fossey.

And to your point, Demi, of like, he's not letting them, like, he just wants to do it all himself.

He's literally doing it.

You don't know a cough.

Let me, I got that.

I have the lung cancer cough.

Is it Fosse singing in lieu of Scheider at the end on Bye-bye Life?

Because that cannot be Scheider's voice.

It seems like ADR for sure.

Yeah, I don't know whose voice it is, but I don't think it's Scheider.

No, I mean, Roy Scheider is listed on the soundtrack in Bye-Bye Life, so I think that's him.

What?

Wow.

He sounds amazing.

Roy Schneider, if you're listening from that next place, wherever it might be, my sincere apologies.

I never should have doubted you.

I know this isn't his intention, but like, I'm imagining the cough or like just some of the sounds in the scenes where like the audio drops out and it's just that.

I'm like, it does feel like a really good artistic choice if you know it's Bob Fossey's cough.

But like, that's true.

If you don't know.

He doesn't want you to know.

I don't know.

But he knows.

You know what I'm saying?

That's the level of obsessiveness is he probably thinking like, that's not what the cough sounds like because I hear the cough every time I cough.

So I might as well just use my cough.

He is his only audience that he cares about.

He was also particularly rough on editor Alan Heim, especially since Heim had played himself in the movie.

Fossey was pissed at Heim's performance.

I think he's very funny in Deadpan.

He kept asking to see take after take.

Finally, he kicked a wastebasket across the room and asked how he could have let Heim be so bad at acting, to which Heim replied, I'm not an actor.

And Fosse said, But you are a human being.

I should be able to get a better performance out of a human being.

And Heim replied, Bob, that's the nicest thing you've said to me in two weeks.

This poor, poor man.

Also, his mother had died during the edit process.

And Bob Fosse is like, But why are you bad at acting?

Well, go smoke a cigarette about it and come back.

Oh, God.

If only your mother had died during production, then we could have used that for the performance.

I do think the editing in this movie is like mind-blowing.

It's unbelievable.

I think that the editing is what makes it feel timeless, even though I do think that the Angel of Death vignettes date it a little bit for me personally.

I just, there's something about the costuming there, even though I love the content of those scenes, the first hour of this movie feels extremely modern.

Yeah.

The way he described it is like it's rhythmic the way that he's cutting, but he's not matching the cuts to the beat of the music.

He's focusing on the dancers' bodies and like body parts and, you know, like a flick of a hand or something.

And it just, it's beautiful.

I really, I'm so blown away by the editing in this.

Also, Fosse was obsessed with tightening the movie.

He wanted more and more cuts, but they finally got it done.

Early screenings were understandably very awkward since the material was so autobiographical and so many people were either playing themselves or playing very real people in Fosse's life.

Ann Ranking was concerned that he'd portrayed himself too callously, and his daughter Nicole told him she felt the daughter was, quote, the only one who cared whether he lived or died.

But Fred Ebb of musical super duo Candor and Ebb said, it gave him pleasure to feel he was being betrayed.

He wanted to be the victim.

It was all about Bobby pretending to be honest.

I think that's a really interesting take.

And I don't know if, I think I agree.

I think that's like one of the things where...

Like when he has that conversation with the angel of death, where he kind of admits that saying, I love you, was a lie and he just kind of did it to hurt her.

It's like, yeah, you want, you it's a control thing you want to be like you want to be in a position where you can forgive someone yeah he says it you know i don't know where the bullshit begins and it ends you know he's i think he's expressed that he's almost like insulated himself against a lot of angles of criticism because he goes you know so hard and lizzy i think it's only

by doing a really holistic look that you can say maybe he didn't even go far enough you know what i mean

showing the warrants.

I don't think he could.

Like, I don't think there is a way to do that for yourself.

Someone else would have had to have stepped in.

Yeah.

All that jazz released wide across the U.S.

on December 20th, 1979, and reviews were pretty mixed.

Many said it was egomaniacal.

Others said it had borrowed too heavily from Fellini's eight and a half.

Most people seem to agree that the acting and choreography was phenomenal, but it seems people's issue may have been with Fosse himself.

Variety said, Quote, the film's major flaw lies in its lack of real explanation of what, beyond ego, really motivates Gideon.

I don't know.

I mean, I think it, yeah, I guess I don't have an answer for that.

In my head, it's like greatness, but I think that's just me projecting like what any creator you assume wants, but it's not just

doesn't that tie into ego?

I mean, it's the show must go on.

Like, I just that to me, that is the whole the fact they zip up his body bag, and there's no business on the show.

It's just the show must go.

He is a slave to the show.

That's all he cares about.

That's all that matters.

That's why when somebody dies, they are no longer relevant.

When they get sick, even.

He's just like...

When they get sick, it doesn't matter.

He can't perform.

Exactly.

So if he is sick and he is out, that means he is no longer relevant because he can no longer be part of the show.

I do think it's, you know, in film, we all love movies.

We work in movies.

We love movies so much that it can seem as if there is no life outside of movies.

And I think the same is true for people in musical theater and show business and the circus, you know, whatever type of performing arts you do.

And

if he's not in it or at the center of it, he may as well be dead.

Well, he says that in this.

He's like, the work is all there is, basically, when he's talking to the angel of death.

Yeah.

Exactly.

It's an addiction.

Sometimes you start running and you are just like, well, I have to keep running or else I'm not.

Like, it's that first line where it's like, all there is is life on the wire.

And it's like living is just living on the wire.

Anything else is just waiting.

Yeah.

Also, this was a Christmas release.

That's crazy.

It was a holiday film, Demi.

I don't know.

It was a family holiday film.

Yeah, I guess.

Load up the van and take the kids out to all that jazz.

Yes, my God.

It's like the reverse version of Ebenezer Scrooge.

Like he learns nothing from the angel of death and he dies at the end of the day.

Oh my gosh.

That's true.

Well, Stanley Kubrick loved it.

Of course he did.

Sure.

Yeah.

He did.

He said it was the best film he'd ever seen.

Throughout the press for the film, I referenced this a couple of times.

Fossey kept insisting it was not at all autobiographical.

I think he was trying to mitigate some of the criticism that it was, you know, a massive ego trip.

He's like, it can't be an ego trip if it's not me.

It's clearly not me, guys.

It also can't be an ego trip if I'm saying I'm a piece of shit.

That's a better argument.

Yeah.

Gwen Verden sort of backed him up, saying, I think it's a magnificent film.

I think it has nothing to do with our life and his life.

I guess the way I truly acted was not theatrically right for the story that Bob was telling, which is interesting.

Still, the movie was a financial success.

It grossed roughly $34.8 million on a budget of $12 to $20 million, depending on the source.

Melnick said it wasn't Rambo, but both studios got their money back with some left over for the principals.

Of course, it won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

It was nominated for nine Oscars, winning four, including a much deserved one for Allenheim's editing.

It was nominated for art direction, costume design, film editing, original score, actor in a leading role for Roy Scheider, who was, by the way, beaten by Dustin Hoffman for Kramer vs.

Kramer, which swept the Oscars that year.

Demi, you're shaking your head.

I just, I think Scheider should have gotten it.

And I know that it's like a heavy year, but I'm just, and this isn't any like shade against Kramer versus Kramer.

I'm just like, he's so good in this movie.

It's unbelievable.

I also like,

this was probably just a mistake, but I do think it's interesting.

In Dustin Hoffman's speech, when he wins, he says he refuses to believe that he had beaten all the other actors in the category.

And then he names them all except for Roy Scheider.

Really?

I'm guessing a mistake.

I'm sure it was a mistake.

It also could have maybe been a shot at Fosse in a weird way if he still didn't like him, you know, all those years later after Lenny.

I guess we'll never know, unless Dustin Hoffman wants to call in and tell us.

He's like, yes, that was on purpose.

Yeah.

Also nominated for cinematography, was nominated for directing, but of course he did not win.

Best Picture and Writing.

And again, this is nominated for original screenplay.

So I think they changed it so much that there was no need to even credit the original book.

I feel like if you ask Bob Fossey about that book, he'd be like, what is that?

Like,

there's no way.

Never heard of it.

So on September 23rd, 1987, Bob Fossey was out walking with Gwen Verdon.

They were on their way to see the premiere of the Revival of Sweet Charity in Washington, D.C., which Fossey had directed, but Bob never made it to the theater.

He collapsed and died of a massive heart attack at the age of 60.

Just three years earlier, he'd told Rolling Stone, What'll happen is I'll probably die in some hospital with no glory at all, no theatrics, a B death.

But who's going to direct it?

I don't trust any of them.

Wait, when did he say that?

Because it's crazy to go, this isn't a biography, but it is what's going to happen.

He's like, it's not a biography because it hasn't happened yet.

That was three years earlier.

So that would have been in 1983.

So only about, you know, four years after all that jazz.

It's 100% it's autobiographical.

I mean, like, there's no way it wasn't.

I think he was just trying to mitigate some of the commentary that came out about the movie, you know.

Which is so funny because I do think, like, with hindsight now, I think if Bob Fosse lived a lot longer and saw like the legacy of his film, he'd be like, yeah, that was me.

I did.

It is me.

Totally.

Well, that's it.

Wow.

What went right?

I mean, so much.

Like, for me, this is probably top five movie about obsession, top five movie about the creative process, about the agony and the ecstasy of show business.

Another reference, Demi, I don't know if you agree with this, but Bye-bye Life always reminds me of Around the World by Daft Punk, just the way that they shoot the circular stage.

I don't know if you guys remember that music video.

Yeah, I don't know why.

It just always reminds me of that.

I think this is an amazing movie.

I think in the realm of self-referential

meta stories, this is about as good as

you can get personally.

But I would like to give mine to Roy Scheider.

I miss Roy Scheider.

He is one of my favorites.

And this is a career-defining performance.

It's so vulnerable.

It's so beautiful.

I know there were other actors that could have done this.

I cannot imagine any of them offering the heartbreak and the

sardonic pleasure of him saying, it's showtime in the mirror every morning.

So I would like to give mine to Roy Scheider, and I apologize for jumping in and stealing that.

No, you had to, or else I absolutely would have said Roy Scheider.

Yeah, I know.

I could see it.

So I was like, I'm going to take it from him.

I mean,

it's, you know, I think it's crazy to say, but I'm going to say what went right is also what went wrong, which is Bob Fosse himself.

Yeah.

I think he is an insane man and a psychopath.

And even to make a movie that says you don't get credit for acknowledging your flaws and not fixing them, it feels like this is what a man writes at the end of his life, knowing that he can't change, but wanting to acknowledge that he, like, it's like saying, I know these problems with me.

I cannot change them.

And it's just so, like, it's sad.

It's, it's, it's an addictive tale.

Like, it is, there's so many things that are wrong with it, but there's also like a passion and a like, a heart and a true artistry to this that I think is so of one man's mind in a way that I'm like, I hate all of the terrible things that had to happen to make this movie as good as it is.

And I hate

the lesson that might come away from it that like this obsession and this focus and this passion will like sort of result in something powerful.

But it also, it's like, it's, you cannot make this movie without being Bob Fossey.

I think it's also, it is the kind of movie that people chase.

Like, when you try to make an artistic biopic, it's like, I do think this is the touchstone for all of it.

And no one's, I don't think anyone's come close to it.

Not remotely.

No, to the point that, like, Better Man came out last year.

And I was like, wow, a biopic where someone says they're a little hard to deal with.

I'm like, that's not even close to what Fossey's doing here.

But, like, I do think it is something that is built out of this man's life and the acknowledgement that he has lived a rough life, but that doesn't excuse anything he's done.

So, I got to give it to Fossey for at least having the self-reflection to say like i'm i'm a piece of but like i i can't change well he literally he says it to leland palmer's character at the very end when he looks at her right as he's about to sort of make his grand exit he says at least i don't have to lie to you anymore and i think that's what this whole movie is it's him being like I want to expose myself, not necessarily because I want to change or, you know, because I want to apologize, but just because I don't want to hide.

I don't want to lie.

Like, I think it's such a I'm sorry for everything I did to you.

And if I live, I'm sorry for everything.

No, I don't think he is.

I'm sorry.

I don't think he is sorry.

I think it's like, that's the weird thing.

No, but that's what he says, right?

When he's on the gurney, he says, if I die, I'm sorry for everything I did to you.

And if I live, I'm sorry for everything I'm going to do to you.

Yeah, that's true.

But I don't think Bob Fosse is sorry.

No.

Who knows?

I don't think he has the capacity to express sorrow, just to know that he's like, I know I'm doing something wrong.

I know that this is not how it should be.

Yeah.

Amazing, man.

I'm glad neither of you took my what went right.

I have to give it to the editor, Alan Heim.

I just think the editing in this movie is stunning and it would not work as well as it does without him.

Also, again, it takes a very particular person to be able to work with Bob Fosse.

And he did it for like over a year editing this thing.

I cannot imagine how much of a nightmare that was.

And he had worked with him previously.

And

I just, I I also think he's great as himself in this.

I know he doesn't say anything, but he's just so simple and like pure and he's just there.

And he won the Oscar for this.

Man, did he deserve it?

So absolutely Allenheim went right in this.

It's amazing.

It's one of the few movies where, because I feel like sometimes I'm just like,

good editing sometimes feels invisible where it's like it works, but you aren't thinking about it.

This is a movie where it not only feels like I can see it, but it's like, thank God I can see it because you want some of these things to stand out in the way that they do.

Just the way, like the timing of the cuts in that pirouette sequence in the opening, it's so, I don't even know how you figure that out.

Like it, it's just amazing.

And also to be able to have that timing working with Bob Fosse, who was like a human metronome, they said that in some of the mixes or when they were, when they were doing the orchestration, he could hear if something was like a tenth of a second off and he would flag the horn section.

That's crazy to be able to do that.

And then that Alan Heim was able to match that is really remarkable.

And with not with non-linear digital editing.

Yeah.

I mean, he's splicing by hand.

Yeah, that's true.

The final cut of this movie is also just one of the most brutal, like

things I've, it's just the hard cut from him like sort of floating towards the angel of death to just him in the body bag.

Yeah.

Silent.

It hits in a way that I think it's like,

it shouldn't feel, it shouldn't feel like, oh, this is just, yeah, that's how you got to end the movie.

It feels like something that you come up with in editing.

It's like, it's got to be timed right.

It's got to be jarring.

And it just, it works so well because of how empty it leaves you.

Yeah.

The timing of it is really incredible.

Well,

what a bummer.

That's it.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Demi, for joining us.

I'm so happy to have you on.

I'm so happy to be here and to talk about this movie.

It's also, it's like between every time I watch it, it's funny to be like, oh, I can see that this is what this movie was trying to do.

Like my ex-partner worked on Joker 2 and watching this, I was like, oh my God, this is what he was trying to do.

And he really did not get it.

You're right.

Man, you're right.

We just talked about that on Sam Sanders' show.

And so I watched that for that show.

And yeah, you're totally right.

Also, because like we didn't really talk about this, but this is technically a musical, I think, but it feels like a musical that does not care about the music at all.

I sort of got, I had a discussion with, I watched this with a few friends friends yesterday and had that exact discussion of like, some people wouldn't consider this a musical and some of it is structure and some of it is like, the only thing to me that is like strange musically is just the idea that like there are four back-to-back scenes that are just songs and in a musical you'd space them out with story and like none of the songs are really like story songs.

But I still, I heavily consider it a musical.

Yeah, I think so.

I mean, also, I could be wrong, but I think Cabaret was maybe the first time that anybody kind of took the musical numbers out of the context of people breaking into song.

And, you know, he set them up in the Kit Kat Club.

So they were like a separate entity that was sort of informing the story, but not part of it in the way that people were used to and musicals and particularly movie musicals.

So I think he had kind of already started exploring that.

Interesting.

Well, is there anything you'd like to plug before you leave us?

You can follow me everywhere online at Electrolemon, and I'm doing a one-man show, comedy show called Demi DeGuibe is going to do one backflip.

I'm about to to tour it.

I don't know when this comes out, but I'm probably going to be in Australia touring it.

And then if I'm not tired, I will be elsewhere.

And if I am tired, you can wait until I shoot it as a special or something.

I don't know.

I think we have a good number of fans in Australia.

Please, Australia, come out.

Guys, get out there.

And I won't do the voice.

That's how much I'm ready to.

Chris, you can do the voice for me, please.

No, right, no.

This is actually going to come out in July.

Well, in that case, thank you for coming out, Australia.

I had a great time.

And yeah, I think I'm actually shooting shooting my show as a special right now.

So I hope that you all get to see it.

And if not, I can't wait to come back on here and talk about it.

Yes, please.

Yeah, it all went wrong.

No, it's going to go great.

A huge thanks to Demi Eda Juibe for joining us on this episode.

You know, also a huge thanks to Demi for giving us a shout out on Instagram in the past.

It actually really helped us.

So thank you for your support, Demi.

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Bye.

Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com.

What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Chris Winterbauer.

Editing and music by David Bowman.

Research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer.