Wake up. Blast Vivaldi. Pop pills. Dexedrine. Alka-Seltzer. Visine. Jazz hands. Smile like you mean it when you wryly mutter, “It’s showtime, folks!” to your reflection in the bathroom mirror. Repeat every morning, until you think you’re gonna die. This is part of Joe Gideon’s (Roy Scheider) daily routine. The other parts involve chain-smoking, drinking, womanizing and being the best damn theater director on Broadway.

Bob Fosse’s Oscar-winning 1979 music-drama All That Jazz tells a familiar tale: an eccentric genius gets away with indulging his vices by virtue of said genius. Federico Fellini famously explored this subject in 1963 via 8½’s Guido Anselmi. Paul Thomas Anderson followed suit in 2017 with Phantom Thread’s Reynolds Woodcock. Chicago director—more on Chicago later—Rob Marshall’s 2009 musical Nine ties Fosse, Fellini and Daniel Day-Lewis all together, albeit with less than stellar results. Gideon even mentions a real-life example, when he ponders aloud, “Do you suppose Stanley Kubrick ever gets depressed?” (for the record, Kubrick claimed that All That Jazz was the best film he’d ever seen). Everything old is new again.

But this yarn is spun in an unfamiliar way, glitter and gore weaving through its strings. There’s a certain razzle-dazzle that separates All That Jazz from the rest of the chorus line—and it’s not just its New York skyscraper-high Letterboxd score. With a sensational 4.3-out-of-five-star rating and a firm spot in our Official Top 250, the existentialist song-and-dance tragedy has clearly shimmied its way into the hearts of our community, despite it infamously being unavailable to stream or rent on VOD (it’s occasionally on Tubi, and even then, it’s only in standard definition). “Channeling the brilliant mise en scène of Pressburger and Powell, and the introspective powers of Bergman and Fellini, All That Jazz is a great example of soulful, personal filmmaking that transcends time and space,” writes Nick. Meanwhile, Grace sums it up simply in her five-star review: “I love when musical theater is fucked up.”

A survey of Letterboxd lists also reveals that, as well as all those mentioned above, myriad filmmakers and creatives connect with the picture—David Fincher (who references the ‘Take Off With Us’ scene in Paula Abdul’s ‘Cold Hearted’ music video), Martin Scorsese, Mike Flanagan, Paul Dano, Julia Hart, Sean Price Williams, Susan Sontag and Guillermo del Toro, to name just a few. The opening routine montage set to Vivaldi is especially popular, with Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and television shows Better Call Saul and GLOW paying direct homage to the scene.

“Some filmmakers can’t help but use their art to try to understand themselves, and we try to find ways to see ourselves in our work,” Flanagan writes in his Letterboxd review. “But I can’t think of another example of a filmmaker so unflinchingly dissecting themselves on celluloid. Life and death, art and commerce, and the full spectrum of a human being—failings and vices and all—are all nakedly displayed in this astonishing piece of filmmaking.”

As Flanagan articulates, All That Jazz striking a chord with film/theater industry veterans makes perfect sense—it depicts nearly every aspect of the artist’s struggle: balancing the domestic personal and demanding professional life; fending off penny-pinching producers from compromising and commodifying your vision, fighting (or succumbing to) the hedonistic urges that surround show business; wondering if any of this even means anything in the grand scheme of your life. “The Broadway people, this is like the Bible, this movie,” Scheider states on the select scene commentary, recorded in 2001 and available on the Criterion Collection disc. “The dancers know that this is a genuine portrait of what it’s like to work in a Broadway musical.”

In addition to directing and choreographing his Broadway musical NY/LA, Gideon is also a film director and editor, much like the nine-time Tony Award-winning Fosse himself (eight of those Tonys were for choreography, a record yet to be broken). Yes, the scenes in which Gideon edits The Stand-Up—a comedy film that aptly includes a routine about the five stages of grief—was inspired by Fosse’s experience making his 1974 biopic Lenny, starring Dustin Hoffman as comedian Lenny Bruce, while simultaneously staging a Broadway production of Chicago. “No, I’m no one’s wife, but oh, I love my life and all that jazz!” belts that long-running musical’s Velma Kelly in the opening number ‘All That Jazz’, succinctly summing up Gideon’s perspective on his own existence (or, at least, the perspective he’s trying to convince himself he has) and blessing this film with the perfect title.

The way that Scheider tells it on the commentary, Fosse was walking in Washington, D.C. with his estranged wife and frequent collaborator, Gwen Verdon, who was the inspiration for Gideon’s ex-wife Audrey Paris (Leland Palmer) and, on Broadway, originated the legendary roles of Roxie Hart in Chicago, Charity Valentine in Sweet Charity and Lola in Damn Yankees. (She and Fosse separated after she became fed up with his endless stream of affairs, but they remained close and never divorced—their tumultuous relationship was chronicled in the 2019 Fosse/Verdon miniseries.) The pair had just watched a rehearsal of a revival of Sweet Charity, when, according to Scheider, Fosse “stopped, said, ‘I don’t feel well,’ then laid down on a bench and he died.”

The story is somehow both eerily similar to and a far cry from Gideon’s decline and death in All That Jazz. In the film, it all begins during a read-through of NY/LA—the viewer is thrust into the auditory perspective of Gideon, and the raucous laughter around him goes mute. All that can be heard is ragged breathing, watches ticking, cigarettes crunching and pencils tapping, then breaking. Angelique, the Angel of Death whom Gideon has been flirting with throughout the film, appears: an omen. “His idea of an idealized death, of course, would be a beautiful woman,” Scheider observes on the commentary. “She was the one character in the movie that he couldn’t bullshit.”

Gideon collapses and checks into the hospital to recover, but soon suffers a heart attack after a prominent critic pans The Stand-Up with “half a balloon” out of her “four-balloon rating system”. Images of his going under the knife for a coronary by are ingeniously intercut by editor Alan Heim (who appears in the film as, naturally, a film editor) with discussions between Broadway investors about the financial implications of his potential death. They ghoulishly decide it would actually be more profitable, insurance-wise, if he doesn’t make it through surgery.

On the topic of the human body, this brings us to the death fantasia finale sequence. As Gideon dies, he imagines a theater set populated by distorted mirrors, reflective surfaces, organ stings, dancers in anatomy-themed costumes and an emcee (Ben Vereen) who introduces the doomed director as “adored but not loved,” declaring, “To this cat, the only reality is death, man!” Avatar Gideon appears—in a sequined outfit tailored to show off the silver streak of paint running vertically down his bare chest, glamorizing the real Gideon’s surgical incision—and launches into an ironically lively rendition of ‘Bye Bye Life’, a parody of the Everly Brothers’ ‘Bye Bye Love’. “I think I’m gonna die,” he sings, a showbiz smile plastered across his face.

It’s this scene that garners the most awe on Letterboxd. While not everyone can relate to the burden of being a tortured creative genius, we can all relate to the universal fear of dying. “This is how you document thoughts on death and grief!” writes Awoman_oftaste. “The intersection of life and death is draped in rainbow and chrome colors!” Nathan praises the production design, too: “The design of the set, with its sleek, warped edges is hypnotic, and Scheider plays a brilliant mix of melancholy, giddiness and a seeming relief that his time is over.”

Gideon’s time is over, and so is ours. With that, we’ll dim the lights and close the curtain with a grand finale quote from Scheider’s commentary, which presciently predicted the deep impact and legacy that All That Jazz would leave:

“I think the picture, if it were made today, probably would be better received now than it was then… This is a film that’s gonna last, that’s gonna be around for a long time because it’s beautifully shot, it’s well-acted, beautifully directed, it’s intelligently written, it’s honest and it’s also fantastically entertaining at the same time… The movie still has a lot to say to audiences.”

That it does. And what it says? “There’s no business like show business.”