A Star Editor—And His Work on Star 80

by Bobbie O'Steen | Published October 18, 2010

I recently moderated my third panel for EditFest, and although this one had only one panelist, it was enough for a feast, because that panelist was the very gifted and gracious Alan Heim. Alan chose to discuss and show clips from Star 80, director Bob Fosse’s final film, which was an unconventional decision.

The film was vilified by the critics and audiences found the disturbing and sexually violent subject matter to be difficult viewing. “I believe, had it not been so well made, maybe it would have been unwatchable,” Heim said. Fosse had this to say about the film: “The passion I had when I made it is no longer there, but I know it’s technically the best movie I’ve done. I felt completely in control of this story.”

Fosse was known as a brave visionary, and the same can be said about Heim. On the first of more than 40 films that Heim has edited, he got a taste for taking risks. The director was Sidney Lumet, who came from live television and was known for shooting very few takes. Out of necessity, Lumet showed Heim what you could get away with—how you could take chances—which got his juices going.

“I discovered in Fosse a really kindred spirit,” Heim said of meeting Fosse in 1972. “The whole freedom of editing that I got from Bob fits into my whole psyche.” Their first venture together was Liza with a Z, which was a one-hour live concert, filmed with nine cameras, “A tremendously complex film and the main camera broke in the middle of the first act, so we had no master shots and we started fiddling around with the film to cover that. And we sort of never stopped fiddling.”

The next film they made together was Lenny, about comic Lenny Bruce, which Heim calls “one of the best scripts I’d ever read.” But when Heim started cutting it together, Dustin Hoffman’s performance, “was kind of weak.” So Heim suggested to Fosse “that we intercut it more than it had been intercut in the script, his performances with his life. So suddenly I was really making juxtapositions that told very strong stories. I always felt working with Bob was a little bit like working on a silent film; the dialogue wasn’t really all that important, you just kept moving.”

Then Fosse went on to write and direct All that Jazz (for which Heim won an Oscar) and he used the techniques they used in Lenny. “It had as much interconnectedness as Lenny ended up having”, which was followed by Fosse writing and directing Star 80, “a tremendously complex movie.” So not only was Lenny made in the cutting room, but it created a kind of template for the next two films.

All three films have more than an intertwined structure in common. They’re all based on true stories and on some level deal with Svengali situations: The man behind the woman. They also deal with the dark side of showbiz and the human condition. And—as Heim says—they have, “at the end, a dead body.”

Star 80 was based on a Village Voice article about the killing of Dorothy Stratten, who was discovered at a Dairy Queen in Vancouver by a small-time hustler named Paul Snider, who became romantically involved with her and persuaded her to pose for nude photos. She ended up in Los Angeles as a Playmate of the Year and an actress and was eventually killed by Paul, “out of jealousy and a kind of a madness… So when we made it we felt the audience would know the story and we had a certain freedom to mess around with time. The other thing was that Bob loved to mess around with time. Ralph Burns [the composer] who worked with Bob a lot, said, ‘There’s real time and there’s flashbacks and there’s flash forwards—and then there’s Fosse time...’ shows what you can do if you are willing to trust the audience, give the audience as little information as you can in a way, let them discover things, and then move on and try and weave it together.”

We ran the first five minutes of the film, which showed the dense embroidery used to tell the story. Dorothy’s voiceover interview about her life as a Playmate is cheerful and innocent, as we hear the clicking of the tape recorder and see a montage of photos of her posing for Playboy. Then we see a nighttime shot of swirling traffic lights and ominous music, along with a bloodied and agonized Paul in front of a blowup of one of those Playmate photos, a snippet of the murder scene. There is no real suspense, because right away we know what is going to happen, and that this narrative is doing something very different.
Certain elements here will recur throughout the movie as a way to fracture and punctuate time. The bloodied Paul at the murder scene, the documentary-like interviews with Dorothy, the clicking of the tape recorder and the camera shutter, the montage of photos showing her early life and Playboy shoots. (Fosse had used recurring motifs in All That Jazz as well, such as showing the main character repeatedly popping pills, smoking, using eye drops and antacids, then looking in the mirror: ‘It’s showtime, folks!’)

The next scene is a flashback to Paul at the beginning of the story, lifting weights and posing in front of the mirror, which tells you virtually everything you need to know about him—the slippery slope he’s on, his lack of self-awareness, the hollowness of his talking to himself in the mirror, his ultimate disappointment in himself. (There were always mirrors in Fosse’s movies, as well.)

As we watched the montage of Paul working out, we got to experience Heim’s magical way of cutting to music, which eludes explanation, but has been partially described as being not on the beat or off the beat but around the beat. We also then see Paul as a sleazy entrepreneur, staging a wet T-shirt contest. Fosse was a dancer—originally in the world of burlesque—which somewhat explains the mirrors and his fascination with the sleazy aspects of show business.