A friend of mine just got a big-ass fancy big-screen TV setup, and invited me over to ooh and aah. Since I wasn’t particularly interested in seeing any of, let alone all of, the Star Wars flicks in HD, he said fine, bring whatever you want to watch. So I took Microcosmos (bugs in extreme close up) and All That Jazz, which is one of my all-time faves. I never saw in the theater, so I was curious to see it on a larger screen.
Turns out my friend had never seen All That Jazz, and he was pretty thoroughly freaked out by it. (About 20 or 30 minutes into it, he said “good lord this is depressing – does it get better?” And although I didn’t say “well, he dies at the end,” I did say “not much – we don’t have to watch it if you don’t like it.” But we did watch the whole thing.)
Anyway, we got into a big conversation after about the bleakness of Fosse’s worldview. And I think one of the things that makes the movie bearable for me is the sense that he learned something from the experience – that there’s a little self-knowlege in the very fact that he made the film, and surely he became somewhat less of an asshole having gone through the actual heart attack stuff, plus the experience of making the movie.
Maybe not. After dinner we went back and started listening to some of Roy Scheider’s commentary – and it turns out *Fosse made Ann Reinking audition for the part of the girlfriend. *
The same behavior that Woody Allen explored in his “artist as asshole” trilogy (Bullets over Broadway, Deconstructing Henry, and Sweet and Lowdown). Allen made the point that to create great art, you sometimes need to be cruel in your relations with others. The vision becomes part of what you are, and if something isn’t quite right, you sometimes have to choose between being nice and being true to your vision.
Joe Gideon in All That Jazz is intent on creating the best thing he can possibly create, and that gets in him trouble with his human relationships. Fosse was well aware of how people took his behavior, but he still needed to get things right. Putting Reinking in the part if she could handle it would have been detrimental to the film (think of Sofia Coppola in Godfather III, though she was a last-minute replacement). The fact that the character was on some extent based on her doesn’t necessarily mean she was right for the role, since the screenplay probably had her doing things she didn’t do in real life.
The point is just that Joe Gideon is intent on creating, and is unable to work on relationships. Not all artists are this way, of course, but often the more visionary ones are.
The character Ann Reinking ended up playing was, basically, Ann Reinking. Who’s going to play it better?
And RealityChuck – I’m not a fan of Woody Allen’s, so that argument doesn’t cut a lot of ice with me. Miscasting can be disastrous, yes – but the part Sophia Coppola was playing wasn’t Sophia Coppola.
I think she should have to audition for the part, because it is based on her. The natural tendency of an actor would be to change the way the character does the more embarrassing actions, or to shade motivations, or somehow alter the intent of the writer/director. the audition was probably Fosse’s way of seeing if she could do her life his way, not her way.
Not auditiong her would be little more than nepotism. Reinking had very little, if any (too lazy to IMDB although I probly coulda done it in the time it took me to type “too lazy to IMDB”) screen experience, and for him to risk his entire project–his art–on doing his girlfriend a favor, well then he’d never have gotten where he got to, as an artist. It would go against everything he stood for. (Have you *seen *the movie? )
This is probably both a hijack and an utterly ignorant question; if so, please forgive.
A friend is enthralled with Ann Reinking in “Annie” (particularly the dance after they get to keep Annie) but I’m getting the strong impression that “All That Jazz” is of quite a different character. Less … upbeat, perhaps? Is the dancing good, such that I should recommend we watch it? Or, put another way, is the dancing good enough to overcome the depressing nature of the movie?
I found All That Jazz not just depressing, but bizarre and bewildering when I watched it a couple of years ago. Certainly it has almost nothing in common with Annie.
I’ve never seen the film, and until now I thought it was a “concert film” style filming of a “greatest hits” performance, a Broadway Review, of peices that Fosse had choreographed over the years.
Now it sounds more like it was a slightly fictionalized autobiographical drama, a story with plot and characters and such. It that more like it? That would have me more interested in seeing it. I’ve always avoided it because, although I like the songs included and I like Fosse’s choreography, I really HATE Reviews, stringing together of unrelated works that had been intended to work within the scope of a specific play.
I am not that fond of Fosse as a person [seriously an asshole] but as an artist, excellent.
The movie is interesting as it is what is more or less running through his head, interwoven with what is happening in real life [so to speak.] Watching him work through the stages of death was fascinating.
I didn’t know he made Anne Reinking audition, but I can understand why he did it.
Lewis Black has a great routine about having to audition for a role based on his comedy. He didn’t get the part, BTW. [Lewis Black] Unbeknownst to me, there was a better me! [/LB]
Ron Howard made both his mother and brother audition for their parts in Apollo 13. This is surprising to me, as I can’t picture Howard telling his mother that she didn’t get the part.
All That Jazz is a great film, IMHO, and I suppose I shouldn’t admit it, but I really identified with Gideon. Some times, before I go into work, I look into the mirror and go, “It’s showtime!” just like him (minus the amphetamines, of course).
The film is a very, very thinly veiled autobiography of Fosse having a heart attack. One of the main characters is “Fosse”'s gf, who is played by Ann Reinking, who, IRL, was Fosse’s gf. She is primarily a dancer and (these days) a choreographer, best known for her association with Fosse (she generally oversees revivals of his work, etc.), though talented in her own right.
Just out of curiosity – it seems to me that everyone who has come in and said “well, duh, of course she had to audition” is male. Are there any other women who have an opinion about this?
Campion, bienville – it’s a brilliant movie filled with just amazing dancing – as I said, one of my all-time top ten favorite movies – but it is, indeed, very dark. Before yesterday it wouldn’t have occurred to me to hesitate to recommend it to anyone – but as I said, my friend was fairly freaked out by it.
The point of being in a movie isn’t “being” a character, it’s “portraying” a character, under very abnormal conditions - lights, frequent stops and starts, dozens of people staring at your tits while you say your lines to no one at all for coverage shots… It’s ACTING, not BEING, no matter what the later-day-Method actors say. (Not only is that a serious revision of Strasberg’s theory, but I seriously don’t understand how - logistically - actors can “stay in character” for film acting. What - when the director yells cut you stay angry but stop swinging the axe? Or does the lowliest intern have to duck and restrain you until the scene is reset for take two?)
Just because Fosse drove her crazy IRL doesn’t mean she can act as if he’s driving her crazy on screen. Hence the audition.
And, of course, she was great. But she could have been awful. And far better to find that out through an audition beforehand than to have to fire your girlfriend and halt production while auditioning a new actor for the role.
Yeah, can you imagine having to tell your squeeze, “Sorry, honey, but you don’t make a very good ‘you’ and we’re going to have to replace you with someone else.”? :eek:
)