Welcome to the Fossethon! For info on the blogathon as a whole, please go to our delightful and inviting hub page. Below is the third and final part of my mammoth first submission to the Fossethon. To start at the beginning, see this post. (On the other hand, if you scroll down and read them in backwards order, it all comes out with a less upsetting ending, kind of like that Gaspar Noe movie I’m afraid to see.)

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What can you say about a film career that starts with a musical about “the adventures of a girl who wanted to be loved” and ends with a horrific docudrama about an obnoxious semi-pimp who winds up as a necrophiliac murderer and suicide? His victim (Mariel Hemingway), a girl who really does want to love and be loved, is almost beside the point.

It’s funny, because I had forgotten a lot of things about Star 80, and the murder of Dorothy Stratten, over the years. Starting with the necrophilia — a factoid which Bob Fosse’s biographer Martin Gottfried couldn’t help stressing in connection with the film. In fact, reading about the film, which I hadn’t seen for at least ten years, I found myself wondering if the film was really as brutal and disturbing as all that.

I remembered a smoother, shallower, more — dare I say it — entertaining film. Certainly Gottfried’s references to “gore” are overblown. The only entrials visible on screen are emotional. The shock of the final murder and post-mortem desecration is created almost entirely through Eric Roberts’ performance alongside quick, murky shots of Hemingway/Stratton’s partially concealed corpse, followed by a few movements suggesting the sexual nature of his character’s pathetic final act of revenge — anything more would have resulted in a commercially impractical X rating and Salo-like notoriety.

Seeing it again, though, I found the horrified reaction of critics and Hollywood types a lot more understandable than I expected. It’s possible that the years have made me a bit more sensitive to these things, but now Star 80 strikes me as a very slick open sore of a film. And the source of that tension is his decision to almost ignore Stratton and focus primarily on her husband and eventual killer, small time hustler Paul Snider.

By this point, Fosse was not interested in innocents; he was interested in manipulators. And, while he portrays Hugh Hefner (super suave Cliff Robertson) and his Peter Bogdanovich clone (Roger Rees) as relative knights in shining armor, there’s no escaping the implication that, in different ways, Stratton functioned as a meal ticket and sexual toy for all three. Bogdanovich and Hef were in show business and show business feeds on beauty and sexuality. But both had at least tasted spectacular success, and Fosse is losing interest in winners, too.

Here’s where, finally, I can’t avoid putting Bob Fosse on the couch. Eric Roberts has been quoted as saying that Fosse essentially told him to play Snider as Fosse, if he had never been successful. Clearly, the increasingly frail razzle-dazzler felt there were important similarities between himself and one of the most repulsive figures to ever dominate a major motion picture. And, just as I sit here writing, it occurs to me that Star 80 is a very much the flip side of the openly autobiographical All That Jazz.

It’s horror show time, folks!

While Jazz is undeniably the better film, Fosse must also have known that he was letting himself off easy. Roy Schieder as choreographer/director Joe Gideon may be an irresponsible multiple drug addict and a rank womanizer, but we never seem him being cruel, petty, or vindicative. While the intent was to be “warts and all,” the result was that the warts shown were the more charming and sexy warts. And, in at the end, everyone forgives Joe Gideon’s his sins — though only in his imagination.

Eric Roberts’ Paul Snider makes up for that. His character is cruel and manipulative in a way that only a saint like the film’s version of Dorothy Stratten could ever forgive. The man who put dancer girlfriend Ann Reinking through a series of grueling musical auditions to prove that she could play a character closely modeled on herself in All That Jazz understood that he could be cruel, no doubt rationalizing a lot of it as a side-effect of his perfectionism.

Paul Snider doesn’t even have that flimsy excuse, and the effect is what you’d expect. While few viewers would want Joe Gideon near a young female relative, most of them would enjoy having a drink with him. Paul Snider, on the other hand, is a guy you’d do anything to avoid, and the movie forces you to stare in his face for most of 100 minutes. No wonder there were walkouts.

Two non-successful Fosses: Paul Snider/Young Joe Gideon (Keith Gordon)

Though it had admirers, Star 80 was pretty widely reviled on its release and a few lily-white hands were raised up in horror. Some of this anger, no doubt, had a lot to do with the film’s implied criticism of the carnivorous nature of the world of show business, where the innocent Dorothy Stratten is not safe from abuse even as a corpse.

It’s an excessively dark film that nevertheless deserved better…and still does. The only DVD currently available is a panned-and-scanned mediocrity, marring the work of Fosse and master cinematographer Sven Nykvist.

It might be the fact that I’ve been immersed in the mostly sad and unnerving life of Bob Fosse for the better part of ten days talking, but Fosse is trying to force us to loathe the only character were allowed to identify with. No wonder audiences were alienated. Self-loathing is about the most unpleasant sensation there is, and all the razzle-dazzle in the world can’t change that.