Taglines: All that work. All that glitter. All that pain. All that love. All that crazy rhythm. All that jazz.
All That Jazz movie storyline. Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider) is a theater director and choreographer trying to balance staging his latest Broadway musical with editing a Hollywood motion picture he has directed. He is a workaholic who chain-smokes cigarettes, and without a daily dose of Vivaldi, Visine, Alka-Seltzer, Dexedrine, and sex, he wouldn’t have the energy to keep up the biggest show of all – his life.
His girlfriend Katie Jagger (Ann Reinking), his ex-wife Audrey Paris (Leland Palmer), and daughter Michelle (Erzsebet Foldi) try to pull him back from the brink, but it is too late for his exhausted body and stress-ravaged heart. In his imagination, he flirts with an angel of death named Angelique (Jessica Lange).
Meanwhile, Gideon’s condition gets progressively worse. He is rushed to a hospital after experiencing chest pains during a particularly stressful table-read (with the production’s penny-pinching backers in attendance) and admitted with severe angina. Joe brushes off his symptoms, and attempts to leave to go back to rehearsal, He collapses in the doctor’s office and is ordered to stay in the hospital for several weeks to rest his heart and recover from his exhaustion.
The show is postponed, but Gideon continues his antics from the hospital bed, in brazen denial of his mortality. Champagne flows, endless strings of women frolic around his hospital room and the cigarettes are always smoked. Cardiogram readings do not show any improvement as Gideon dances with death. As a negative review for his feature film (which has been released without him) comes in, Gideon has a massive coronary and undergoes coronary artery bypass surgery.
All That Jazz is a 1979 American musical drama film directed by Bob Fosse. The screenplay, by Robert Alan Aurthur and Fosse, is a semi-autobiographical fantasy based on aspects of Fosse’s life and career as a dancer, choreographer and director. The film was inspired by Fosse’s manic effort to edit his film Lenny while simultaneously staging the 1975 Broadway musical Chicago. It borrows its title from the Kander and Ebb tune “All That Jazz” in that production. The film won the Palme d’Or at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival.
In 2001, All That Jazz was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
About the Production
With increasing production costs and a loss of enthusiasm for the film, Columbia brought in Fox to finance completion, and the latter studio acquired domestic distribution rights in return.
The film’s structure is often compared to Federico Fellini’s 8½, another thinly veiled autobiographical film with fantastic elements.
The story’s structure closely mirrors Fosse’s own health issues at the time. While trying to edit Lenny and choreograph Chicago, Fosse suffered a massive heart attack and underwent open heart surgery.
The part of Audrey Paris—Joe’s ex-wife and continuing muse, played by Leland Palmer—closely reflects that of Fosse’s wife, the dancer and actress Gwen Verdon, who continued to work with him on projects including Chicago and All That Jazz itself.
Gideon’s rough handling of chorus girl Victoria Porter closely resembles Bob Fosse’s own treatment of Jennifer Nairn-Smith during rehearsals for Pippin. Nairn-Smith herself appears in the film as Jennifer, one of the NY/LA dancers.
Ann Reinking was one of Fosse’s sexual partners at the time and was more or less playing herself in the film, but nonetheless she was required to audition for the role as Gideon’s girlfriend, Kate Jagger.
Cliff Gorman was cast in the titular role of The Stand-Up—the film-within-a-film version of Lenny—after having played the role of Lenny Bruce in the original theatrical production of the show (for which he won a Tony Award), but was passed over for Fosse’s film version of the production in favor of Dustin Hoffman.
All That Jazz (1979)
Directed by: Bob Fosse
Starring: Roy Scheider, Jessica Lange, Leland Palmer, Ann Reinking, Cliff Gorman, Ben Vereen, Michael Tolan, Max Wright, Deborah Geffner, Kathryn Doby, Anthony Holland, William LeMassena
Screenplay by: Robert Alan Aurthur, Bob Fosse
Production Design by: Philip Rosenberg
Cinematography by: Giuseppe Rotunno
Film Editing by: Alan Heim
Costume Design by: Albert Wolsky
Set Decoration by: Gary J. Brink, Edward Stewart
Music by: Ralph Burns
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: 20th Century Fox, Columbia Pictures
Release Date: December 20, 1979
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