Read This: Fosse

When Sam Wasson saw Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz for a film course as an undergrad at Wesleyan in 2001, he “felt something… like depressive exhilaration,” he recalls. “It ate my imagination. I’d had some version of that feeling before, of being consumed by a great work, but it had always registered more like catharsis. It felt good. All That Jazz I loved with an intensity that erased me.”

His reaction isn’t hard to understand. All That Jazz is the type of overwhelming creative vision that can convince even the most hardened materialist to accept the auteur theory—but, more than that, it’s one of a handful of films where the filmmaker’s vision becomes inseparable from his personality to the point that you find yourself on a guided tour of his psyche. In Fosse’s case, despite his superficial attempts to obscure the issue, it was an explicitly autobiographical tour spurred by a series of heart attacks in 1975, when he was simultaneously trying to edit the film Lenny and launch the original Broadway production of Chicago. The film’s climactic number, “Bye Bye Life,” stretches the Everly Brothers classic “Bye Bye Love” so far that it nearly becomes meditative—and would be, if it weren’t for the non-stop choreography and the way Fosse extends the dream-like quality of the Hollywood dance sequence into a provocatively surreal realm… then brutally pulls the rug out from under his fictional stand-in (played by Roy Scheider) and the audience.

That college screening planted a seed in Wasson that has culminated, more than a decade later, in Fosse, a massive biography that builds upon previous accounts of the director-choreographer’s life with extensive original research and interviews. His efforts to explain his subject’s genius are relentlessly psychological, taking its cues from the outline Fosse himself laid out: Scarred by his adolescent experiences working alongside sexually aggressive burlesque dancers, in an environment his parents should have known enough to keep him from, he would grow up to love and hate show business with equal passion, sublimating the moves he learned in those cheap joints for the Broadway stage and the big screen. For Wasson, that process becomes a consistently frustrated attempt to work through his youthful suffering.

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13 January 2014 | read this |

Life Stories #57: Jonathan Wilson

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photo: Gabe Wilson

In this episode of Life Stories, I chat with Jonathan Wilson about Kick and Run, a “memoir with soccer ball” that begins with his growing up in midcentury London to his life as a father, fiction writer and now memoirist in the United States—with football serving as the common element throughout. So we talk about everything from the unsupervised games of his childhood to his arrival in New York City in 1976 (when Americans didn’t yet know much about the sport) to covering the 1994 World Cup for The New Yorker to coaching his own children’s youthful soccer matches.

Oh! And we had this conversation before the group stages for the 2014 World Cup were announced, but I suspect that if we were to talk now he’d be just as pessimistic about England’s chances in Brazil—and maybe even just as politely encouraging about the American team—as he was then. (There’s also a point where, discussing how other international teams often draw more fans to matches than the U.S. squad, I suggest it would be silly for the U.S. to play Portugal at Fenway Park; I realized much later I must have been subconsciously thinking of a Celtic-Sporting friendly that actually did take place there.)

This is the final episode of Life Stories for 2013, and a lot has happened with the podcast these last twelve months! It’s a fantastic opportunity, getting to talk to so many memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, and I’m looking forward to what 2014 has in store. Thanks for listening!

Listen to Life Stories #57: Jonathan Wilson (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

16 December 2013 | life stories |