MovieChat Forums > All That Jazz (1979) Discussion > Not to sound like an old fuddy-duddy bu...

Not to sound like an old fuddy-duddy but Air-otica is too much.


Sometimes in a play/movie, when sex is in play, less-is-more.
Can see it as a scene in a bio picture, about Fosse and his mind, but if that was in a Broadway musical it would have "interfered" with the entire show.
(And I'm not just talking about the "family audience" either.)


"It's the system, Lara. People will be different after the Revolution."

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That entire scene was intended to be way over the top. We were supposed to be getting a glimpse into the mind of Fosse. The whole "they didn't like it..." at the end was only supposed to be a surprise to Fosse.

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The overly sexual dance number that, as you said, "interfered" with the musical it would have been in, was Fosse's Achilles Heel during his Broadway career. Fosse devised such numbers for NEW GIRL IN TOWN, CHICAGO (The trial scene would have been filled with writhing, moaning bodies), and PIPPIN. Often, as in NEW GIRL and CHICAGO, the number became the bone of contention between the producers and actors and Fosse, forcing Fosse, eventually, to tone it way down. His biographers Martin Gottfried and Sam Wasson describe the near-crisis that Fosse's propensity for choreographed near-pornography on stage often created in a rehearsal period. On CHICAGO, actor Jerry Orbach, who was playing Billy Flynn, volunteered to do a gentle intervention, and convince the choreographer-director that turning a jury box into a passion pit would overwhelm the rest of the show. Thus Fosse knew that "Joe Gideon" would have to devise an oversexed extravaganza that makes everyone watching it uncomfortable, even Gideon himself. We never find out if it does go into the final show; of course, it goes into the show we're watching, the "new musical" of Gideon/Fosse's life. Fosse knows too well what he was doing in such numbers, satirizing cheerful Broadway ditties like "Take Off With Us" into something its composer never imagined. Who is the songwriter supposed to be? Kander and Ebb (CHICAGO, CABARET)? Stephen Schwartz (PIPPIN)? It's hard to tell, although when the songwriter puts his head in his hands and despairs, "Now Sinatra will never record it," one might remember that Sinatra had recently made a hit record of "New York, New York," which Kander and Ebb wrote for a movie, not by Bob Fosse, but by Martin Scorsese.

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