Die Like a Rockstar: All That Jazz (1979)
One of the most enduring images of All That Jazz, a film seemingly composed entirely of such frames, happens in its first two minutes. Director Joe Gideon, portrayed by the deeply underappreciated Roy Scheider, is on one knee, sizing up a dozens of aspiring dancers simultaneously. The composition immediately establishes the enormous scope of Gideon’s task and the scene itself, which is amplified as the camera slowly pulls out to reveal more and more bodies on the stage. It’s the very beginning of the bravura “cattle call” sequence that opens the movie. Filmed in only two days, this six minute montage set to George Benson’s rendition of “On Broadway” acts as a sort of microcosm of the entire film. It’s extravagant and rhythmic, a jolting, kinetic example of visual storytelling.
We immediately understand who Gideon is. He, like director Bob Fosse, is a theater director and choreographer, but the first minutes of this film are devoted to telling you what kind of director Joe is, and what kind of man he is. He’s proficient with this process, and just as he eyes all of the dancers, all eyes are on him. From the audience, producers and his family are watching. When he demonstrates a move, all the dancers observe him. This character is the center of his own universe as well as the film’s. This sequence perfectly lines up with Gideon’s personality, where the scale represents his boundless appetite for success and excess, and the jittery, yet spotless editing accentuates Gideon’s anxiety-inducing perfectionism, which ultimately drills into his need to be loved and revered. It is the relationship between these two things which drives the film — the hedonistic urge for more and the deep need to be beloved (or at least appreciated). There’s a terrible tension between the two desires, and also a terrible synchronicity. These two wants drive Joe more or less like a drunk teenager would drive a Lamborghini.
The craft on display is marvelous, particularly Alan Heim’s Oscar-winning edit of the film, which gives the opening sequence a tremendous amount of energy and verve. Both the film and its protagonist have electricity flowing through them. In one especially breathtaking moment, Heim stitches together several actors performing a spin move. Like everything else happening, it’s dazzling to watch, and it also tells us about the shape of the film itself. All That Jazz is a circle, it works in an iterative sequence of loops, held together by the editing and a stiff shot of Vivaldi. Just before this montage, we see Gideon’s morning routine, complete with pills, a soggy cigarette, and a jaunty, “Showtime, Folks!” This image repeats multiple times and denotes the blending between one day and the next, just as the spinning faces of the dancers are edited one into the other.
It’s an endless arcing movement, an infinite dance move that looks as taxing as it does impressive. One other key similarity is during the spin — the dancers’ and Gideon’s — there’s a certain performative quality, excellence in search of approval. It only makes sense to meet a character like Gideon at an audition; in this context, he’s watching performers and making cuts, but it is in his nature to want to be seen and to be evaluated. Gideon never stops being a showman; he doesn’t know how to be anything else.
As the sequence goes on, Gideon thins his herd, cutting dancers who couldn’t quite cut it. He’s taking the extravagantly large group and taking it to its bare essentials, which mimics the eventual shape of this story, where we clear away the layers of aesthetic, showy artifice to get to Joe’s interior. It moves from a full stage down to a single man. In the process of Gideon’s casting, we get a glimpse into the his womanizing. He stares down more than one pretty young lady in a leotard, and we even here gossip about him sleeping with dancers from two girls leaving the auditorium. Though we never hear it, we also know Joe cast at least one dancer who couldn’t sing and who we later find out isn’t a wildly good dancer either. Naturally, she and Gideon fuck just under twenty minutes into the movie. In between their tête-à-tête and the end of the opening montage, Gideon stops directing a play and starts directing a movie. And that breathless cycle is our loop: Wake up, eyedrops, smoke, Vivaldi, Dexedrine, smoke, theater, drink, movie, infidelity, repeat, repeat, repeat.
The manic kineticism feels like a progenitor to Black Swan or Whiplash, but this movie also feels driven by even more insatiable needs. Those two movies are about a dogmatically disciplined pursuit of perfection, whereas All That Jazz shows a character who won’t even settle for perfect, it also has to be as big as possible. He wants a perfect cast, a perfect cut of his film, a perfect script, a perfect love life. And it’s immediately clear not only that this is impossible but that its toll is immeasurable. Gideon is visibly worn through, his relationships are hanging on by a thread, and the margin between his ideal performance as a director, as a lover, as a man and an absolute burnout is razor thin. In any given moment, Gideon is simultaneously on the verge of a triumph or a disaster. A high wire act with hundred pound dumbbells in either hand where Gideon seems determined to accomplish it at a dead sprint.
Each revolution of our wheel, each day in Gideon’s life, seems to progress faster and faster. The first hour of this movie is paced absolutely breathlessly, and it seems to turn the crank harder as it goes along. Once each iteration of Gideon’s loop starts to spin faster, the true form of the story reveals itself. The circles are joined in a downward spiral pattern. The further down Gideon goes, the faster the cycle becomes. It feels like he’ll have to start smoking two cigarettes at a time just to keep up, which seems generally in keeping with Gideon’s personality.
In the first half Fosse also treats us with a great two-part musical number, “Take Off with Us.” After struggling with staging a song for a Broadway show Gideon has finally put together a version he wants to show. It begins with what director Fosse has described as a fairly by-the-numbers Broadway staging of the song. I am amused by that, because even when Fosse is trying to be relatively restrained or toned down, he creates a piece that’s immaculately choreographed and visually resplendent. Fosse naturally can block a beautiful number in his sleep, but the specific way he choreographed this for film detail really makes in pop on screen. The subtle hand movements highlighted by the casts’ grey airline gloves are flourishes designed for a camera’s lens, while the actors’ positions show off the on stage movement of a Broadway number.
Gideon’s audience of producers shout with glee, they love it, but of course Gideon can’t settle for just love. He’s converted the fairly rote airplane-based tune into an expressive exploration of sexual fantasy — complete with a lesbian couple, a gay couple and a hetero couple! In the backhalf of the number, dubbed “Airotica,” the dancers strip and imitate sexual intimacy. It’s a truly effective and creative number that shows what Gideon, All That Jazz and Fosse himself are capable of when unbound by the convention, taste or the need to appeal to the “family audience.” The second half of the “Airotica” number absolutely erupts into a sensual Bacchanal complete with a ripping live drum performance that’s absolutely unforgettable. Naturally, the producers hate it and feel like they can’t use it.
In this segment, there’s a haunting line, “Our motto is, ‘We take you everywhere but get you nowhere.” It suggests that all this Dionysian pleasure seeking is hollow, that the travel and Gideon’s own life is circular. He’s spiraling, and in each turn he’s missing something more meaningful, either beneath the surface of himself or in relation to his family. Gideon also ruminates after the producer’s poor reaction to “Airotica” that nothing he ever does is “good enough, not beautiful enough. It’s not funny enough. It’s not deep enough. It’s not anything enough.” Suddenly Gideon feels a bit like a different Greek mythological figure, Tantalus, who is punished to go forever hungry in plain view of a fruit tree.
Gideon is staging this number in a show he’s doing for his ex-wife, and he also has a young daughter. He dotes on the latter, but the film also suggests he neglects in his ceaseless hours of work. The former, though amiable, clearly reached her limit of personal life Joe long before our story began. Gideon is a hard guy to catch up with, but like in Aesop, speed isn’t everything. For Gideon, it’s the only life he knows, and it’s killing him on a daily basis. During a script reading, the film screeches to a hard halt. The sound cuts out, and so does Gideon. The next thing we know his ex-wife and his girlfriend are each rushing to find him in a hospital. This happens an hour into the film, and the movie never leaves that location. The spiral has led Gideon here; it’s his final resting place as well as the film’s.
Given Gideon’s seemingly indefatigable spirit, this structural choice feels like an acknowledgement that the director and the audience both genuinely believe Gideon will see the stage again, but it also gives each rewatch a strong pang of dramatic irony. As the man himself says, “Too much boozing, too much screwing around, it’ll get you every time.” Even as Gideon tries to push back against the doctors, we see his body giving in on him. No amount of will is getting this soul out of the underworld. Put the pennies on his eyes, man, he’s finished.
Intercut with many scenes of All That Jazz are clips from Gideon’s movie-within-a-movie The Stand-Up. That fictional picture somewhat mimics Fosse’s own Lenny, a 1974 biographical film about stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce. Like Joe Gideon, Bruce is an entertainer who spends a lot of time strung out, and he doesn’t survive the end of his story either. Fosse uses The Stand-Up to insert a monologue about death, specifically to explain the Kübler-Ross (with a dash) model of the five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. Gideon and Fosse are both meditating on death, even before it becomes apparent that the character himself is dying. This all gets very metatextual as Fosse himself died of a heart attack in 1987. In some ways, the extravagance of this film, Fosse’s penultimate, has always suggested an approach like he believed this would be his last time making a picture.
It’s widely believed that All That Jazz is an 8½-style semi-autobiography, and it’s clear as day how many parallels there are between Gideon, a director of the stage and screen, to Bob Fosse himself. And so you have a movie where a director is getting introspective about himself, a showman, someone who is driven by ambition but a need for approval. Like any showman, there’s a man and a mask. There are levels to Gideon, a man who wears many hats. It’s as if all those revolutions build up layers of his artifice, a series of decorative outer shells that he presents to his audience. In an early scene with his girlfriend, Joe asks her to stay, and she directs him to try it with a different line reading. The line between reality and fiction is totally blurred. Neither Gideon nor anyone else knows, “where the bullshit ends and the truth begins,” because they’ve been chasing themselves in a circle so quickly they’ve essentially become one and the same.
It’s in the hospital where the real truth starts to show itself. The movie is here to peel back Gideon’s layers and see what is underneath. As we reach the end of his downward spiral, all we can do is look inward. And what we find is frankly, predictable and unpredictably frank. What I mean is, we learn that Gideon lives only one way, excessively and exuberantly. He doesn’t quit smoking, he doesn’t quit philandering, he definitely doesn’t quit reading his bad reviews. The man has six gears, but he only needs the last one. What’s really effective about this is how honest it is. The movie makes some early intimations about childhood sexual experiences and the stage, but really Fosse gives us an earnest, “it is what it is.” This is the man who entertains you, and he’d love to make you smile however he can manage it. He’s a cad, and he’s exhausting, but he’s damn good at what he does.
In these scenes, Gideon is reckoning with his health and his legacy. Whether its newspaper or television reviews of his film or his contemporary’s commentary on his character, he wants to know how he will be remembered. His window into the outside world and the future that lies beyond him can only be seen through a television screen, and how apropos for a showman of his caliber.
Eventually Gideon goes under for a coronary bypass surgery, where he imagines his ex-wife, girlfriend and daughter all chastise him for his way of living. Each one pleads with their number for him to change and shape up, to think of his future and theirs. One of the most striking parts of this scene is that Scheider is playing both the bed-ridden Gideon and also the director of the three womens’ musical numbers. It echoes the meta relationship between Fosse and the material and demonstrates something I’ve been saying all along: Gideon wants it all, he’s the audience and the director. Even with a tube down his throat, he seems unsatisfied with his own choreography.
After the surgery, it’s only a short time before Gideon has a heart attack, and the end truly comes into view. After waking up in his hospital bed, Gideon traverses through the hospital corridors as the audio track of The Stand-Up plays through the five stages of grief. Gideon’s dying, and he’s completing his very last loop before his final curtain call.
One of the very most impressive parts of All That Jazz for me is its a movie, that like its protagonist, wants it all, and I think it manages to achieve it. The movie hums with an incredible energy from start to finish. Its musical numbers are creatively conceived and flawlessly executed. And every bit of that craft is telling you the story, sketching out Gideon and the other characters along the way. It’s the complete package for the duration, which promises you an incredible finale… and absolutely delivers.
After Gideon’s hospital adventure and embrace of his own demise, he is discovered by two orderlies and brought back to his room. After Gideon is strapped into his bed, there is a brief and beautiful montage of him being prepped in the hospital cut with the man sitting in makeup, getting ready for one last show. The film then transitions us from Gideon’s hospital bed to what we saw on the television set just scenes prior. We’re behind the screen now, and our host is now critical of Gideon, he “allowed himself to be adored, but not loved.” That his successes and failures were a wash. We’ve peeled back the shiny veneer of director Joe Gideon, and now we’re looking directly inside his soul.
Naturally, his soul is a massive variety show complete with an elaborate set, live music, two women dressed as lungs, and of course, a roaring audience.
The film’s final musical number, “Bye Bye Life,” is a literal showstopper. It is very likely my second favorite piece of musical cinema, following only Stop Making Sense, which I look forward to discussing in a future installment of this series. What’s so incredible about “Bye Bye Life” isn’t just the beauty, the design or the song itself, which is a bop. The percussive beat that runs the length of the tune feels like a raising pulse.
This number is stellar, and the way the film gets here makes it even more gratifying. This is a movie that has teased enormity and perfection and then takes its final act into the stratosphere. Words don’t do it justice, and neither do stills, but together the idea becomes pretty clear: this is incredible, and absolutely Fosse’s finest work.
It is elaborate, yet perfectly conceived for film. Like all great Fosse numbers, it’s designed around accentuating the performers’ body parts, be they a hand, a single shoulder, their hips, or their heads. Each shot of it is its own work of art. It’s infinitely rewatchable, and I’ve seen it at least a dozen times to prepare for this piece and just because it’s so damn infectious.
The song is naturally the crescendo of the film and of Gideon’s life. Lyrically it’s about facing the end and finding a way to accept that, whatever may come. It’s genuinely beautiful and as life affirming as it is massively entertaining. It is the triumphant, exuberant and wistful gem that caps off Fosse’s opus. It’s delirious and exhilarating, just the way this film should close. Say what you will about Joe Gideon, when you pay for one of his shows, you absolutely get your money’s worth.
In the end, Gideon passes on. The final image of the film is a disembodied hand zipping a body bag around our star. But before he died, he left us with a show and a smile — one for us and one of his own as he glid off to meet his own end.
