Word: biz
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Nowhere is the director's artistic schizophrenia more apparent or disturbing than in All That Jazz, a highly personal film that swings wildly from the sublime to the ridiculous. For half its length, Jazz is a knowing and witty tour of high-powered show biz, with Fosse as the guide. The film's hero, Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), is a driven director-choreographer who not only looks like Fosse but also shares his personal and professional history. As Gideon rehearses a new musical that recalls Chicago and edits a new movie that resembles Lenny, he carries on harried...
...comes to a screeching halt when Gideon re-enacts Fosse's heart attack. Though it is daring for a film maker to dramatize his own brush with death, Fosse does not so much confront his own mortality as trivialize it. His usual grab bag of show-biz metaphors is not equal to the dramatic tasks at hand. Indeed, some of Fosse's conceits are embarrassing. An angel of death (Jessica Lange) trots in and out to recite banal Freudian explanations of Gideon's workaholism and promiscuous sexuality. Ben Vereen and dancers in cardiovascular body stockings hoof...
...eddies of this confluence, the work of art, battered and sucked this way and that by incompatible necessities, becomes simultaneously prominent and invisible. It can no longer speak as it once spoke. It is asked to become not an object of contemplation, but a spectacle. In the show-biz world that replaces the more subtle processes of art appreciation, there are two kinds of artwork, Treasures and Masterpieces. Anyone can tell the difference. Treasures have gold in them, Masterpieces...
...went on to become a TV celebrity. In the campaign, she put her media training to expert use to help her husband. When the cameras appeared at a gathering in Lexington, she instructed campaign workers: "Smile, people. Let's see some teeth. This is show biz...
...sheer fact of the politics-show biz mingling may be no cause for worry. Still, too intimate a consortium would do the country no good. The electorate should remain a skeptical and demanding constituency, but the ubiquitous looming of star performers does tend to turn it into a distracted audience. The capacity to achieve effects by glitter and glamour is not likely to inspire politics toward greater integrity. Nor are theatrical atmospherics apt to move the public to examine more soberly issues that too few Americans take seriously even...