Fosse's Dark Vision

Teresa Carpenter’s article “Death of a Playmate” appeared in the November 5-11, 1980 issue of the Village Voice, and was the first major treatment of Dorothy Stratten’s murder after the initial reports of her death the previous summer. The article is a pitiless account of a naïve young woman seduced by an ambitious pimp named Paul Snider who convinced her to pose nude and brought her to the attention of Playboy magazine, which made her a centerfold and a celebrity. But once she was selected as Playmate of the Year and a potential movie career opened up for her, she outgrew her loutish husband, who preferred to kill her rather than give her up.

Something about the murder of a beautiful young woman less than six months out of her teens when she was on the cusp of movie stardom struck a nerve in the popular culture of the 1980’s, and the article is a searing indictment both of Hollywood and the Playboy aesthetic, laced with a dour, take-no-prisoners brand of feminism. There isn’t a single person in the piece, not even the murder victim herself, described by Carpenter as “less memorable for herself than for the yearnings she evoked,” who isn’t depicted with ill-concealed contempt.

Given director Bob Fosse’s decidedly grim view of human nature, he and Carpenter’s article were a perfect fit. The article give him a chance to show the world that he was something more than a shallow purveyor of razzle-dazzle entertainment. Fosse, after an abortive attempt at movie stardom in the 1950s at MGM, had become the most sought-after director-choreographer on Broadway, and by the early 80s had established himself as a brilliant filmmaker as well. After several major hits in the past decade and an Oscar under his belt for Cabaret (for which he beat Francis Coppola for The Godfather), this was his chance to finally show Hollywood that he was a real artist, the equal of Bergman and Fellini, with a tragic view of the world yet with a sensibility and a subject matter that was uniquely American. But as one biographer put it, “Fosse’s own self-hatred, evident throughout his life in his obsession with death and self-destruction, may have drawn him to a project focusing on a side of his personality he found abhorrent.”

Fosse had aspired to be a writer for decades. His closest friends, such as Paddy Chayefsky and Herb Gardner, were writers, and as early as the mid-1960s Fosse had made an attempt to write the book for the Broadway musical Sweet Charity before being replaced by the more established playwright and librettist Neil Simon. But it was Sweet Charity, according to biographer Kevin Boyd Grubb, that “began Fosse’s long-time romance with the typewriter.”

While Fosse had shared screenwriter credit for the first time (with Robert Alan Aurthur) on All That Jazz, he wanted to be a true auteur, and Stratten’s tragic story, Carpenter’s bilious prose and his newfound clout combined to give him the opportunity to make that dream a reality. One could argue that by making Star 80 Fosse was exploiting Dorothy Stratten in death the way Paul Snider had exploited her in life, and for the same reason: to further his ambitions. In a 1973 interview he had explained his ultimate desire: “I’m gonna write and produce and direct and do everything myself, and if it fails, what have I got to lose?”In the end, it would turn out that Fosse had quite a lot to lose.

Star 80 and an earlier Fosse film, 1974’s Lenny, while superficially dissimilar, share formal and thematic elements that make them fascinating to compare. Both of these films lay bare Fosse’s twin obsessions: his ambivalent love/hate relationships with both show business and women. It’s important to understand that, while to the outside world Bob Fosse was a brilliantly successful choreographer/director who had pulled off the unparalleled accomplishment of winning an Oscar (for Cabaret), a Tony (for Pippin) and an Emmy award (for the TV special Liza with a ‘Z’) all for Best Director, in the same year, in his own mind Fosse was poised midway between the movie star he never became and the serious writer he yearned to become. Fosse was also a compulsive womanizer who grew up working as an underage tap dancer in sleazy burlesque dives (an atmosphere vividly, if disturbingly, evoked in All That Jazz).

Womanizing, granted, is hardly a rarity among film directors, in fact, one could posit that it’s the rule rather than the exception, but in the event all of Fosse’s films, from Sweet Charity to Star 80, share a deep, disquieting ambivalence about women and their sexuality.

Not only do Lenny and Star 80 share the same interview structure (in both cases the voice of the off-screen interviewer is that of Fosse himself), they both tell the same basic story. Neither film is about its ostensible subject. Star 80 is no more about the Playboy playmate Dorothy Stratten than Lenny is about the standup comic Lenny Bruce. Both films are about an ordinary man who falls in love with a beautiful, sexually desirable woman and depict how his lust for that woman destroys him.Fosse begins Star 80, not in media res, but at the climax of the story, when Paul Snider has already killed and presumably sodomized the corpse of his wife but before he’s killed himself, and the structure of the film (although it never explicitly says so) is about what goes through Snider’s head in the roughly one hour between her murder and his suicide.

Fosse then flashes back to Vancouver in 1978, showing Snider working out and preening in front of the mirror in his underwear, rehearsing how he will greet strangers to make a good first impression, veering from narcissistic self-love to total self-contempt. Any viewer of All That Jazz, Fosse’s previous film, cannot help but be reminded of how Joe Gideon, the film’s Fosse-esque protagonist, also stood in front of the mirror before facing the public, saying: “It’s show time, folks!” It’s an early (and eerie) indication of the near-total identification Fosse has with his main character.

Snider wants fame the way Rupert Pupkin does in Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (released in the same year), and in both films the protagonist is compelled to use another person as the means to the end of status and celebrity, and ends up resorting to antisocial behavior in order to attain it. In The King of Comedy De Niro’s Rupert Pupkin merely kidnaps Jerry Langford in order to achieve his goal: in Star 80, Snider, blocked from every other avenue of accomplishment, can only realize his goal through murder. “You won’t forget Paul Snider,” he says before blowing out his brains, as if murder and suicide were creative acts, and self-inflicted violent death could confer immortality – a staple of the Romantic mindset ever since Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. You could even argue that the interview sections of the film, where an unseen interrogator questions various people about Paul Snider’s life, are nothing but figments of Snider’s vainglorious imagination as he visualizes his posthumous celebrity before killing himself.

Snider is the product of a culture that is beginning to celebrate celebrity for its own sake: celebrity devoid of any tangible accomplishment. Like Rupert Pupkin, Snider is depicted as being an outsider in the world to which he aspires simply because of his choice of wardrobe (they both wear the same lurid color palate: compare the gaudy blue tuxedo that Snider wears to Dorothy’s prom, which makes Dorothy’s mother burst out laughing at its sheer tackiness, to the similarly garish suit Rupert Pupkin wears to the offices of Jerry Langford in Scorsese’s film – they could have had the same tailor). And while The King of Comedy has an ironic coda that is reminiscent of the end of Taxi Driver (both films have, in a sense, happy endings), Star 80 is a dirge from its opening credits, with almost no relief in its 103 minute running time. It’s somehow eerily appropriate that, in the decade in which the AIDS virus was first diagnosed in America, Fosse would make a motion picture in which sexual desire would lead ineluctably to annihilation.

For Paul Snider, the highlight of his life and the brief fulfillment of his fantasy was the night he went through the gate of the Playboy Mansion to meet his idol: Playboy founder and publisher Hugh Hefner.It’s not a coincidence that, as we see Dorothy leading Snider into the Playboy Mansion, the song on the soundtrack is The Band’s “Up on Cripple Creek,” and that we hear it again when Hefner walks into the room. It’s about as true to the period as the Scott Joplin rags that George Roy Hill chose for The Sting, but Fosse wasn’t so much interested in period verisimilitude as subliminal comment. The song nicely epitomizes his view of show business: that it consists of pathetic emotional cripples who need the acclaim of the crowd to make up for their own emotional deficiencies. Only that acclamation is never enough to fill the emptiness at their core, which would explain their need to fill it with drugs, alcohol and mindless sex. Anyone who’s seen All That Jazz will recognize the autobiographical underpinnings here. It’s also not a coincidence that the song contains the line “I don’t have to speak, she defends me,” another subliminal comment on what is about to happen, since Snider is going to ruin any chance at a relationship with his idol, something that could have been avoided if he had just been smart enough to keep his mouth shut.

Fosse draws out the suspense as Hefner greets various people (mostly attractive young women) before strolling over to Dorothy and Snider in his patented silk pajamas, phallic Coke bottle in hand. It takes a protracted 20 seconds of screen time for Hefner to come over and speak with Dorothy, with Snider standing next to her looking like a kid on Christmas morning. The instant Dorothy introduces Hefner to her boss, without so much as saying hello, Snider launches into a rant which we learn is an extended quote from Hefner’s own writings. While Snider holds forth, displaying his prodigious memory in as exhibitionistic a way as any centerfold, Fosse cuts to a close-up filmed with a long lens of Hefner listening, his expression a blank. Then he cuts to a tight two-shot of both men, Snider pouring it on, going all-out to impress Hefner: in a sense, to seduce him.

As he finishes, Snider grins triumphantly, thinking he's sealed the deal. That brief moment, lasting only a few seconds, might be the high point of Paul Snider’s life. But Fosse cuts back to the close-up of Hefner as he politely points out that Snider has not quoted him correctly. His fabled memory has failed him, and Hefner quietly one-ups him. Fosse cuts back to the two-shot, only now Snider looks as if the air has been totally knocked out of him by Hefner’s courteous correction. But he recovers and bores in, doubling down on his bet, trying way too hard, throwing his arm around Hefner as if they were lifelong pals and then literally says that: “God,” he says to Dorothy, “I feel Hef here and I are old friends.” Then, as another Playmate named Bobo Weller comes waltzing by, Snider pulls an identical act on her, telling her all the information from her own centerfold to which her only response is an eloquent: “Oh, wow.”

Then comes the shot that does him in. If there’s one thing that defines Paul Snider, it’s that he never knows when to stop, and he doesn’t stop here. It’s not enough that he tries to impress a not-overly bright Playmate in front of his fiancée and her employer, he then leers down at her waist and places his hand on her hip, saying smarmily, “I’d know that bod anywhere.” Hefner looks down at Snider’s hand in distaste and Fosse cuts away from the shot of the four of them to a close up of Dorothy, looking at Snider, mortified. Hefner’s appalled reaction forces an epiphany on Dorothy, who finally gets it: her soon-to-be husband has no class, and he never will.

But it’s what Fosse does next that’s even more interesting. Hefner leaves Snider drooling over Bobo Weller and leads Dorothy over to a movie producer and promotes her to him as “a very fine actress.” It’s as if Fosse is equating Hefner with Snider as a panderer of women. One of the reasons Hefner reacts with such distaste to Paul Snider is that Snider could be said to be his own distorted reflection in a funhouse mirror. Snider, after all, is his most fervent acolyte: the Playboy Philosophy incarnate. Hefner might just see himself, or a far more downscale version of himself, in Snider, and he doesn’t want to own up to that sobering realization.Rather than Carpenter’s transparent loathing for Playboy and its ethos, Fosse tries to have it both ways, positing Hugh Hefner as a quasi-father figure who tries to manipulate and promote Stratten but in a subtler, more subliminal way than Snider. In an interview scene, a reporter even points out to a colleague that the words Dorothy speaks to the press have been injected into her, like silicone breast implants, by Hefner, as if she were a pneumatic Manchurian candidate. Later in the film, as Stratten is speaking on the phone with Snider (while her director boyfriend listens to her from the couch), she tells her estranged husband words that her lover had told her in an earlier scene in bed: “Things change. I’m not the same girl I was in Vancouver.” Snider’s response is: “I have a hunch that you’re sitting in Aram’s knee right now and he’s moving your mouth – he’s pulling the strings.” Anyone familiar with Fosse’s stage work will recognize the image: it derives from Fosse’s 1975 Broadway musical Chicago, when the lawyer Billy Flynn has Roxie Hart on his knee and is putting words into her mouth like a ventriloquist while they sing “We Both Reached for the Gun.”

Fosse follows Carpenter’s main thesis: that Dorothy Stratten was the prey of three men, all of whom used her for their own ends: Snider for a ticket to the big-time, Hefner to buttress his image as a star maker, and the movie director “Aram Nicholas” (a legally compulsory pseudonym for Peter Bogdanovich) for a malleable, seducible Playmate. Ironically, neither Carpenter nor Fosse ever considers the possibility that she might have been using them. They both deny Stratten any possibility of agency and prefer to think of her as a hapless bimbo and victim, rather than a woman who made conscious choices in the hopes of bettering the lives of herself and her family and who lived (and died) with the consequences of those choices. Fosse does no more than make the famously affable Hefner seem in turn vaguely avuncular and mildly sinister, and he seems completely unwilling to invest his nominally fictitious movie director with the kind of identification he had with Snider – ironically enough, given that Fosse himself was a priapic film director whose “puerile preference for ingenues,” as Carpenter puts it, was right up there with Bogdanovich’s. He does little more than recycle the anecdotes about Bogdanovich and Stratten during the filming of They All Laughed that Carpenter reports in her article, and it’s undeniable that when Eric Roberts’s Paul Snider isn’t dominating the screen the film becomes less interesting. Fosse’s identification with his alter ego is so complete that it’s almost as if he has no interest in any other character.

Like another notorious 1980’s film, Jonathan Kaplan’s 1988 The Accused, Star 80’s flashback structure can be said to be in a sense pornographic. With The Accused we spend much of the movie impatiently waiting to see a woman being gang raped (a scene we are promised in the opening sequence), whereas with Star 80 we spend the movie waiting to witness a rape, a murder and a posthumous rape. As Bogdanovich puts it in his book, The Killing of the Unicorn, “Bits of the murder sequence are flashed throughout the Fosse picture, like subliminal attractions for the main event.” James Toback once criticized Fosse for not actually showing Snider raping Stratten’s corpse at the end of the film, but the fact is that it took protracted and elaborate legal vetting, according to biographer Sam Wasson, before Fosse was able to clear the rights and proceed with filming, and that the director was “ordered to refrain from any implication that sodomy preceded the murder.” Fosse had to imply what he couldn’t show.

But even with the restrictions imposed on him by Stratten’s surviving relatives, it’s undeniable that the last 15 minutes are what the film is moving towards: the murder and necrophilic rape of Dorothy Stratten by Paul Snider and his subsequent suicide. In order to achieve complete verisimilitude, the rape-murder-necrophilia-suicide sequence was shot by Fosse in the actual house in which it had taken place, and Fosse even lived in the house with Eric Roberts as roommates during the filming. It’s important to keep in mind that this sequence is entirely an invention of Fosse’s since, as Teresa Carpenter points out in her Village Voice article, “No one knows exactly how events unfolded after Dorothy entered the house that afternoon.”Starting with a master shot of Dorothy on the left side of the frame and Snider on the right (with a huge blow-up of a headshot of Stratten in-between them, symbolizing how her success and iconic status as a Playboy Playmate has separated them, as well as foreshadowing what Snider will do to that face), the scene degenerates into Snider’s increasingly desperate desire to hold onto and control his wife at all costs.The crucial cut in this scene happens after Snider has already played the suppliant, playing on their joint memories and attempting to manipulate her into returning to him. When that doesn’t work, he is literally on his knees in front of her: he puts his head and her lap and says “I don’t think I want to go on living without you. I bought a gun.” And when Dorothy reacts with pity, he becomes enraged and physically abusive, twice pushing her back into her seat when she tries to get up to leave.

He begs her to stay and she lowers her head and silently agrees. Snider shows her his latest project (“I have been working my ass off on these,” he tells her): some tacky posters with her semi-nude image on them that he believes will outsell the famous Farrah Fawcett poster.She doesn’t say a word, just turns her head. And Paul Snider knows that it’s over. He doesn’t stand a chance. All this time Fosse is keeping the two of them separated, almost never in the same frame. By now Snider is literally in the shadows while Dorothy is in the light. In one of the rare shots in this sequence where they’re both in the same frame, Snider has locked the door and he towers over her, one hand on his hip, the other up against the wall as if to accentuate his dominance over his wife, while he berates her for what he considers to be an inadequate settlement offer.He screams that she’s a liar, contemptuously tosses the keys down, tells her to get out and leaves the room. Dorothy is alone in the frame while we hear Snider, off-screen, continue to berate her. The next 25 seconds are the crucial turning point, not just of this sequence, but of the entire film, and they demonstrate how Fosse, who started out on the stage, became a consummate filmmaker. Like many men of the theater turned movie directors, from D.W. Griffith to Orson Welles, Bob Fosse became obsessed with editing. This brief series of shots shows that he learned what Griffith and Welles had both discovered before him: that editing is the essence of filmmaking.Fosse gives us 16 shots in 25 seconds. These shots are used contrapuntally, contrasting Snider’s growing rage with Dorothy’s passivity and, finally, her belated desire to get away. Snider grabs out of a box the shells for the shotgun he has just bought; he tears the wrapping off the shotgun in three brief shots; Dorothy sits and just listens to him rant; Snider opens the box of shells and spills them out; then in a matching shot we see the keys where Snider has tossed them and Dorothy’s hand hesitatingly reaching down to pick them up; then back to the shot of the shells as Snider is heard off screen saying: “I don’t think you’ve ever known how much I love you.”

Then Dorothy, her back to the camera, slowly walks towards the door with the key in her hand. We hear Snider, off-screen, say: “Well, maybe now you will.” Just as Dorothy is about to put the key in the door, Fosse cuts to a brief shot of Snider cocking the shotgun and then another shot – the key shot in this sequence – of Dorothy reacting to the sound of the shotgun. She turns her head like a deer reacting to the snap of a twig.

She does not leave. Everything after that is violence and carnage. Star 80 is a tragedy, but it’s not the kind of tragedy to which most people are accustomed. Our conception of tragedy comes from the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides as filtered through Aristotle and his Poetics. But Star 80 is not a Greek-style tragedy, with a tragic hero and his hamartia, his tragic flaw. It’s far more akin to Senecan tragedy, the kind of violent and horrific Roman tragedy that inspired Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Is Paul Snider raping and murdering his wife then sodomizing her corpse all that different from Atreus in Seneca’s Thyestes, who displays to his brother Thyestes the heads of his sons on a platter, then gleefully reveals that his brother has unknowingly feasted on the flesh of his own murdered and dismembered children? It’s entirely possible that Paul Snider, having wreaked his bloody vengeance on all those who had humiliated and belittled him, stripped him of his dignity and robbed him of the woman who represented the one undeniable accomplishment of his life, feels that he has regained his dignity at the end through violence and murder and dies, in his own mind at least, a tragic hero. One can’t help wondering if Fosse felt that way as well.If making such an uncompromising film was an act of artistic hubris on Fosse’s part, it came at a steep price. The first film on which he claimed sole writer credit, the one on which he finally staked his claim to being a true auteur, was also his last. In the remaining four years of his life, Bob Fosse never directed another feature film.

Star 80 may well be the most personal film ever made by an American director, and one of the most disturbing. It is what the French call a film maudit, and while it may have bombed at the box office, so did Von Stroheim’s Greed, a film that in many ways Star 80 resembles. Fosse’s film is grim, uncompromising and relentless: an assault on the audience that chooses to sit through it. Its main flaw (at least in terms of commercial appeal) is that Fosse’s identification with his protagonist is so complete that he failed to understand how offensive that would be to his audience, especially in an era – the early 80s – when feminism was becoming more belligerently radical. That was the era in which such alleged feminists as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon were proclaiming that intercourse was rape and pornography a hate crime: not the best time to release a film in which a pimp, rapist, murderer and necrophiliac is, one could argue, portrayed as a tragic hero. In the final analysis, Star 80 isn’t about how Paul Snider destroyed Dorothy Stratten: it’s about how Dorothy Stratten destroyed Paul Snider, in the same way that Lenny is about how a man is doomed the minute he falls in love with a stripper. It’s about female sexuality as a destructive force and the disastrous consequences that it can have on the men who fall under the spell of beautiful, sexually desirable women. It’s the one story that Bob Fosse felt he was born to tell.Hollywood films have almost always given their audiences ameliorative fantasies, fanning their dreams, allaying their fears and telling them ad nauseam that if they just hang in there, persevere and keep on hoping, somehow everything will all turn out for the best. That dreams are attainable, prosperity is just around the corner and love will find a way.

But Star 80, darker than the darkest film noir, insists on driving home to its audience a diametrically opposite message: that the deck is stacked, the wheel is rigged and no matter how hard you try, the house will always win. In a way, Star 80 is a film out of its time, and one could only imagine what kind of reception it might have gotten had it been released a few years earlier, when downbeat films were in vogue, rather than during the early years of the Reagan administration. After all, it’s no worse than Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver in the blood and guts department, and Taxi Driver was a hit. So what was it, besides simply bad timing, that turned off critics and audiences so much about this film when it was first released?

The answer is simple: Star 80 doesn’t just assault the senses of its audience, but its values as well, something Taxi Driver, with its painfully ironic “happy” ending, doesn’t do. Star 80 tells its audience in no uncertain terms that the value system they’ve been spoon-fed by Hollywood and the media about love and success is utter bullshit. That brains, imagination and hard work are not enough. That love, if it exists at all, will be snatched away from you just when you need it most. That women will betray you for someone more wealthy and successful the minute they get the chance. And that there’s nothing you can do about it, except maybe blow your brains out. Americans will sometimes stand for pessimism but almost never for nihilism, and Star 80 is one of the most nihilistic films ever released by a Hollywood studio: no wonder it was a flop.

In the world of filmmaking, however, box office success and artistic merit don’t always coincide (as the eventual fates of films as different as Intolerance, Greed, Metropolis, The General, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Rules of the Game, The Magnificent Ambersons, Ace in the Hole, Sweet Smell of Success and Touch of Evil, among others, can attest) and Star 80 fits into that category as well. But while They All Laughed, Peter Bogdanovich’s collaboration with Dorothy Stratten, seems to be gradually inching its way into the canon of great films (Quentin Tarantino in the 2002 Sight and Sound poll listed it as one of the ten best films ever made), few people have made the case for Star 80 as a neglected classic. Now that it has been reissued on DVD in its original aspect ratio by Warner Archive, perhaps that will change, and audiences will finally come to appreciate the ferocity of Fosse’s dark vision.

Films fail to become classics without champions, the way Rainer Werner Fassbinder among others championed the once unfashionable melodramas of Douglas Sirk, and yet, more than thirty years after it was originally released, Star 80 remains a powerful, personal and deeply disturbing film by a director with a unique sensibility. It deserves to be rediscovered by a new generation of filmmakers and scholars.

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Tom Moran is a freelance writer who lives in New York.