Dead Stars by Bruce Wagner

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 i
MD
b 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
dexe
dream 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