All his life he’d prided himself on being a chameleon. Ambition and good fortune had allowed him to do spectacularly well with the middling artistic hand he’d been dealt, and for that he was grateful; his genius lay not in the art of his craft but in the seasonal confounding & upending of expectations, a nearly mischievous, overreaching, against-the-odds grab at the brass ring. Another thing he’d never shared with anyone, not even his wife (especially not her, he had his pride): the vain notion there was the possibility of a discernible, other-than-entrepreneurial genius nestled in some frozenly findable place within, an aspect of MD transcending his populist iMDb filmography. There came days now where he felt tough enough to storm the gates of heaven & snatch his prize from the gods; & (mostly) nights when all he sought was sleep. It was always said to seize the day, but why not seize the night? The cancer war had bestowed upon him strength and validation, & the spoils necessary to affect his new venture — an excavation of long-buried things. He would drag them into the moonshadows. It was time to dig for hidden codices & calendars, forgotten scriptures, scripts & sundials bearing signs & symbols written in a mother tongue he’d never bothered to learn. He would need to draw on that same courage he had summoned in the dark public noon of his disease, and see himself at last for what he was: either artist or quixotic fool — a brutal, delicate, holy enterprise.
Now it was time, & it felt like only a short walk from the community plunge to the ocean. He would leave the pool, with its useless, obsolescent lifeguards, to go swim with the ancient salt-water giants, living and dead. .
. .
All That Jazz.
The movie Michael had watched probably 30 times in as many years was still talismanic, still incantatory, still possessed the thaumaturgical effect of sponging up his anguished depression, preventing it from overpuddling — regulating and distracting. After the shock of diagnosis, he gravitated (again) toward the fatal themes of monomania & greasepaint grandiosity running through Jazz like a funhouse burglar. Fosse was writing about the dexedream years when he simultaneously put on Chicago while editing Lenny—the choreographer’s Love in the Time of Cardiac. He hadn’t watched the movie in a while & this time was amazed to see it for what it was, as an unmitigated failure, a stupendously conceived, curdlingly self-indulgent, terribly written, crassly executed mess. A FAIL from the likes of Fosse was magnificently riveting; yet, because Jazz was so egregiously flawed, this mortal wound of a film left ample room for other voices, other rooms.
As they blasted the tumor from his tongue, he began to conceive himself as the chain-smoking black-shirted paws-up King of the Dance. (Who’d a thunk?) Made him smile. He immediately saw Catherine in the rôle limned by Jessica Lange — the white-gowned gossamer-veiled Angel of Death, the protagonist’s last seduction. His wife would make an iconic, dusky, sensuous angel indeed. His medical travails had made their marriage stronger & the Jazz variations would memorialize that. Show the world they weren’t afraid to meet The End clear-eyed & unafraid, that love was stronger than death. Cat seemed a natural to play another part as well, the dancer-mistress that Fosse cast his ex Ann Reinking in, but that was tough. He knew she’d prefer that rôle over beckoning Death — plus, in the Reinking part, she’d be able to dance, pull out all the stops. But it would be tough for him, & he had to think of himself. He needed to marshal his energies and protect his heart. He saw the Angel of Death as a caricature, which was OK — but for Cat to play a beautiful dancer/lover felt too close to the bone. Besides, he hadn’t conceived All That as a project for husband & wife. No: the notion was born in a place far from commerce and calculation, shamanic, mysterious, & much was unclear. He did not know if it was meant to save his life, or save his death.
In those perilous, ghoulish dog days when malignant thoughts of recurrence stuttered on the tip of his insulted tongue, his jazzy desire coalesced; such was his cancer’s sequelae. It gave him something to shoot for, a major pursuit. He knew if he trained very hard he might just be able to pull off — with merit — a personification of that swagged-out Fosse Swagger of derbied, softshoe’d nomadic royalty. Fosse wrote the book to Chicago as well, which gave Michael the encouraging nod to begin a 1st draft of Jazz, a potentially radical reimagining. He would show it to friends — Aaron (Sorkin) & Tom (Stoppard) & Steve (Kloves) for feedback, suggestions & general help. What was there to lose? If the cancer don’t kill me, I’ll be 80-years-old in the blink of a wet macular degenerated eye————
It came to him out of the blue (where the best ideas always seemed to live) (that mysterious, excavated out of the blue place), from irradiated sleep (Week 7 of radiation, & after the three chemo seshes):
Michael Douglas Catherine Zeta-Jones
All That Jazz
Heather Morris
. . . . . . . . . . Heather Morris AKA Brittany Pierce, Glee’s drop-dead funny deadpan surrealspeak gal. (Cat & the kids were gaga for all things Brittany.) A fresh face with no feature experience to speak of, a working dancer turned improbable, show-stealing comedienne, she was an inspired choice (and one helluva dancer) to play the Reinking-mistress.
Maybe deliriousness in the wake of the cytotoxic campaign the doctors waged had beckoned him manically knit together the karmic thread that weirdly sewed it all together: 1) his wife won an Oscar for her performance as Velma in the movie based on Chicago*; 2) when Beyoncé came across an old curiosity on YouTube — three dancers (including Fosse’s wife Gwen Verdon) doing one of the master’s signature, flirty, muscularly jaunty, thrown-away routines — she liked it so much she copped it for the famous “Single Ladies” video; 3) Beyoncé hired pre-Glee Heather Morris to go on tour & be one of the back-up dancers replicating the dance clip; and 4) the karmic circle was complete when the Glee people asked Heather to teach the cast the “Single Ladies” moves, a road that eventually led to Brittany S. Pierce. Lately, Michael found himself making connections like that, big and little, whimsical and not, as if something alien had given him a tune-up. How extraordinary was the world! Not too long ago, he was certain he would die before his father, unthinkable, but now he felt more alive than he’d ever been.
The critics would have a field day, they always did.