All That Jazz (1979) on Netflix
Joe Gideon stages a new Broadway musical, NY/LA, while cutting The Stand-Up, the Hollywood film he directed. His days run on cigarettes, pills and a stream of women.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.8/1041,297 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes87%
Trailer
Plot summary
Joe Gideon is a Broadway director and choreographer who is preparing his musical NY/LA and editing The Stand-Up, a Hollywood film he made about a stand-up comedian. Every morning he plays Vivaldi, takes Visine, Alka-Seltzer and Dexedrine, looks at his mirror and says it is showtime. His ex-wife Audrey Paris works on the production and dislikes his womanizing. His girlfriend, Katie Jagger, and his daughter, Michelle, stay near him. In his head he flirts with Angelique, an angel of death, in a nightclub, and talks with her about his life. He is unhappy with the editing of the film, keeps changing one monologue, and turns his anger on the dancers in rehearsal.
Cast
- William LeMassenaas Jonesy Hecht
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about All That Jazz (1979)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- While trying to edit Lenny and choreograph Chicago in 1974, Bob Fosse suffered a massive heart attack and underwent open heart surgery.
- The part of Joe Gideon was offered to Paul Newman, who turned it down because he did not feel the character was redeemable and did not take Fosse into consideration; Newman would later call that a "dumb mistake."
- Cliff Gorman plays the lead of The Stand-Up, the film-within-a-film version of Lenny, having played Lenny Bruce in the original theatrical production and won a Tony Award for it, only to be passed over for Fosse's film version in favour of Dustin Hoffman.
- Gideon's rough handling of chorus girl Victoria Porter closely resembles Bob Fosse's own treatment of Jennifer Nairn-Smith during rehearsals for Pippin; Nairn-Smith herself appears in the film as Jennifer, one of the NY/LA dancers.
- It jointly won the Palme d'Or at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival with Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha and took a leading nine nominations at the 52nd Academy Awards, winning four: Original Score, Art Direction, Costume Design and Film Editing.
- Following its release Stanley Kubrick called it "[the] best film I think I have ever seen", and in 2001 the Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
