When I first learned of Bob Westal’s Bob Fosse Blogathon, my plan was to write about Star 80, a film I’ve never seen but have long wanted to. I had ample time, in the ensuing month and a half, to track down a copy of Star 80 on DVD, watch it two or three times, and come up with oodles of brilliant ideas in relation to it.

But I didn’t. I lost track of time. I forgot. And I inevitably found myself wandering around the East Village on Saturday, looking everywhere but finding Star 80 nowhere. Even Kim’s on St. Marks, which has a full Fosse section on its DVD sales floor, didn’t have it. “These are supposed to be the spoils of living in New York,” I grumbled internally on the subway back to Queens. “My apartment is too small and my savings are non existant, but at the very least, if I want to buy something, I’m supposed to be able to find it.”

I wasn’t necessarily shit out of luck, re: the blogathon–I have a copy of Cabaret on my DVD shelf, I could have just written about that–but at some point on the way home I decided that my inability to find a copy of Star 80 was significant. It certainly said something about my own laziness, but it also speaks to the film’s lasting legacy. Made by an Oscar-winning director, based on a true story, featuring actors portraying debatably significant real-life figures such as Hugh Hefner and Peter Bogdanovich, Star 80 has nonetheless fallen into the dustbin of cinema history. Even YouTube, the crumb catcher for the toaster of forgotten pop culture, offers no help.

I don’t have any explanations. I haven’t even seen the movie. But I can ramble a bit after the jump.

Star 80 was the last film Bob Fosse directed. He wrote the screenplay, based on a Village Voice story by Teresa Carpenter about the murder of Playmate/actress Dorothy Stratten. It was the only film, other than the admittedly autobiographical All That Jazz, that Fosse had a hand in scripting, and by all accounts, he put much of himself into it. As our host put it in his entry on the film, “Eric Roberts has been quoted as saying that Fosse essentially told him to play Snider as Fosse, if he had never been successful.”

Mariel Hemingway famously had her breasts enlarged in order to play Stratten, who was murdered in 1980 at age 20 by her husband Paul Snider, a low-rent hustler incensed by Stratten’s affair with Peter Bogdanovich. Snider confirmed suspicions of Stratten’s infidelity by hiring a detective to track her around New York, where she spent the summer filming a key role in Bogdanovich’s They All Laughed, in which her character begins an affair with the detective hired to trail her by her overbearing husband. John Ritter played the detective, in what seems like a impersonation of Bogdanovich.

They All Laughed plays 26 years later like a bittersweet ode to the fluidity of love and sex, but in the months immediately after Snider murdered Stratten and then turned the gun on himself, it played like wishfully revisionist history. Bogdanovich couldn’t get his film released, and ended up going bankrupt trying to release it himself.
In Star 80, Bogdanovich’s name is changed to Aram Nichols, but all other names and many details are, apparently, close to life. Fosse even shot the murder/suicide in the actual North Hollywood apartment where it took place. The film carries an 89% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but that mostly seems to be the work of Roger Ebert, whose four-star rave compared Star 80 favorably to Taxi Driver, and included praise for Fosse’s restraint. “Fosse keeps his distance, regarding Dorothy more as a case study than as a fantasy,” Ebert wrote when the film was released in 1983. Ebert’s seems to have been the dissenting opinion of the time. John Simon at the National Review trashed Fosse’s “cowardice”, claiming that the film “pussyfoots with a real-life horror story it will not, cannot, dare not fully explore.”

Star 80 performed poorly at the box office, and has only been released on DVD once, in a widely-panned, pan-and-scan version. As previously noted, clips from this disc have not made their way on to YouTube, but its influence is felt through The Crysalis Killing, an only-on-YouTube 13-minute short which bills itself as a “sequel to Star 80.” “I thought it was interesting how Peter Bogdanovich married Dorothy Stratton’s younger sister after she was killed and had her get plastic surgery,” the filmmaker writes. Bogdanovich did befriend Stratten’s then-teenage sister Louise after Dorothy’s death, and married her eight years later, but he claims he didn’t have anything to do with Louise’s plastic surgery. Crysalis flattens that bizarre kink in Stratten’s legacy into a low-rent, disposable Vertigo.

An odd world, this, wherein a film’s shitty, unauthorized “sequel” can be viewed at the click of a button, but the film itself is nowhere to be found. Baudrillard rolls.