All That Jazz - 1979 (starring Roy Scheider, dir. by Bob Fosse)

I saw this for the first time recently & liked it a lot but thought of that thread bc for a while I was hung up by wondering if the film thought Gideon was actually talented or not. Like he’s obviously presented as v successful and respected, but the actual creative work that we are shown in the film (editing the fake Lenny Bruce movie and the porno dance scene he choreographs) were both howlingly silly and bad imo, to the point where I wondered if Fosse was being parodic or laceratingly self-critical.

tbh this is the usual failing of Films About Artists, so I don't get hung up on it.

also i think regardless of how good either project is, the movie views them both as acts of self-sabotage

yeah thats why those scenes still worked for me (& why whether or not i think the works are "good" is irrelevant), they both served plot & character functions beyond just "lookit what a genius this person is", which is the default reflex of most Great Artist bios. i like Fosse fine but i appreciated not having that be a requirement for enjoying it as character study.

Back when I was working in a Turkish Nightclub...

My sister had an idea she wanted to add "All that jazz" to one of the shows, and got somebody to bring out this movie's soundtrack.

When it got here, guess what?

Yep. It's not in this movie. It's "Chicago"

Never mind, we did mine it for other tracks, and "It's showtime folks" did get used as a blip intro...

Blank Check recently did a series unpacking all of Fosse's films.

Lin Manuel-Miranda guests on the ATJ one, some great moments are drawn from Fosse's first draft of the script that Sam Rockwell sent to Miranda, w/ no name changes and some juicy details.

https://soundcloud.com/griffin-and-david-present/all-that-jazz-with-lin-manuel-miranda