Fosse (35 page)

M
ARTY BAUM HAD
to fly out from Los Angeles to smooth things over. Though Fosse and Feuer had at long last settled on cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth, Baum couldn’t get Fosse to bury the hatchet. “You were either a friend or
an enemy,” Feuer said. “And he moved me from friend to enemy.” Openly ignoring Feuer, Fosse barred him from discussions
at every opportunity, forcing crew members to pick sides or at least make shows of their allegiance whenever Fosse tested them.

They needed extras. But running a call notice in the paper wouldn’t do. “For six weeks,”
said assistant director Wolfgang Glattes, “I went to the red-light district looking for extras. Some days I wouldn’t get to the production office until one o’clock in the afternoon because I had been up until five [in the morning] the night before.” Nearly impossible to satisfy, Fosse tested like mad, and not just actors and locations; every last detail had to audition. “Bob was obsessed with blood,”
said Glattes. “He tested three or four weeks of blood on the pavement. Just blood! ‘Mixture 13C!’ We did ten or fifteen tests just to get the right color and the right density. Then we’d examine it the next day in dailies. If Bob wasn’t happy, we’d go back for more.”

Rather than depressing the crew, Fosse’s ruthless perfectionism bolstered the collaborative spirit. His team wanted to help him. With money scarce, everyone did whatever he or she could to match his efforts, many of them living together under one roof at a residential hotel in Schwabing. With the right people always on hand to help Fosse try out new ideas—and Fosse was always coming up with new ideas—the boundary between production time and play time evaporated.
Cabaret
grew around the clock. That the script was still being rewritten—this time, with Fosse’s blessing,
by Hugh Wheeler—only enhanced the sense of communal authorship. Fosse would hear any idea.

Michael York
finally mustered the courage to address the problem of his underwritten character, but he wanted to do it without seeming high maintenance. “Bob,” he said, “I just reread the script on my way over and I don’t know how to play this. There’s nobody there!”

“Don’t worry,” Fosse said. “We still have two weeks.”

After Fosse finished rehearsing the dancers, he, Wheeler, Minnelli, and York locked themselves in a room in Bavaria Studios and started talking about the script, beginning at page 1. “That two weeks,”
York said, “was one of the most creative times I have ever spent working with a director. We were all boiling, going at all cylinders.”

Trailed by her dog Ocho,
named for the Puerto Rican bar where she found him, Liza Minnelli came to rehearsal fully prepared. A connoisseur of Kander and Ebb, she had sung their songs (many written exclusively for her) for the better part of her singing life. Taking her father’s advice, she had studied Louise Brooks and Louise Glaum,
the flapper sirens Sally Bowles would have idolized. And she had already isolated the most important aspect of her character: The main act of a trashy, rundown nightclub, Sally “needed to be special.”
So she spotlit herself with press-on eyelashes and green-painted fingernails. Fosse understood why: failure was the province of glitz.

Minnelli cut her bangs down to a point à la Louise Brooks. “Well?” she asked, modeling
the hairstyle for her director. “You like it?”

“What if I hadn’t?” he asked.

In rehearsal, Fosse found that Minnelli, still a young actress, cried too quickly, too easily. Almost as soon as the scene began, streaks of black mascara spilled down her face. It was startling, but Minnelli’s gift for instant vulnerability, which worked so well in her act, ran counter to a certain inauthenticity in Sally Bowles. Fosse wanted Minnelli to clarify the tension before the tears, to work at restraining what came to her so naturally. “If you feel like crying,” he told her,
“I want you to fight like an animal trying not to cry.” When Fosse gave her that note, she cried. But she heard him and made the adjustment permanent, and the two never stumbled again.

The night before the first day of filming, Emanuel Wolf flew in for an enormous kickoff party. Jammed into an expensive biergarten for an all-night bacchanal of schnitzel and beer, hundreds of crew members and their spouses enjoyed a rare night out on the production’s dime. The only scowl in the room was Fosse’s.

“What’s wrong?”
Wolf asked.

“Am I paying for this party?”

“What do you mean?”

“What did this cost?”

Wolf sat down beside him. “I want you to relax. Okay, Bob?
Enjoy
the party.
Enjoy
it.”

“I have seven and a half percent of this movie, Manny. Am I paying for this?”

Wolf smiled. Fosse’s concern was a good omen. “I will put it in writing that the cost of this party does not go against your profit percentage, okay?”

Fosse reached for a napkin. “Here.”

“I’ll send you a letter in the morning.”

“Fine.”

That night, Fosse couldn’t sleep. He called Wolf.

“I got a problem.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Can I come see you?”

Moments later, Fosse was seated in an armchair across from Wolf’s bed. “I have a big problem directing this movie.”

Wolf felt a tightening in his throat. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m not Jewish.”

Of all the reasons to worry, and there were many, real and imagined, Fosse’s religious background seemed an odd one for him to pick, especially at one in the morning. But he had been through all the others.

“I don’t understand being Jewish,” Fosse explained, “and I don’t have a feel for it.”

Fosse questioned Wolf about Jewish life, and Wolf, who wasn’t religious, tried his best to answer. “I didn’t know,” Wolf said, “if he was addressing the real problem here or he was using it to try to get close to me.” Three hours later, they were still talking.

“Manny,” Fosse said, “there’s this thing with Cy . . .”

He explained everything. On a certain level, Wolf was not surprised. Early on, Wolf sensed Feuer had advocated for Fosse because, as a desperate director coming off a flop, Fosse would submit himself to Feuer more willingly than a celebrated director high on his own success would.

“Bob, from here on in,
Cabaret
is your picture,” Wolf said. “Your picture and my picture. Cy and Marty Baum were brought on by me, you got me? ABC put up half the money, but I have final cut, final script, final everything, and I’m telling you, Bob, if you’ve got any problem, any question, you come to me, okay? Not Cy.”

The next morning, filming began. Separated from his American Camels, Fosse smoked Gitanes without the filters. “His concentration was so intense,”
Glattes said, “we’d all have to watch his cigarettes to make sure he wasn’t going to burn his mouth.” Glattes had met and fallen in love with Kathryn Doby, who was playing one of the Kit Kat dancers. “Because we knew him, Kathryn and I would slip by Bob, pick the cigarette out of his mouth, and throw it to the ground before it got too short. And he would go on as if nothing happened! That’s how focused he was.” A great respecter of focus, Geoffrey Unsworth earned Fosse’s appreciation simply by working quietly. “When he was ready to go,”
Glattes said, “he would wait to catch my eye and just raise his hand. I knew then to get the actors ready. Geoffrey never had to speak.” Calm coming down from the top pervaded the entire set. “It was always very comfortable,”
York said, “very friendly.”

Filming began with the cabaret numbers, danced on a tiny stage only ten by fourteen feet, compelling Fosse to work within authentic restrictions. “I tried to make the dances look like
the period,” he said, “not as if they were done by me, Bob Fosse, but by some guy who is down and out. I tried to keep this in mind, but it’s so difficult. You think, ‘Oh, I can’t really have them do
that.
That’s embarrassing; it’s so bad, so cheap.’ But you think, ‘But if I
were
the kind of guy who only works with cheap cabarets and clubs, what else would I do?’” And Fosse was that kind of guy, at least in part. From the wings of half-forgotten nightclubs, an emotional analogy to fascism grazed his memory, waiting to be mastered. Fosse didn’t know Hitler’s audience, but he knew how they must have watched their lousy cabaret acts, with excitement, horror, and lust.

The dances Fosse saw, but how exactly to film them was not clear. It wasn’t like
Sweet Charity,
whose steps he had lived with for years before filming them. On that movie, anticipating what angles he needed was easy; he could close his eyes and turn around the 3-D model in his memory. But on
Cabaret,
whose multitudes of images were only beginning to flood over him, whose details and variations on details would be impossible to foresee, Fosse opted out of storyboarding
to shoot somewhat on the fly. “I basically try to get an overall shot
covering the choreography,” he said. “Then I go in and start playing.” And so, with the crew waiting and money burning, Fosse would circle the dancers, examining each one’s every angle from every conceivable vantage point. “Every time I do that,”
he said, “I say, ‘Oh my god, it’s incredible to see this leg from this angle. No one’s ever seen a dance from here.’” He didn’t know what he wanted until he saw it; until then, he kept looking. “I keep my options open as long as possible,”
he said. “It’s a definite problem in collaborating with me.”

The cinema was perfect for his sensibility. On film, where Fosse could cut to an extreme close-up of the littlest finger performing the smallest twitch, he could reveal what was difficult, or even impossible, to see onstage. “You see, the wonderful thing about a camera
that you don’t have onstage,” he said, “is that you can come in on a hand, you can come in to a face or some movement that you don’t get in that proscenium, that you wish you could, you know, have glasses that come in on somebody’s foot on a particularly right movement.” Watching a performance onstage, audience members did their own editing; they picked and chose where they wanted to look. Of course, in the theater, Fosse could guide the eye with lighting and blocking, but with a film, the audience’s eyes went where he wanted them to go, constantly and permanently, a perfect performance every single night. The only things keeping him from perfection were time and money. He said, “They have to keep pulling me out
to say, ‘Stop already.’ Production managers, assistant directors are always saying, ‘How many more you got?’ ‘I got thousands; how much time do I have?’”

Time and Cy Feuer. Their fight over a cinematographer turned into a war over light. “Feuer wanted a kind of Barbra Streisand,
Harry Stradling look,” said camera operator Peter MacDonald. “He wanted everything lit, everything obvious, everything normal, like an MGM musical. But Bob wanted it to be dark, very, very dark.” To MacDonald and Unsworth, Fosse said, “I want this to feel like you’re in a club. I want to feel at times like the camera’s frustrated by someone in the foreground and you want to push them away. If you see me doing that show-offy stuff I did in
Sweet Charity,
stop me. This isn’t going to be a movie. This is real.” Smoky atmosphere, light-reducing filters, long lenses . . . “You had only a few points of leeway between the shot working and everything being a total disaster,” MacDonald said. There was no monitor to check the shot, and since there was no way to correct underexposure in postproduction, finding out in dailies that the shot was too dark would be a disaster. “It took real nerve,” MacDonald said, for Fosse to fight Cy Feuer’s open opposition to
Cabaret
’s look.