Fosse (65 page)

Columbia president Frank Price, charged with restoring the struggling studio to financial health, had been tracking Fosse’s spending since his first day on the job, in 1978. “Columbia was kind of
seat-of-the-pants,” Price said. “I inherited a lot of problems.” Along with
Altered States
and
Annie
(whose rights the studio had purchased for a preposterous $9.5 million, à la Sam Cohn),
All That Jazz
was one of three productions the board of directors deemed “problem pictures.” Price had to fix them. “By the time the [
All That
Jazz
] budget reached
nine million,” he explained, “I had to say, ‘Fellas, we’re not operating with a blank check.’” Looking to trim, he asked Fosse to budget his big finale. Fosse refused.

Price appealed to Cohn. “We can’t have this thing going up
any more,” he said. “The board is pressing me. I’ve got to have a budget or this will become a nightmare situation.”

Cohn appreciated Price’s predicament, but his allegiance was to his client. The big ending—still a work in progress—could not be budgeted.

“Sam, I’m going to have to come to New York, to Astoria—”

“I’ll bar the door.”

“Sam, I’m going to have to shut you down.”

This was seven days
before the completion of photography. (“I thought Bobby was going to
have another heart attack,” Scheider said.)

Assemble the picture,
Price advised Melnick, and if they needed those unfilmed sequences—“Bye Bye Life,” “NY to LA,” and Gideon’s dialogues with the Angel of Death—then they could shoot them. Price thought this a reasonable compromise.

Melnick thought it highly impractical. “Are we supposed to stop production,
take a few months off to edit, then get everyone back together to shoot it?” he asked.

Apparently, yes.

“Excuse me for a second.”

Melnick returned to his office and called Fosse and Cohn. “I want to set up the movie someplace else.”

There was silence on the other end of the line.

Changing studios midstream simply didn’t happen, especially when there was already so much money in the hole and when the footage—only partially comprehensible without the Angel of Death pieces for temporal segues—smacked of the kind of arty, genre-bending, self-indulgence that marketing departments lived in fear of. But Fosse made a feast of studio pressures, and he said yes, let’s do it. Sam Cohn stood with him.

“Fellas,” Melnick said, “I just want to make sure, before we go through with this, that you’re ready to live with the consequences of the poker game we’re about to play”—meaning, if Fosse threatened to leave, he had to be willing to actually leave, to risk his financing, risk finishing the film and not having it distributed, not to mention risking the lawsuits—“Bobby,” Melnick said, “do you want this?”

“Go for it.”

“I’ll call you back.”

But that poker game never got to the table. Striking a compromise, Price and Melnick agreed to take on another studio, a partner. It would put up the money for the unfilmed material and share in the profits. All Melnick had to do was sell
All That Jazz
all over again.

“Dan Melnick called,”
Alan Heim’s mother-in-law told Alan. “From California.”

Heim called him right back. “Dan, it’s Alan.”

“Alan, I want you to prepare an hour of the best material we have—”

“What’s going on?”

“—and get it out to me by Sunday.”

“Today’s Friday.”

Unsure of what this was all about, Heim took an assistant to the cutting room the next morning and assembled, as directed, an emergency reel of cut and uncut footage, using the cattle-call sequence and certain stand-alone dramatic scenes as set pieces. When time ran out, he called in a messenger and arranged to have the canisters delivered to Melnick’s Beverly Hills front door at 6:00 the next morning.

Ten hours later, Dan Melnick’s doorbell buzzed him awake. Instead of answering the door, he fumbled for the phone. “Alan?”

“Is it there?”

“Did it have to be six in the morning?”

A salesman in black shades and a designer suit, Melnick dropped the canisters in the trunk of his car and rode from studio to studio. Warner Brothers liked what he showed them, but their key executive was out of town and they couldn’t commit without him. So Melnick got back in the car and drove directly to Alan Ladd Jr.
Among the most admired and well-liked executives in Hollywood, Laddie, as he was known, had independent taste and a sweeping view of film practice and industry, which, as the son of actor Alan Ladd and stepson of actress/agent Sue Carol, he’d been cultivating since boyhood. He had joined CMA to agent under Freddie Fields before setting out to produce on his own, and eventually he landed on top at Fox, giving easy, clairvoyant yeses to projects as diverse and dicey as
Harry and Tonto, The Rocky Horror Picture Show,
and—when no one else would—
Star Wars.
The Hollywood he imagined had room enough for all. “I just liked it” could have been Laddie’s motto; in an industry of panicked arbitrations, Laddie had a laid-back, eloquent instinct, trusting and forthright, and he had earned his stripes, both in the boardroom and at Chasen’s.

Laddie invited a few people from the studio to join him and Melnick. He was basically familiar with
All That Jazz,
having turned down
Ending
years earlier. But now that it was
All That Jazz,
a Bob Fosse musical, Laddie’s interest shifted back.
My God,
he thought as the lights went down,
if Bob Fosse had been making a musical all along, I never would have passed.
The lights came up forty minutes later and Laddie turned to Melnick: “I’ll take it.”

Triumphant, Melnick drove back to Columbia, to Frank Price’s office. “You’re out of the picture,”
he announced. “I’ve laid it off for you.” For
you:
as if it were a favor to Price.

“Where?”

“Laddie. Fox.”

Columbia and Fox elected to co-distribute
All That Jazz,
with foreign rights to one and domestic to the other. Who got which was decided by
an official coin toss at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Price had tails, Laddie heads.

It was heads. Laddie took domestic.

Back in the game,
All That Jazz
moved an hour upstate, to a vacant black-box theater at SUNY Purchase, to shoot “Bye Bye Life,” which, due to persistent budgetary restrictions, had to work as the final number.
There would be no opening night of
NY to LA,
no Flentrop organ. Gideon would simply sing bye-bye to life and drift toward death. Then the zipper would close on his body bag and Merman would belt out “There’s No Business Like Show Business” as the credits rolled.
All That Jazz
was a musical.

Translating the
NY to LA
design elements into “Bye Bye Life,” Fosse, under deadline, sent Walton and Phil Rosenberg back to
the drawing board and closed the door behind them. “It was getting quite frightening,”
Rosenberg remembered. “We would bring in models and sketches time after time, and he wouldn’t know what he wanted and we were only about a week away from having to shoot the scene when he finally said, ‘You know, I had a dream last night about cylinders. White cylinders.’” In came yards and yards of
silver-coated Mylar—Mirrex Mirror Scrim inherited from the unborn finale, reflective floors, and transparent Plexiglas cylinders with light-bouncing surfaces. Shrouded in black and silver, the intimate five-hundred-seat space did indeed look like a rock concert setting somewhere between life and death.

Crouched behind the bleachers
brought in for Gideon’s audience, Peppino and Lynn Lovett flipped through a Fellini coffee-table book, one of several Fosse and the cinematographer used to complement their hand gestures. Deferential to his magnificent oeuvre, Fosse gave Peppino very little feedback, which Peppino, taking Fosse’s quiet to mean
he was disappointed, returned with more silence. Sometimes they wouldn’t speak, each wondering what he had done to the other. And they were always together. Harpo trailing Chico, Peppino followed his director wherever he went, at the ready to receive the budding ideas from his brain, but Fosse was mostly too deep in Fosse to notice him there. “Where’s Peppino?”
he’d ask, and from two paces back would come “I am here, Fosse!,” and both would laugh. “Peppino was a gentleman,
a man of light to Fosse’s dark,” David Ray said. “He had a calm personality the process needed.” Looking at a still from Fellini’s
Casanova,
Peppino and Lovett admired an entombed
Venetian opera house dripping with chandeliers. “That’s the same shot,”
Peppino said, his face warming. “But this time I’m going to do it right.”

While Fosse built “Bye Bye Life,” his actors waited. A few got together in their motel rooms for games, charades, and the kind of truth-telling marathons Fosse might have enjoyed if he weren’t confined to the SUNY Purchase black box. The incarcerated dubbed themselves Prisoners
of the Performing Arts—POPA for short. “We just sort of occupied ourselves,” John Lithgow said. “It was just constant laughter and fun. Even when we went to the bathroom, we would do it together and call it POPA pisses.” Actor Anthony Holland brought in his play, and POPA gave a reading of it; Barbara Cook performed somewhere, and POPA organized a field trip.

Meanwhile, delays continued. Fosse built.

The number’s two lead dancers—one tall, one short—weren’t working well together, a dilemma Fosse was contemplating up until to the very night before the shoot, at dinner with Doby, weighing the pros and cons of their next move. Do they replace one? Both? Proceed as planned? Doby advocated for replacements
and additional delays; Fosse had no answer. They ended the evening on a low note and said good night.

Hours later, Doby’s phone rang. It was two in the morning on the day of the shoot.

“You’re right,” he said. “We better change it.”

“To who?”

“You and Annie.”

Doby and Reinking, just in from New York, were in a rehearsal hall hours later. Albert Wolsky put a rush on
their costumes—a pair of full-body leotards with red and blue veins appliquéd onto the fabric, custom-made to represent two halves of a beating heart. That created more delays, and it wasn’t until the following Tuesday that Wolsky’s order came in, and “Bye Bye Life” was, at last, ready to shoot.

But Fosse wasn’t. Once all the pieces had been assembled on set, he had to break down the number into shots. All that had passed was merely preparation for this moment. “Bob started changing things
from shot to shot,” Doby said, “so we had to keep changing the dance to try to keep up.” And when they changed the dance, he changed the shot, which changed the dance, which . . .

All in all, “Bye Bye Life” took them two weeks. “Fifteen days,”
Glattes said, “for seven minutes of music.”

Rehearsing the number, perfecting its climactic baseball slide, Roy Scheider messed up his leg. He said, “It was the hardest physical thing
I’d ever had to do.” He developed a lump. It made sliding, already a challenge, even harder, and every night, as he lathered himself in Tiger Balm, he refused to think he might not make it through the shoot. He loved this number too much. He loved this man, and he knew what “Bye Bye Life” meant to him. “I think he knew that his death was not going to be as wonderful as this,” Scheider concluded, “so that’s why he spent so much time thinking about making it wonderful in the movie.” Exultant, showy, funky, odd, euphorically mournful, “Bye Bye Life” generated the operatic spirit of a showbiz addict’s absolution by death and entertainment—to Bob Fosse, a happy ending. Imagining the real thing, he said, “Maybe somebody will say,
‘He was a good showman; he gave us good shows. You could always count on him for an evening’s entertainment.’” Maybe for that they would forgive him.

As Fosse was filming the very end of “Bye Bye Life,” in which Gideon rushes into his audience of enemies and loved ones for the final goodbye, he called cut and peered out from behind the camera. He wanted to look at them, the people he knew. There were hundreds. Annie, Leland Palmer,
NY to LA
’s “producers,” the strippers in the scene with Keith Gordon . . . The way they looked at Gideon seemed a lot like love. Love for him.

He pulled Scheider aside. “You know, that must be kind of exhilarating.”

“Yeah, Bobby, it is.” Scheider smiled. “Why don’t you try it?”

“Naahhhh.”

“Come on . . . You’ll love it.”

Scheider cued the band, the music started, and Fosse dashed from the stage into his people, hugging and kissing, thanking and touching. When it ended, they applauded him—a standing ovation—as he headed back to Scheider, back to the stage, trying to catch his breath.

“Jesus Christ! That’s terrific!”

“Yeah, Bobby. It is.”

“And you know, Roy,” he was said to have whispered, “the best part of it is that they forgive me too.”

Scheider saw tears in Fosse’s eyes. “Yeah, Bobby. We do.”

A
SIDE FROM THE PIROUETTES
in the audition sequence, which Fosse had Heim cut immediately, the day they were shot at the Palace, the majority of
All That Jazz
was cut after shooting had been completed. “This was highly, highly unusual,” said assistant editor Wende Phifer. “Bob didn’t even want to think about cutting the movie until he had shot everything. And when he had, we cut in chronological order, taking boxes off the shelf one scene after the next.” Editing took more than a year, a colossal amount of time for a feature film. “It was a life,”
Heim said, “a whole life.” Alan’s mother died while they cut “Bye Bye Life,” and David Ray’s marriage collapsed. “It wasn’t the movie’s fault,”
Ray explained, “it was probably going to end anyway, but I was there for a good six months working until one in the morning.” Alan Heim, on the picture for fourteen months, recalled, “The set dresser [Phil Rosenberg] had
a heart attack on the first attempt of the film, and then came back in time for the second one.” Of course, Bob Aurthur was dead. Danny Ruvolo was dead. Christopher Newman’s wife had a baby.

In need of more space, the team moved from their enclosure in the Brill Building to the Directors Guild of America building on West Fifty-Seventh, one block from Fosse’s apartment, where he kept his production office. Through one window he could see up to Fifty-Fifth Street to where he had lived with Joan McCracken. “All those years and all that work,”
he told a reporter, “and all I did was move a couple of blocks.” Going out to dinner or on his way home from a show, Fosse would drop in on the editors with an idea, sometimes with his girlfriend model-actress Julie Hagerty. “I just want to run through
a couple of things,” he’d say, and Wende Phifer would cue up a reel. As late as two in the morning, David Ray would leave the DGA building with Fosse and a handful of assistants. Rounding Fifty-Fourth Street, Fosse would light up at the sight of kids crowding into Studio 54. “He would make small talk
with these young people,” Ray said, “until we realized he wanted us to leave so he could go in and party.”