All That Jazz (film)

All That Jazz is a 1979 American musical film directed by Bob Fosse. The screenplay by Robert Alan Aurthur and Fosse is a semiautobiographical fantasy based on aspects of Fosses life and career as dancer, choreographer and director. The film was inspired by Bob Fosses manic effort to edit his film Lenny while simultaneously staging the 1975 Broadway musical Chicago. It borrows its title from the Kander and Ebb tune All That Jazz in that production. The film won the Palme dOr at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival.

Gideons condition gets progressively worse. He is rushed to a hospital after experiencing chest pains during a particularly stressful table read with the pennypinching backers in attendance and admitted with severe attacks of angina. Joe brushes off his symptoms, and attempts to leave to go back to rehearsal, but he collapses in the doctors office and is ordered to stay in the hospital for three to four weeks to rest his heart and recover from his exhaustion. The show is postponed, but Gideon continues his antics from the hospital bed, in brazen denial of his mortality. Champagne flows, endless strings of women frolic around his hospital room and the cigarettes are always lit. Cardiogram readings dont show any improvement as Gideon dances with death. As the negative reviews for his feature film which has been released without him come in, Gideon has a massive coronary and is taken straight to coronary artery bypass surgery.The backers for the show must then decide whether its time to pack up or replace Gideon as the director. Their matteroffact moneyoriented negotiations with the insurers are juxtaposed with graphic scenes of presumably Joes open heart surgery. The producers realize that the best way to recoup their money and make a profit is to bet on Gideon dying which would bring in a profit of over USD500,000. Meanwhile, elements from Gideons past life are staged in dazzling dream sequences of musical numbers he directs from his hospital bed while on life support. Realizing his death is imminent, his mortality unconquerable, Gideon has another heart attack. In the glittery finale, he goes through the five stages of grief anger, denial, bargaining, depression and acceptance featured in the standup routine he has been editing. As death closes in on Gideon, the fantasy episodes become more hallucinatory and extravagant, and in a final epilogue that is set up as a truly monumental live variety show featuring everyone from his past, Gideon himself takes center st

Source: Wikipedia