Musical Matinees (The Mavericks): All That Jazz

All That Jazz is a 1979 American musical drama film directed by Bob Fosse and starring Roy Scheider as an obsessive film and stage director. It is a semi-autobiographical fantasy based on aspects of Fosse's life and career as a dancer, choreographer and filmmaker. It was also the final work of its producer Robert Alan Aurthur, who wrote the screenplay with Fosse and died a year before its release.

The story draws from Fosse's experience editing his 1974 film Lenny while simultaneously staging the Broadway musical Chicago, which he directed, choreographed and co-wrote. Like Fosse, Scheider's character attempts to stage an ambitious Broadway musical while supervising the editing of a film he directed and which, like Lenny, centers around a stand-up comedian. Jessica Lange, Ann Reinking, Leland Palmer, Cliff Gorman and Ben Vereen co-star in supporting roles. The film borrows its title from the song of the same name from Chicago.

All That Jazz received commercial and critical success, being praised by critics for its creativity, ambition, choreography, and Scheider's performance, although it was labelled by some as pretentious or "egomaniacal", in particular in regard to its autobiographical nature. It jointly won the Palme d'Or at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival together with Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha and received a leading nine nominations at the 52nd Academy Awards, including for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor for Scheider, winning four: Best Original Score, Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, and Best Film Editing. Following its release, Stanley Kubrick called it "[the] best film I think I have ever seen", and in 2001 it was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

All the Maverick Musicals include an introduction, discussion and follow-up Q&A with Professors and Film Scholars Richard Edwards and Vanessa Theme Ament. Both Edwards and Ament have written extensively about the American Musical and especially about the impact of the Maverick Musicals had, and continue to have on modern culture and to new directions and new possibilities in American and European cinema.

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