Bob Fosse’s Star 80 deals, or pussyfoots, with a real-life horror story it will not, cannot, dare not fully explore. It concerns the hideous murder of a Playboy playmate and starlet, Dorothy Stratten, by her husband, Paul Snider—a con-man and pimp with as pirations of becoming another Hugh Hefner—who then killed himself. For three reasons, aside from the trashiness of the story, Fosse could not succeed. First, the truth was too grisly to avoid an X rating, meaning a loss in revenue no big-budget picture wishes to incur. And where a story registers, for better or worse, through its horror, soft-pedaling means a loss of nerve that infiltrates the entire operation.
Second, although Snider and Miss Stratten are both safely dead, and her mother and sister could be placated into permission, there is no way in which Hefner, who made Dorothy his Playmate of the Year, and Peter Bogdanovich, who directed her in his last picture show and wanted to make her his mate for life, would have permitted an excess of truth, against which the well-known and well-heeled can be legally immune. Hence any filmmaker undertaking to tell such a story knows ahead of time that he will have to skip, finagle, and falsify—another method from which little good can come. But the third and greatest drawback is that Fosse, a dancer and choreographer, is much less of a movie director and not at all a writer: There is not much communication between the dancing foot and the writing hand.
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