Bob Fosse made five films between 1968 and 1973. The first, Sweet Charity, he had directed and choreographed on the Broadway stage in 1966. Fosse won his fifth Tony Award for the choreography of this show, which starred his wife, Gwen Verdon. I was surprised to learn that the book by Neil Simon was based on Fellini’s screenplay for Nights of Cabiria. Despite its success on the stage, the movie was a flop.

I’m asking for your nominations for an artist who achieves the highest levels of mainstream success in two different fields. For as much as I’m cheating with the qualifiers I’m interested in the names you come up with. I excluded writers who merely mastered different genres and dismissed most musicians who dabbled, however successfully, in acting. Artists like Wallace Stevens, Charles Ives, or William Carlos Williams may be notable for being able to maintain a conventional career in conjunction with their writing or composing but they excelled in only one artistic medium. Warhol was tempting but I didn’t see his films as mainstream enough and other visual artists who could write well enough rarely produced enough to warrant inclusion. I was left with Sam Shepherd, he’s one of our best playwrights and he did get an Academy Award nomination for his acting but, let’s face it, he pretty much plays variations on the same role every time. Stretching further, I’ll throw Pasolini’s name into the ring but don’t feel qualified enough to really judge as I’ve only seen a handful of his films and a poem or two in translation.

One of the many things that intrigue me about Fosse, clearly my vote for this list, is that he continued working on Broadway even after winning the Academy Award as a film director in 1972. I can understand the narrative where the choreographer suddenly makes it to the big time and thereafter only chooses to work in film but to not only return to the stage but work on Hollywood and Broadway projects concurrently is surprising to me in the extreme. I know next to nothing about dance and loathe most musicals. This too is a huge hook to me, how can a man whose life work up to that point is centered on dance create such an utterly personal body of work in film that can speak so directly to someone with so little appreciation for his best known skill?

It’s difficult for me to realize how popular Cabaret (1972) must have been considering how disturbing it is watching it now. The film won eight Oscars, including Fosse winning over Coppola’s work on The Godfather for best director. I’ve complained before about the Academy Awards being overvalued and bewildering (see Joel Grey besting Al Pacino for best supporting actor) but they are representative of the zeitgeist and I still wonder at how this film played back then. Was the audience so in thrall to Minnelli’s car crash of a performance to not be completely creeped out by the young blond boy singing in the beer garden or were we in fact close enough to World War II to accept this look back at the darkness that was to come? That Fosse doesn’t overplay the Nazi material makes it all the more chilling, he’s filtering Isherwood of course but the idea that a song and dance man in only his second film can somehow perfectly create an atmosphere of decadence that works for both Weimar Germany and Nixon America is an achievement that deserves another viewing. Tell me if you too caught your breath when that slow pan over the brass reflects the SS officers in the audience right before the credits crawl. Completely brilliant…and the happiest ending of the three films to follow!

Lenny (1974) is interesting to me primarily as an antecedent to Star 80 (1983) and as a comment on how Fosse works with actors vs. stars. That this depressing failure of a film got nominated for another batch of awards must have been the glow from two years previous but some kind of justice prevailed and Coppola won for The Godfather Part II. All of the good luck Fosse had with Minnelli on Cabaret inexplicably disappeared when working with a far better (and saner) actor in Dustin Hoffman. I don’t know why exactly, other than that the script leaves Hoffman little to do but chew scenery which he does too willingly and that Liza’s compulsive and compelling need to be stared at took our mind off of the bleak political subtexts of that film. Two of the greatest performances Fosse elicited, from Roy Scheider and Eric Roberts, were by actors who were not necessarily stars and I think this is one of Fosse’s signal strengths as a director. The emphasis on performance, particularly the realities of life backstage, on the road, or during the creative process, is consistent in all of Fosse’s work and the talking heads interviewed to tell the retrospective tale will be used to similar but improved effect in the Stratten film nine years later. Final shot alert: a slow pull back to reveal a grainy black and white still of Lenny Bruce’s nude overdosed corpse.

Fosse didn’t make another film until 1979’s All That Jazz but he choreographed and directed a number of Broadway shows during this time, including 1975’s Chicago which he helped write the book for as well. It was during the editing of Lenny and the rehearsals for Chicago that Fosse suffered a near fatal heart attack. But don’t trust me; see the actual open heart surgery for yourself as Fosse has a never better Scheider portray himself in the painfully autobiographical and self indulgent All That Jazz. I wonder why Fosse even bothered to call the character Joe Gideon; he could have been ahead of his time and sponsored an entire academic industry of postmodern studies by just having Bob Fosse direct a film about Bob Fosse. I urge you to wade past the occasionally wince inducing megalomania, you will be greatly rewarded. You want to see a 1979 pretty Jessica Lange play the angel of death? You’ve got it. How about a fifteen minute long fantasy sequence featuring a live band that looks like it just got off of Carousel from Logan’s Run? Look no further. And what exactly is Ben Vereen wearing? I’ll call it a grey spandex unitard worn under that tuxedo, how about you? This film tied with Kurosawa’s Kagemusha for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Must have been that last shot of Scheider being zipped into a body bag as Ethel Merman warbles “There’s No Business Like Show Business” that sealed the deal.

Two years ago I tore my ACL and was laid up for a solid week after the surgery. I could do little but grow whatever facial hair I can muster and at the end of that week I hobbled on my crutches to the bathroom mirror to see what I could make of this new canvas. I shaved myself a pencil thin mustache and started smiling into the mirror as I intoned variations of “Hi, I’m Paul Snider”, “How you doing, Paul, Paul Snider” or “Snider, Paul.” I’m not necessarily proud of this and there’s no way I’m telling you if I rocked the black bikini briefs too but simply warning you as to the effect Star 80 can have on people.

I wonder what people said to Fosse after they saw All That Jazz? “Hey, I never thought of lovingly filming my own death like that, nicely done. And how are you feeling, anyway?” It’s my favorite Fosse film and the one I would recommend most from this list. It also shows him actually choreographing a show and the insight it gave this dance neophyte into that art form was instructive in its own right as well as a literal mirror of what makes Fosse tick. But how could one possibly raise the stakes and better intertwine his three obsessions of sex, death, and performance? Star 80 is that attempt. It reprises many of Lenny’s formal devices to better effect but the enormity of the true life crime and the complicity of most of the people involved make it almost unwatchable outside of an unbelievably good performance from Eric Roberts (which may form the basis of another list of nominations-best performance by an actor who never got close to being this good ever again) and an underrated job by Mariel Hemingway. Despite my love for The Last Picture Show, and an appreciation for his interviews with Orson Welles I promise that you’ll never look at Dr. Melfi’s shrink the same way again. That Bogdanovich actually marries Dorothy Stratten’s little sister after the events depicted in the film may make him, thinly disguised as a director named Aram Nicolas, the most disturbing character in the entire piece. Hard to believe but, again, the logic of Star 80 is that dark and twisted. The first time I saw it I could only see the brilliance of Roberts as he somehow elicits sympathy in his desperation as Snider but in watching it again for this post I’ll rank it above Lenny and leave it to your own discretion and capacity for well constructed but bleak narratives. The end doesn’t shock the way the others do but seeing a clip of a live Dorothy being interviewed makes it perhaps the saddest of them all.

So get your nominations in and hurry to adjust your queue. It’s Showtime!