Fosse (71 page)

“You have to get in.”

“It’s trespassing.”

“Just do it.”

“Bob—”

“
Get in.
”

At dusk, the Santa Monica Freeway clogged over the pale box at 10881 Clarkson Road, and Glattes and his son Michael broke in through the garage.

“Look,” Michael said, pointing up.

Cartridges. Still there on the shelf.

Snapping pictures of walls, carpeting, furniture—whatever he could—Glattes moved through the house and into the little bedroom where it happened. Thin coats of new paint didn’t cover everything. Glattes found traces of shotgun damage and crusted spurts of blood. “We got the hell out of there,” he said.

In Vancouver, Fosse and casting director Lynne Carrow turned a hotel room into a makeshift office and spent days reading and interviewing extras. Though some would appear only in the background of the shot, Fosse auditioned them as if they were potential leads, devoting as much as fifteen minutes to each individual—a long time for a tiny part—to connect to them. “He had this incredible ability
to focus so totally on each actor,” Carrow recalled. “Bob would sit there a foot away from the actor, pulling a performance out of them, while I read. I never worked with a director who physically sat knee to knee with the actors, coaching them and then turning to me and putting his hand on my shoulder to give me direction, and then turning back to them. It was very intimate. He would touch the women in a way to let them know he was there. But male or female, it didn’t matter. He’d be talking to them very gently, very softly, with a cigarette in his mouth. You could see the actor realize they were in the presence of someone who totally understood them. I remember one actress who was having a hard time pulling her performance down and when she got too big he would lean forward and gently touch her knee and say, gently, ‘Start that again.’ It was sensual.”

Fosse scouted Vancouver in a fifteen-passenger
van big enough for every department head. He rode up front, smoking far more than his usual too much, his eyes fixed on the window. They couldn’t get Dorothy’s actual family home so they got one nearby, but they did get the real Dairy Queen, the one where Snider first saw Dorothy, and drove onward to the Penthouse, a strip club perfect for the part of Snider’s hangout. There was a lot of downtime in the van, and conversation came easy. Master cinematographer Sven Nykvist took the opportunity to bring up his director’s love life. “Bob,” he asked,
“why all the young girls?” To the window, Fosse replied, “Their stories are shorter.”

Currently, Liz Canney headed the pack. (He had met her at a Westhampton Beach bar.
She was a waitress.) A pretty, dollhouse brunette, Canney was young (in her early twenties) and seriously interested in editing. Fosse gave her a job working for Alan Heim,
effective as soon as production began. In the meantime, back in New York, they
spent New Year’s Eve together and went to dinners with Doctorow and his wife, Helen; Sam Cohn; and Steve Tesich. One evening, Fosse’s
Star 80
script came up, and Doctorow hedged. He didn’t think it worked; the plodding inevitability of Snider’s course could make for a tiresome movie. But this close to production, Doctorow felt it would be inappropriate to suggest major revisions. Fosse was already worried enough. Though
Star 80
was his fifth feature film, Fosse approached it like it was his first, with debilitating dread. He told Doctorow he had no idea what he was going to do once he got back to Vancouver. “I’m going to go out there,”
he lamented, “and they’re going to ask me where to put the camera.”

B
EFORE LEAVING FOR VANCOUVER
, Fosse choreographed “The Magic Bird of Fire,” a rock-disco reimagining of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, for Nicole. It would be one part of a benefit evening for Ballet Today, Brett Raphael’s fledgling dance company, and took the efforts of all the Fosses to mount. While Bob helped Nicole through the pointe solo he tailored to her strengths and weakness, Gwen busied herself with Nicole’s feathery unitard and acted as intermediary between father and daughter and Raphael. The afternoon of May 24, Fosse arrived at FIT’s Haft Auditorium for a dress rehearsal, gave only a few notes, and left before
the one-night-only performance. Verdon and Reinking came instead.

The piece gave Fosse an opportunity to try a kind of ballet without suffering the consequences of a highly visible failure. But if “The Magic Bird of Fire” got a positive response, he might find the courage to finally accept the Joffrey’s offer and put on his first full Fosse ballet. After
Dancin’,
it still seemed to him a kind of finish line. Maybe even a relief. “It was fierce,” Raphael said of the ballet, “with a lot of jumps. Not a subtle piece.” Critic Mindy Aloff wrote, “This piece is dressed and lit
in flame, and features a few singed remnants of dancing: pointe tendu, retiré, and the ever popular pectoral twitch. . . . Nicole Fosse is a pretty teenager; this, however, makes her look as if she’s pushing retirement.” “The Magic Bird of Fire” was never performed again. Any plans for the Joffrey Fosse sidelined.

With Fosse in Vancouver, Glattes took charge of screen tests in LA.
Merely doing the scenes as written rarely gave Fosse as much as he got from getting them laughing or having them tell jokes, so he urged Glattes toward interview-auditions, recommending he interrupt the conversation with a continuous stream of comments and questions. Throwing them off balance could show a glint of real character. To gauge their appearances, Fosse requested close-ups, left and right profile shots, and, of course, full figure (in T-shirt). Glattes knew the drill, but never before had he seen Fosse so blindly adamant about detail. Trivia consumed him.

“We have to use the same carpet,
Snider’s real carpet.”

“Bob, you can’t show blood on a brown carpet.”

Fosse held his ground and Glattes tested blood for months, a different shade of red every day. As if compensating for being a first-time writer and a longtime success, Fosse indulged his every hypervigilant concern. On
Lenny
he was desperate; on
All That Jazz,
obsessed; on
Star 80,
Fosse was a bottomless wound of insatiability. “It was like none of his successes
had ever happened,” Doctorow said. In advance of his arrival, Fosse insisted every bookcase on their
Playboy Mansion set match every bookcase in the real thing and that every book on those bookcases fit Hefner’s personality, whether it was in the shot or not. “It was just a movie,”
Reinking said, “but it had to be real.” Now with a permit to shoot in the actual house where the killing took place, Fosse had the crew dress Snider’s former
garage with the metalworking equipment he had used to build his sex-torture machine, and he instructed set decorator Mel Cooper to study explicit crime scene photos to assemble the contraption with total and horrendous fidelity. (In the weeds behind the house, Cooper found a Canadian license plate, presumably the one he had ditched to make room for his
STAR 80
.) The envelopes on the desk that doubled for Hefner’s contained letters from Dorothy to her mother—“real” outgoing mail Cooper stayed up nights writing, in Dorothy’s hand, in case Fosse decided to open one. “I didn’t try to copy her signature,” Cooper said, “but it had to be in a woman’s writing.” Some thought it overkill, but the effect was so lifelike, one could not step on set without feeling a ghostly chill, a premonition. It gradually dawned on cast and crew that Fosse wasn’t filming a tragedy—he was re-creating it.

He returned to Los Angeles in June. With his final script revision complete, he rehearsed Hemingway and Roberts for six weeks—unprecedented for a Fosse film—in a vacant studio space at Hollywood United Methodist Church. Each “room” marked off on the floor
with tape, they ran through the script, first in chunks, then in full runs, like a play. Only necessary props, blowups of actual locations, and occasional mood music disrupted the totality of their immersion. Midway through the process, Fosse asked second AD Tony Gittelson to put them on the clock. “Start the movie,”
he would say, and
click
—Gittelson hit the stopwatch. Before long, Hemingway realized that her director was choreographing an entire movie. “It was
all
choreographed,”
she explained, “every movement. ‘You’ll pick up this, he’ll play the guitar and sing this . . .’” Fosse had never made a movie this way before, but with all he had on the line, staging
Star 80
in full allowed him some kind of insurance, as if by isolating every detail in advance, he could watch a rough cut of the movie before he made it. But the final scene he kept to himself. Fosse hadn’t rehearsed that. He did not reveal how he planned to stage the murder-rape-suicide, if he had a plan at all. And so it loomed over the production, a conspicuous and horrific inevitability waiting for everyone.

Filming began in July 1982. “It was so painful to work on,”
Albert Wolsky said. “Not just in subject matter, but we shot [mostly] in sequence, so the whole shoot was building closer and closer to it. Sometimes on movies you do the worst thing first, to get it out of the way. Not this one.”

In Los Angeles, removed from his connection, Fosse had difficulty getting amphetamines. “Cis,” he said
to Rundle, who was fast becoming a friend, “if you are the actress you think you are, who can you convince you need Dexies?” At night, away from the movie, they laughed, took trips to the Improv, and hung out at the bus stop, people watching. But the dark was always there. Some nights, Rundle just held him. He asked her to and she wanted to help. “Make these last,” she warned when she handed Fosse the pills.

A mix of tantrums, charm, and withdrawn silence, Fosse’s moods fluctuated throughout the shoot. “It was like sounds were too loud,”
Hemingway said. What set him off? Was it personal? Not knowing kept the crew on edge. One day he angrily cleared the set, only
to look up hours later and ask, “Why isn’t anyone here?” Casting director Lynne Carrow thought his moods a function of broken concentration (“I’d say, ‘Hey, Bob,’
and he’d look at me blankly”). Others had different theories, mostly guesses. They said he was trying to quit smoking; he was taking too many pills; he was quitting pills. Eric Roberts saw a man under impossible pressure. “Everyone was all over him about,
‘You can’t badmouth Hollywood, you can’t badmouth Dorothy, you can’t badmouth Bogdanovich, you can’t badmouth Hef or we’ll lose the
Playboy
logo.’ Dorothy’s family, people in Hollywood, his lawyers—they were on him about accuracy and morality and the ‘real’ story.” Dorothy’s sister Louise sent Fosse
a letter, handwritten in her tenth-grade cursive, telling him he didn’t know the truth, that he was hurting her and her family. After reading the letter, Fosse professed to be overcome with guilt.
He did not want to hurt her. He did not want to hurt anyone.

He called Ann Reinking. “I’m living in a world where nobody
wants to live,” he told her. “I’m living in this world, and now we got to get to this spot. We’ve got to get to murder. And I really like these people. I don’t want to see them die.” He regularly placed a rose bouquet
on the craft-service table with a note that said
To Dorothy
.

“He’s going to do it,”
Fosse said to Cliff Robertson, his Hefner. “He’s going to kill her, and I don’t know how to stop him.”

The actor didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t be sure if this was some kind of Method trick, or the pills.

“We have to do something,” Fosse said. “Watch him. Help her.”

Roberts had virtually transformed himself into Snider, furthering the illusion and taking the whole production down with him. “He lied about everything,”
one actor said. He screamed. He locked himself in his trailer. He appeared in the production office in
his underwear. “Eric was so volatile,”
another said, “Fosse had to handle him carefully. He’d have these infuriating moments of
I want to fire him, he drives me fucking crazy.
” He would deny it, but Fosse enabled Roberts, reaching raw steaks through his cage, feeding him with friendship and understanding. Without warning, Fosse would show up
at Roberts’s house, banging loudly on the door in the middle of the night as if to say,
Watch and repeat; this is you.
Before he shot Roberts’s sex scene with Hemingway, Fosse asked him to remove the protective
dance belt he had used in rehearsal to cover his genitals. Fosse gave Hemingway a feeble explanation for Roberts’s sudden nudity, and they proceeded with the shot; her discomfort, which Fosse wanted for Dorothy, showed up on film. On separate occasions, when Roberts went too far, Fosse would take the crew’s side against him. “[Roberts] got so into it,”
Fosse said, “that he began alienating everybody around the set. Costume people and hairdressers would come to me and complain about how horrendously he was behaving. I went to him and was in the middle of reprimanding him when I realized what he was doing. He was trying to feel what it’s like to say the wrong things and have people reject you and what that does to you and how it sours you.” Fosse nurtured all of it. Playing one side against the other, he introduced Roberts into an atmosphere of exile and estrangement, the kind that drove Snider.

Shooting on a sound stage at Zoetrope Studios, Roberts flubbed a scene.

Fosse’s head shot out from behind the camera. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“I messed up.”

“Get over here.”

Fosse got up from the crate he used as a director’s chair and took him to the other side of the stage, away from the rest of the crew. “Look at me.”

Roberts looked at him.

“
Look
at me.”

“I’m looking at you.”

“
Look at me!
”

“I’m looking at you!”

“You’re playing
me
if I wasn’t successful.” Fosse got in his face. “Do you understand?”

Do you understand?
He asked the question, Roberts remembered, “like,
Can you do this for me? For me.
It was so moving and so gritty and unexpected. By the time we got back to the set, I was copying his every move. I didn’t drop one mannerism he had for the rest of the movie. I became Bob Fosse.”