Cabaret

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It's every Monday and Wednesday. Come join the phone. Listen wherever you get your podcast. Acast powers the world's top podcast, including Off Menu, the Adam Buxton podcast and the show you're listening to right now. And action. Welcome and PNU. Welcome to your favorite podcast. Full stop. That just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them let alone a good one. Let alone the gold standard for musicals. Movie musicals, at least I would say. As always, I am one of your hosts, Chris Winterbauer, joined by Lizzie Bassett, who once again takes us into the remarkably creative and self-destructive world of Bob Fosse. And I cannot wait. Lizzie, how are you doing today and what have you brought for all of us at home? I'm doing great. I have brought, I think, one of my favorite. This is honestly in my top three favorite movies of all time. I have seen this movie so many times. I saw this movie way too young to understand what was going on in its cabaret. It is 1972's cabaret, of course, directed by Bob Fosse, which we will, he's gonna fussy it up. So just, you know, prepare yourself for that. God love him. But before we get into it, Chris, what was your experience with cabaret prior to now? And what was it like rewatching it for the podcast? I had seen it when I was younger, probably also too young. As I mentioned in our All That Jazz episode, my dad is a big Bob Fosse fan. He loves Bob Fosse. He does. He was more of an All That Jazz fan. And so I was always more of an All That Jazz fan. And I think I even said in our All That Jazz episode that I felt All That Jazz was the better movie. I actually don't feel that way anymore. So I may still personally prefer All That Jazz because of how insanely audible. I just have never seen anything quite like it in terms of its autobiographic nature. That being said, cabaret, I think, is one of the best movies ever made. And it's amazing. It is Liza Minnelli gives arguably the performance of a lifetime. I think Michael York is excellence in this movie. Basil X position. Yes. Yes, Basil X position as we would know him later or Logan and Logan's Run. The storytelling is subtle and beautiful. And it uses the music to jarring juxtapositional effect. The dance numbers are, of course, amazing. The cinematography is great. The editing feels extremely modern as we discussed on something like All That Jazz. I did get a chance to watch Sweet Charity as well, which was Fosse's first movie. Me too. We're going to talk about it. Which I really liked. I did too. But this movie feels like a quantum leap forward for him directorially. I know. Well, I'm sure you'll talk about what it's based on. I loved it. It's amazing. And again, yes, I don't know if it's in my top personal top three, but I really think it's one of the best movies ever made. I think it's one of the most important movies ever made. It's beautiful and tragic and it's nuanced. I just watched DTF St. Louis on HBO Max, which also gets into. Is it good? I liked it. It's flawed, but I still really liked it. And David Harbour is really magnificent. All the actors are very good. And it deals with there's, you know, explorations of sexuality in that show that reminded me of cabaret a little bit. Anyway, Lizzie, great choice. More people need to watch this movie. It has only 65,000 ratings on IMDb, which is criminally low. And we know partially why that may be the case. Spoiler alert, much of IMDb's audience is men. I think this movie should be like played in school for everybody. I agree. So I'm sure we'll get into more as we get along. I think it's a masterpiece. I agree. Well, Chris, I love this movie so much and saw it so young that at 12 years old in my seventh grade drama class. Which song did you perform? That's the question. Why don't you guess? Why don't you guess which song a 12 year old girl thought was the one that she could really connect to? So it's not going to be the opening. No, no. And I can't dance. Keep that in mind. Is it mind hair? No, no, I can't dance. So surely it's not mind hair. I don't know. Which one is it? It's maybe this time. Oh, the solo acts. Yes. Oh, yeah. Okay, yeah. I love that number. Carmella's favorite piece, I think was mind hair because she loved the chairs. Yes. And it's amazing the way they do that. My favorite, I thought money was. I agree. I think money's my favorite because I just think watching her and Joel Gray is so transcendent. They're incredible. They were very good friends in real life, which I think really helps their connection in the movie. But the way that he moves is unlike honestly anything I've ever seen. He's like a doll, like a creepy perfect doll, but he's so smooth. I don't know. I think he's incredible. We're going to talk about him quite a lot over the course of this episode. Yeah, and the way that they use him is like this almost knowing. Well, he's like a Greek chorus. He is a Greek chorus or like an angel watching over or, you know, he's it's so interesting and he's so good. By the way, my drama teacher did not choose that song for me. I chose it for myself, which I think should tell you everything you need to know about 12 year old Lizzie. Yes, it does. But I just love this movie. I loved it when I was younger, I think because it appeared very kind of glamorous to me. And it is in some ways. And I know that that's something that in retrospect, you know, Christopher Isherwood, who we're going to talk about, who wrote the book on which it is sort of based, didn't necessarily love about the adaptations of Cabaret, particularly the movie, because the real Weimar Germany, you know, was not glamorous. It was very poor, especially by the end of the 20s and beginning of the 30s, where this takes place. But I don't think I understood Sally Bulls, this character in particular, until like the older I get, the more I understand her and the more I feel for her. And she's in many ways, she is a manic pixie dream girl. But she is a manic pixie dream girl who exists in real life, if that makes sense. Yeah, like, I know people exactly like this. And it like hurts me to watch them, you know, continue to make the same mistakes. And I think Liza Minnelli's performance is absolutely transcendent. I'm with you. I think the cinematography in this is incredible. You know, the way that it immediately places you as an audience member with Joel Gray looking straight down the barrel of the camera, it opens and closes on a mirror, reflecting the audience back to you. But of course, you know, the first shot is this very vibrant, liberal open scene. And then by the end, you see all of the audience peppered with the swastikas. The first one's black and white. Yes. First two, which then hides the red, you know what I mean? Of the red becomes more noticeable as a backdrop of the swastika, I feel, when they go to color at the end as well. Yes. I think honestly, this might be the best movie in terms of showing the rise of the Nazis. And I was talking to a friend saying that I was covering this and I said that I was like, I really think it depicts the rise of fascism better than maybe anything else I've ever seen. And she was like, Oh, I didn't even know it was about that. I thought it was about dancing. It's like, well, that's kind of the point. Exactly. The way that they explore that through Max's character, that false sense of control, you know, we can use them, we can control them. Yeah, of course, it's great. One of my favorites is the last thing I'll say, but that scene in the beer hall with tomorrow belongs to me is I think maybe one of the most powerful scenes ever put on film. And just the way that it's shot like Bob Fosse. Well, yeah, they don't go wide on the boy singing until the very end. And then he does the high arm salute, you know, to cap the song. It's great. Bob Fosse was so specific, which is obviously like also, I think the downfall of him because he was such a perfectionist. But in something like this, the end result is just phenomenal. And that scene in particular, like, you know, it's cutting around to all the different people in the audience, and you're watching the reactions to this song, and they're so specific and different. And it's like, it's this understanding of what is happening, communicated without saying anything at all. Yeah, shame turns to pride, you know, in this moment as, yeah, this spurned country after World War One finds a corrosive new form of national pride through the burgeoning Nazi party. Yes. And also one of the first depictions of an openly queer character post-Haze code as well, which we will talk about too. So all right, we have a lot to talk about. Let's get into it. So first, the details, as always, this is directed by Bob Fosse. It was released on February 13, 1972. It is based on the stage musical cabaret written by Joe Mastroff, based on a play written by John Van Druten, based on the writing of Christopher Isherwood, with a screenplay by Jay Press and Alan and someone else who we will get to. Starring Liza Minnelli as Foylein Salibow. Joel Gray as the emcee, Michael York as Brian Roberts, Marissa Berenson as Natalia Landauer. She's really good. She's really good. We won't get to talk about her very much, but she's wonderful. And she's stunning. Well, she was a model. But yes, she's great. Fritz Veper as Fritz Vendel. Also very good. Yes. And Helmut Griem as Maximilian von Heine, who is excellent. Extremely good. Yes. Gosh, he's charming, but he's creepy in the way that he shows sort of disgust for the people that he's playing with. He's amazing. And the IMDb logline is, as always, a female girly club entertainer in the Weimar Republic era of Berlin. Romance is two men while the Nazi Party rises to power around them. Girly club entertainer. Gotta rewrite that IMDb. I'm going to call somebody. That's not right. Our main sources for today, among many others, are Sam Wasen's biography of Bob Fosse called Fosse. Joel Gray's Master of Ceremonies, a memoir. BBC's The Real Cabaret, which is an hour-long documentary hosted by Alan Cumming. It's on YouTube. I really recommend that you watch. It's very fun. And then Liza Minnelli's memoir, Kids, Wait till You Hear This. And you know, Liza Minnelli, I love her so much. No, she's fantastic. She's so unusual looking. She's such a good performer. She's such a good actress. Look, Judy Garland, I think, is one of the greatest voices, singing voices in movie history. But Liza, you know, can hold her own. She's pretty amazing. 100%. And she's an amazing actor and very funny. She's a great actor. She's so funny. So I was going to say, I came up knowing her through like, Arrested Development, right? Which, by the way, she's hilarious. She's incredible. And her commitment to the bit is amazing. Yeah. I encourage everyone, myself, obviously included, to go back and watch early Liza Minnelli. She's amazing. She's a powerhouse. What's her Lucille to, isn't that? Lucille to. She always is vertigo. Yes. Yes. Go watch Liza Minnelli. Hope Buster. Hope Buster. Watch her in Arrested Development as a follower to Cabaret. She's incredible. Yeah. All right. So Cabaret, the movie begins in 1931. So I want to take a moment to set the scene for us historically. So 1931 was an extremely economically and politically turbulent time in Berlin. And Germany at this point was still a constitutional republic, the Weimar Republic, as it became known for the first time really in its history. Now, the Weimar Republic had been established after World War I. And while the 20s had brought some return of economic prosperity following the war, the 30s and the Great Depression had hit Germany really hard. And throughout the 20s and early 30s, these cabarets or nightclubs were an enormous part of the entertainment scene in Berlin. And there's a couple of big reasons why the cabarets really flourished here. They were pretty LGBTQ friendly. And though homosexuality was technically illegal in Germany, Germany was way more lax about it than other European countries. Police didn't really enforce the laws. Also, censorship had gone way down after World War I. And all of this allowed these clubs to showcase a very subversive, edgy, and of course, entertaining form of commentary. Now, in the 20s, the Nazis were mercilessly mocked from the cabaret stages, as was their anti-Semitism, which I think you see in the movie, like when they are doing the goose stepping and he's dressed as a woman and they change the hats. Well, even early on, when they kick out the young boy who's tithing effectively, the Nazi youth member, and it's he's a nuisance, right? And then obviously the slow encroachment very drastically changes by the end of the film. Yeah. And it also should be noted that many, many of the performers and songwriters working at these cabarets were Jewish. And it's interesting because we watched this with David's parents who are Jewish and his mom could not believe that Joel Gray, who of course is Jewish in real life, took the role of the emcee because I think the way that it was presenting to her was that it was such sort of like a horrifically racist role. I understand why she saw that. I don't agree with it, especially learning more about the historical context. It's actually very a period appropriate that he was Jewish. And I think you can read a lot of the numbers as critical of the Nazis. They work on multiple levels, which I think is something that works so well about this movie because you're kind of watching the audience's reaction more than anything else, right? Like for example, with the if you could see her through my eyes number. Right. Which I think if you just take it at face value, you could say like, oh, this is some, you know, grossly anti-Semitic. But I think what it really is, is it's a Jewish performer taking the slur and then owning it, controlling it and throwing it back at the Nazis, you know, in that scene. I agree. Which actually, if you watch the BBC documentary, they actually talk about some songs that do something very similar. And I think that this is playing on that exactly. But it is also absolutely, you know, playing on the audience's reaction and who's going to laugh, you know, who's going to be horrified, who's going to laugh, how does the audience react? And there was a belief in Nazism. They had a word for it. It was called untremention. I'm reading a book on Operation Paperclip right now. And untremention meant subhuman. And they actually believed that not just Jews, homosexuals, so obviously the queer community, Poles, Slavs, Russians, they were all, they literally believed they were not fully human. They had literature about how they would present as human, but they weren't, I mean, it was, it was mind boggling when you go back to it. Yeah. It's far stranger and more like juvenile and weird than I think we like to think about it. Also, one little not so fun fact, but in the original Broadway production, the final line of that song where he says, you know, she wouldn't look Jewish at all, I think they wouldn't let them use that word. The producer was like, you can't do this, like it's too much. And so they replaced it with a Yiddish word, which I think is Mieskite. And they were trying to kind of soften the blow a bit. So Fosse actually reinstated that originally intended lyric, which I think like you gotta, if you're going to do it, don't do it halfway, you know, go all the way with it. Well, especially because that scene buttresses Fritz coming clean about his Jewish identity and then having a Jewish wedding with Natalia in maybe the most powerful scene, one of the most powerful scenes of the movie. Yeah. Also, that whole plot line, which is not present in, well, we'll talk about it a little bit, that Natalia does exist in the original writing, but neither of those characters are in the play as far as I understand. And I think that whole storyline is kind of a creation of the movie, which is sort of amazing. Also, all the best and most successful performers were heavily political, as we're discussing, and tended to be very liberal. But as Germany entered the 30s and saw the massive economic downturn, the Nazis began to get a real foothold. And suddenly Berlin was not a safe space for so many of the artists who had flourished in the cabaret scene, again, many of whom were gay, Jewish, Catholic, communist. Yes, Catholic too, we should mention. Yes, big time. Also Romani people as well. Because the cabarets were a place where dissent was celebrated, they were heavily targeted by the Nazis, who began spying on the clubs from the audience and then systematically shutting them down. They kept a few open, but these were basically meant to function as propaganda machines. And many, many cabaret performers were sent to concentration camps and never seen again. The Nazis didn't officially take power until 1933. So as you see in the movie, Berlin was really teetering on the precipice of just disaster here. And the cabaret shows that slide into chaos, as I said, I think better than any other movie. Now on May 10th in 1933, Nazi officials and 40,000 enthusiastic followers, students and professors created a massive bonfire in Berlin's Opera Square, where they burned any literature that they deemed un-German. Chris, I think this is exactly what you're referencing. It was anything by a Jewish author, communist, even anyone particularly liberal or just books celebrating the Weimar Republic. They burned it all. So Karl Marx, Einstein, Brecht, everybody. Yeah, there was this obsession with ancient Aryan roots and Teutonic lineage. You guys are nerds. It's weird. Bad nerds. With Himmler, it ties into the occult. Big time. And all of it's very odd. Yes. So among the books and documents that were being burned were the works of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, founder of the world's first gay rights organization and the Institute for Sexual Science, which had been engaging in some pretty pioneering research into sexuality. And a young British man who had actually rented living quarters attached to that institute at one point stood in the crowd watching Hirschfeld's works burn. His name was Chris for Isherwood, and he quietly uttered one word as he watched. Shame. Now, Isherwood came from a very rich, well-to-do British family. He attended Cambridge, but was kicked out for writing jokes as the answers to all of his exams. And so he began writing novels. And in 1929, he went to visit his old friend, the poet H.W. Auden, who was living in Berlin. Now, Auden and Isherwood were both gay. And it was in Berlin that Isherwood really got to start exploring his sexuality, really casting off the constraints of hoity-toity English high society and throwing in his lot with the misfits of the German cabaret scene, including a woman named Jean Ross, a left-wing journalist who would later partner up romantically with fellow journalist Claude Cockburn. Does the name ring a bell? Oh, of the Olivia Wilde Cockburn? Well, it's Coburn, Lizzie. Well, by the way, though, to the folks who said, why would she change her name? It's pronounced Coburn. We illustrated that perfectly, because us dumb Americans all pronounce it Cockburn, because we're a bunch of cops. There's your answer. That's right. Sorry. Yes. It is the Olivia Wilde-Coburn connection. I think Olivia Wilde is actually her step-granddaughter, I think. Oh, cool. Yes. Now, Jean Ross was eventually later, much later, revealed to be the inspiration for Freyline Sallie Bowls. She was not super thrilled by this because it really kind of reduced her talent and cultural impact and also Isherwood exposed an abortion that he had helped her cover for and then the procedure almost killed her. So not the kind of thing you really want someone else to memorialize or make public for your very uptight family. But anyway, Isherwood was having a grand old time. However, he pretty quickly realized that Germany was slip-slide in its way into total disaster. And in 1932, he began dating a young German man named Heinz Niedermeyer and the two fled Germany in 1933. Now, his lover was denied entry to England, so the pair bounced around Europe until Niedermeyer was sadly captured by the Gestapo in 1937. I do want to note, Isherwood was obviously explicitly anti-Nazi. He was very pro-gay rights. He is an important and wonderful writer. However, he was at least somewhat anti-Semitic himself. It's something that often gets downplayed about him, but it's definitely present in his journals, which I believe are actually at the Huntington Library, Chris. And even to a certain extent in Goodbye, Chipper Lin, which maybe just goes to show how prevalent anti-Semitism was at the time, even outside of Germany. I think that's important context. Aaron Tracy in the podcast on Roald Dahl did, I think, a very good job. He brought on a guest who made the point that Dahl's anti-Semitism as kind of grotesque as it was, was really like a baseline thinking for a lot of people in the United Kingdom at the time. I think I have a harder time with it. One may not have a harder time with it. I have a more difficulty understanding it with Isherwood because he was in Berlin as the Nazis were taking power, but it is an interesting window. It's the original conspiracy theory. And it's a good window, I think, into why it was so easy for the Nazis to use it to gain a foothold. This podcast is sponsored by Bilt. My biggest monthly expense is childcare, but my second biggest monthly expense is rent. And with Bilt, my rent is working for me. Bilt is the membership for where you live that rewards you with points on every housing payment, be it rent or a mortgage. They started out rewarding members on their rent, but as of 2026, Bilt members can also earn points on mortgage payments wherever they live. Every housing payment earns you points you can use toward flights with top travel partners like United and Hyatt, Lyftrides, Amazon.com purchases, and so much more. Personally, I blow all my points on Amazon.com purchases, buying more art supplies for my kids so they can ruin our rental and make sure we never get our security deposit back. But here's the most underrated part. Bilt members also get access to a neighborhood concierge. It can make restaurant reservations, book fitness classes, and find new local spots, all while being rewarded at more than 45,000 merchant partners. It's like having a personal assistant baked into where you live. It's simple, being a renter and now owning a home is better with Bilt. Join the membership for where you live at joinbilt.com slash wrong. That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash wrong. Make sure to use our URL so they know we sent you. A Cast recommends Hello, I'm Sarah Cox. I'm Claire Hamilton. Do my series voice, sir. Claire, we've got 30 seconds to tell everybody about the team commandments podcast. Come on. It's basically about, well, being parents of teenagers. We've got five between us. Yes, sometimes it can be tough. It can be horrific. Yeah, it can be. It can also be very funny. So we talk about that as well. We also go back in time and confess a lot about our own teenage years, a lot of nostrils in there. It's rather gorgeous. It's every Monday and Wednesday. Come join the fun. Listen, wherever you get your podcast. A Cast powers the world's top podcast, including Off Menu, the Adam Buxton podcast, and the show you're listening to right now. Now Isherwood would eventually head to America, first New York City, and then settling in Los Angeles where he remained and became a screenwriter and also continued writing novels, including A Single Man, which would later become Tom Ford's debut film. Oh, I really like that movie. I did too. Yeah. In 1939, he published a novella called Goodbye to Berlin, which was a series of interconnected stories spanning about 1930 to 1933, aka his time in Berlin. And of course, the most famous character featured in the novel was Sally Bowles, as well as Natalia Landauer and a rich playboy named Clive, who I think is eventually what they then pull as the inspiration for Maximilian von Heine in the movie. And in 1950, Isherwood's buddy, Dodie Smith, who wrote 101 Dalmatians, challenged another friend, John Van Druten, to write a play based on Goodbye to Berlin. Van Druten did it and called it I Am a Camera, which is a reference to the opening lines of Goodbye to Berlin, which are I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive recording, not thinking, which I think they also captured really well in the Michael York character in this movie as well. The play opened in 1951, starring Julie Harris as Sally Bowles. She won a Tony for this. In 1955, it was adapted into a film of the same name, also starring Julie Harris. Now, probably goes without saying, but neither this play nor the film made any mention of Isherwood's character being gay, although neither does Goodbye to Berlin, and pretty much erased any of the queer context that does exist in the novel. In the early 60s, Broadway super producer Hal Prince, who we discussed back in our Cats episode, acquired the rights to both I Am a Camera and Goodbye to Berlin with the intention of turning it into a musical. And Prince did this because he saw a really ominous parallel between the rise of Nazism and the fury over the civil rights movement and rampant racism brewing at that point in America. Now, he had already produced the pajama game and West Side Story, so he definitely knew what he was doing. But this was a risky venture. As Vulture pointed out, this was the era of Funny Girl and Hello Dolly. And Hal Prince is like, I want to turn Goodbye to Berlin into an allegory for American racism. Right. I know Rajesh and Hammerstein did some more interesting stuff than maybe we credit them for, but yeah, it's very different. Yeah, it's very different, tonally. And I think it's a distinction between the plays that were being produced in the late 50s and the musicals. The musicals were very bright, happy, like sound of music is a great example of what was coming out. There were plays like Waiting for Godot, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, these things that were starting to deal with darker material, but musicals had not made that tonal shift yet at all. Right. So Prince hired playwright Joe Mastroff and songwriting duo John Kander and Fred Ebb to write the musical. And Kander and Ebb were quite new on the scene at this point. Their previous work, Flora the Red Menace, had gone under after two months, though it did win at star Liza Manelli, a Tony Award for her Broadway debut. She was 19, by the way. Wow. Yeah. Oh, and by the way, if anybody doesn't know, Kander and Ebb will go on to write Chicago and many more. They're wonderful. According to Kander, on the first day of rehearsals, Prince marched in and plastered a picture from Life magazine of a black couple walking into a housing development while white residents openly laughed at them and said, that's what our show is about. Prince was also quite responsible for the character of the MC. He said, quote, I had hung out in a club called Maxims in the basement of a bombed out church, and there was a little MC with lipstick and eyeshadow and false eyelashes. And he'd tell terrible tacky jokes. And there were three very chunky girls in butterfly costumes dancing around him and one drunk at the bar and one asleep at the table. And me in uniform just thinking I'd been reborn and gone to heaven. I love that. I don't know why. Like the MC, I feel like when they created the ladybug character in a bug's life, they like partially based the design on Joel Gray's MC. I don't know. That's just my thought. That's so funny. I love it. Initially, Prince was worried because he had two totally different shows. He had a musical comedy, basically with all of the MC's numbers and then a pretty grim political drama. And this led to the initial separation of really containing the MC to the Kit Kat Club, not as separate as what you see in the movie, which we will get to because songs were performed both in the Kit Kat Club and then, of course, outside the club when the characters would burst into song. Now, Kander and Eb were writing Sally Bull's songs with one person in mind. Any guesses, Chris? They just worked with her. Oh, Liza Manelli? Liza Manelli, that's right. Oh, okay. Yeah. According to Liza herself, the title song was, quote, originally written for me because I was supposed to do the play. And then they decided to make the boy American and the girl English. She auditioned 14 times. But Hal Prince and apparently Christopher Isherwood agreed that she was not right for one big reason. Any guess why? I don't know. My guess was like, she's kind of unusual looking. No. Like, that was just my guess was it was something maybe about appearance. Not at all. Okay, great. I'm glad. She's too good at singing. Well, it makes sense. That's interesting. It's kind of fair. It is fair. When you think about who these characters were and the world that they were in and Isherwood's, you know, point about the fact that this was not a very glamorous, luxurious- She's supposed to actually not be a star. The fact that she says that she could be a movie star is supposed to be patently absurd. Right. But of course, Liza Minnelli is like so magnetic. I know. Wow, she could make it. Yeah, which I like in the movie version. I do too. But that was not the original intention. Minnelli was also well on her way to becoming a star in her own right. According to her memoir, kids, wait till you hear this. She said, I lost out because there was so much happening in my career at the time and the production company felt no one would associate Sally with me at all. Now, in case anyone doesn't know, Liza Minnelli is the daughter of director Vincent Minnelli and, of course, Judy Garland. Liza and Judy had a very close but complicated relationship. She did remain close to her father as well, but it should be noted that it's basically confirmed Minnelli was a closeted gay man. Gonna be a lot of closeted gay men over the course of this episode. Liza grew up very much in the public eye and in the 60s, she'd started joining her mother on stage for musical numbers in the Judy Garland show. And in 1965, as we said, she made her Broadway debut at 19 with Judy Garland in attendance in the audience. And Garland turned to costume designer Donald Brooks and said, can you believe that's Liza up there? We did that. You got her up there looking the way she does. And I got her up there because I'm her mother and conceivably her inspiration, the heck with her motivation. In case you can't tell, Judy loved her daughter, but it also seems that she was at times in competition with her as well. Now, Minnelli cared for her mother during her struggles with addiction and eventual health decline. And according to Liza's memoir, quote, at 13, I was my mother's caretaker, a nurse, doctor, pharmacologist, and psychiatrist rolled into one. It was a crazy balancing act. I'd give mama drugs every day so she could function. Then I'd watch to make sure she was okay. I lost count of the times I called doctors to say she'd run out of pills. And Liza was only 23 years old when Judy died at 47 in 1969. Of her mother's death, Minnelli said, quote, elevator men were falling around me weeping. I was the only one standing up and I got so mad at everybody. I remember yelling at someone you cried for her when she sang over the rainbow and the man that got away. Now at last she's at peace. Smile for God's sake. So with Liza's star steadily on the rise and her voice being, as you pointed out, what it is, Hal Prince instead went with British actress Jill Hayworth for Sally Bowles who had no prior musical experience. And the show was originally called Welcome to Berlin, but they couldn't sell any tickets because Berlin and Germany were still too politically charged at that point. So that's when the title cabaret came in. Welcome to East Berlin. It's the height of the cold war. It's divided. The original run of cabaret was from 1966 to 1969 and it did gangbusters. It won eight Tony awards, including Best Musical, Best Composer for Candor, Lyrics for Eb, Best Direction by Hal Prince, and Best Supporting Actor for who, Chris? Joel Gray. Joel Gray, that's right. That's right. Yes, he was part of the original production. He is the only part of the original production to enter the film, which we will discuss. And also the song that you mentioned earlier on, Tomorrow Belongs to Me, that was written for the, that was in the musical, right? Originally. Yeah. Yeah. And I just want to mention, like, again, the music is so good. Yes. There's not one bad song in this. No, there's not. And like you mentioned, that song, it evolves from, you know, a somewhat stirring national anthem to a chilling expression of nationalist, fascist sentiment in, you know, two and a half minutes. I know. It's an amazing piece of music. The music is so good in the show. I just wanted to point it out. It's incredible. And that song is one of my favorites in the entire piece. And it's so good. For a long time, I thought that it must have been an existing German song because it sounds so right. I thought that too. I looked it up afterwards and I was stunned to find out it's not. And I'm also glad that wasn't the one you performed for your class. Yeah, at least I got that right. Can you imagine? I can. It would have been very funny. Also, Cabaret is sort of always building on iterations of itself. So while later productions, stage productions either hint at or do explore Cliff Robertson, which is the Brian Roberts character in the movie, they explore his bisexuality, the original stage production did not at all. So in 1968, The New York Times announced that Cinerama had purchased the film rights to Cabaret, however, they withdrew that deal later that year and enswooped ABC Pictures financing, Allied Artists Distributing, and producer Cy Fuhr. Now, Fuhr had become basically a household name thanks to hitting it big with his business partner, Ernest Martin, on Broadway with shows like Guys and Dolls. But the two had a reputation for being pains in the ass. Theater director George Kaufman described them as Hitler rolled into two. Jesus. The way people threw around Hitler within like 15 years of Hitler is alarming. Yeah, exactly. But Cabaret marked Cy's first solo venture into film production. Now, while everything seemed to be going swimmingly for the rest of the Cabaret team, 1969 was not a great year for Bob Fosse. If you need more in-depth background on the legendary choreographer, please go back and listen to our episode on all that jazz, which is of course his semi-autobiographical film, features our lovely guest Demi Adajube. But if you don't know who Bob Fosse was, he started off as an actor and dancer, but swiftly transitioned into an all-store choreographer with his very own signature style. Chris, how would you describe it? Shoulder roll, jazz hands, heavy, like, I don't know. I mean, it's just extremely... It's very isolated. It's very like body parts in isolation. Yeah, it's almost like a precursor to pop and lock in a way. Totally, yes. He's amazing. He's kind of the, if Busby Berkeley was the first big choreographer, turned director in Hollywood, I feel like Bob Fosse was the next, you know? Yeah, 100%. It's the biggest choreographer in 30 years. Choreographed the pajama game, damn Yankees, had a succeed in business without really trying. He also did start directing Broadway shows to great acclaim, and he had directed the Broadway production of Sweet Charity, but 1969 marked his feature film debut with the film version of Sweet Charity. Now, Chris, you and I both watched this. Yeah, I'd never seen it before. I hadn't either. It's really uneven, but it has its moments. It has some really high moments, and surely Maclean's really good, I think, in the lead. You know, she does not work for me in this. She feels like a Sally Bowles prototype. Oh, no, I think the way the character's written, I completely agree. I think she does a good job with it, but I think the character feels... I don't think it's her fault at all. That's my point. I don't think they land the depth that they need with the character. She feels so flighty, so manic pixie, as you mentioned. It feels feather light in a way that Cabaret does not. But you see a lot of the seedlings of Cabaret in this, especially with the shots. Of course. You know, there's that number, if you could see me now, and she's shot from behind with the light streaming up. It's very maybe this time. She works The Girlie Show. You know, it's the same sort of vibe as just in New York City. It's a much lighter approach to the material. The dance numbers are bonkers, and I would say you don't need to watch the whole thing to get a sense of it. But if you would like to get a sense of what the scale that he was trying to achieve with this movie, go search the rich man's frugue on YouTube and watch that number. It is nuts. Costumes by Edith Head are wonderful. It feels like an Austin Powers number, to be honest. It does. The... Yes. It's not like that's what it feels like. Yes. By the way, did you know a lot of Beyonce's choreography pulls from Bob Fosse, and the Get Me Bodied video is specifically that number from Sweet Charity. Oh, interesting. Single Ladies, of course, as well. I didn't know that. I was thinking of Single Ladies when you mentioned it a little bit. It definitely does. That one does, too. Now, we may cover that film at some point because it was a disaster. Yeah. It bombed both critically and commercially. It had a $20 million budget and an $8 million box office. It's pretty bad. It's very long, too. It's almost three hours. It's really long. And Bob Fosse took the failure personally. He felt it was completely his fault. So he set out to find a project that would really recover his image ASAP. But unfortunately, he did not have an agent because in 1962, his old agency had dropped all of its clients when it bought Universal Pictures. Antitrust Laws said, you need to pick a lane, basically. And so this was MCA and they dropped the agency side and Bob and all of its clients along with it. Now, he didn't sign with another agent because he was like, I'm Bob Fosse. At this point, I don't need an agent. I have my reputation. But now his directorial debut was a bona fide flopper and he was really regretting that decision. So he could reach out to some of his Broadway pals, of which Cy Fuer was one. But what he wanted to do was direct another movie. So in April of 1969, a week after Sweet Charity released and bombed, he signed with CMA. And he lay low for a while working on a few screen plays until his agent connected him with a playwright named Steve Tessick. And the two shopped around a film called The Eagle of Nap Town. Unsurprisingly, with that title, it did not get picked up. Except it would later become Breaking Away. Well, fun fact. I love Breaking Away. I do too. That's a great movie. It is a great movie. All to say, when Hal Prince called up Fosse to get dinner, Bob was desperate. And Prince told Fosse he was busy rehearsing for the new Sondheim musical company, so he wasn't going to be able to direct the feature film version of Cabaret, at which point Bob Fosse's ears perked up. So he started pestering his Broadway pal, Cy, calling him incessantly until he agreed to meet with him for lunch. Well, Cy had lunch. Bob had cigarettes. And finally, Führer said, look, I have to at least offer the movie to Billy Wilder and Jean Kelly first. It would be weird if I didn't. Just let me rattle through all the usual suspects, and then I'll tell the studio I've tried everyone and it has to be Fosse. And he did pretty much exactly what he promised. And then after some initial cold feet from the studio, thanks to Sweet Charity, they said, fine. And they let Fosse have it. He would get $125,000 $50,000 to choreograph. And because they wanted him to want to keep it under budget, 7.5% of the profits. And that budget was $3 million. No way. It does go over, but it doesn't go that much over. Yeah. I mean, it's very economical with its use of location. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, because you've got Natalia's, you've got the shared apartment, the boarding house, yeah, the boarding house where they're living, some exteriors, and then the cabaret. And that's pretty much the whole movie. Pretty minimal exteriors. Exactly. Just a couple of street shots, you know, what I was going to ask really quickly, Lizzie, was Gene Kelly to be the MC? No, to direct. Oh, Gene Kelly to direct. So Billy Wilder to direct or Gene Kelly to direct. Okay, interesting. Because I was thinking Gene Kelly actually would have been interesting as the MC. He would have been in his like late fifties at the time. I don't know. I mean, he directed singing in the rain. So I mean, no, of course, he said, look, he's an amazing director. He's an amazing dancer. Yeah, would have been interesting. I do think Fosse though, Fosse is a more modern than Kelly. Fosse makes the most sense out of all of them. I will say, go watch singing in the rain again. Oh my God. It's amazing. We'll cover it at some point. If I could move like that, I know. I'd kill all of them. So it had taken a pretty long time to lock down a director by the time they got Bob Fosse, which means a whole lot of pre-production work on cabaret had already happened. Screenwriter Jay Press and Alan, who was known for Marnie, Hitchcock's film, she did some other work for Hitchcock as well. And also the prime of Miss Jean Brody, which I love if you've never seen it, you should watch. You've never seen it. Oh, it's great. The movie with Maggie Smith, she wrote both the play and the movie. She was already hard at work on the script. And she said, quote, I think one of the reasons that Hitch was fond of me and filmed a lot of the stuff I wrote, meaning Hitchcock, was that I am frequently almost crippled by making everything rational. There always has to be a reason for everything. And he loved that. But while Alan had a great working relationship with Hitchcock, the same could not be said for Fosse. She said, quote, I didn't find him the happiest collaborator I ever had. Lizzie, I do want to say it's actually Hitch Co. Pick a lane. If it's Hitchcock, it's Cockburn. There we go. Got the idea. You've planned it all through. The start-up needs starting. The next move is you. With support from that West and this thought we impart, you could do great things. Don't wait. Just start. With the range of accounts, including our metal mobile account, NatWest has helped tens of thousands of businesses get started in the last year. Search NatWest business accounts. Tomorrow begins today. Over 18s only. Specific accounts and services eligibility apply. Source NatWest January to November 2025 data. ACAST recommends. Hello, I'm Sarah Cox. I'm Claire Hamilton. Do my serious voice. Claire, we've got 30 seconds to tell everybody about the team commandments podcast. Come on. It's basically about, well, being parents of teenagers. We've got five between us. Yes. Sometimes it can be tough. It can be horrific. It can be. It can also be very funny. So we talk about that as well. We also go back in time and confess a lot about our own teenagers. A lot of nostalgia in there. It's rather gorgeous. It's every Monday and Wednesday. Come join the phone. Listen, wherever you get your podcast. ACAST powers the world's top podcast, including Off Menu, the Adam Buxton podcast, and the show you're listening to right now. One of the most major changes from stage to screen in Cabaret, though, came from Cy Führer. Do you know what it is, Chris? I kind of mentioned it earlier. Not allowing them to break into song outside of the Cabaret. Exactly. Which is brilliant. Yes. He wanted the musical numbers to take place exclusively inside the Kit Kat club, so it felt more realistic. It's perfect. Fosse was 100% on board because he was very much trying to edge away from musicals like Sweet Charity. And I think into straight dramas, which of course, he would do later. He does what Eisenstein had done with Montage early, which is show you one image, show you another image, and then your brain creates the third image or the composite. You can do two plus two equals four, and that's what the musical numbers do in this movie. They're not story exposition, they're emotional exposition. Ooh, that's a good way of saying it. It's so good. Well, it wasn't just the screenplay that was underway. Casting had also been in full swing before Fosse was ever attached. So even though Liza Minnelli had lost the stage role of Sally Bowles, she'd actually started performing the title song, Cabaret, and another candor and eb song maybe this time in her nightclub act all over the world. She later on was just like, listen, I knew I was going to play it at some point. I just didn't know when. And I think she kind of thought like, fine, I'll do it when it becomes a movie. And sure enough, when it was announced that Führer was producing the film, Minnelli was in Paris with her show. She heard he was in town, so she swiftly arranged the meeting, showed up in full 1930s period appropriate costume and said, come see my show. He did. And there she was singing Cabaret and he hired her immediately. She said, quote, mercifully, they told me that Sally would be a completely different character this time around. She was now a powerhouse singer in a low rent club desperate to achieve stardom. She didn't want to be a great artist. She just wanted fame and the shiny objects that come with it. That would be her deepest need and her undoing. Now, she was also very personally connected to the love triangle storyline in the script, especially since the film was leaning into this element, as we've said, more than any previous adaptation had. She said, quote, I had been deeply affected by my marriage to a person who loved men and women. It was a potent mixture of love, pain, and confusion, nothing to hide or be embarrassed by a learning experience and wake up call about the modern world. I believe she's talking about her first husband, Peter Allen here, who actually, that's who the boy from Oz would later be written about. And he was gay. He came out as gay later. She's a very funny quote. I don't know exactly what it is, but she basically said, I'll never arrive without calling first. It's good. Poor Liza. Which I do love that scene when she does the equivalent of put the song on her phone when she brings the record player, the phonograph into the room. Does my body drive you wild with desire? The desire, yes. It's one of my favorite lines. Divine decadence. She said she loves divine. Everything's divine. It's just divine. Michael York was best known for his Shakespeare work at this point and Zephyr Ellie's Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet. He played Tybalt in that. So he was a bit of a no brainer for this, though, considering the producers were literally looking for a Michael York type. There he was. And his friends and colleagues seemed pretty shocked that he would take the role given he is, as we've said, playing an openly queer man, to which he said, quote, all these people were saying I was so brave and that I was taking a terrible risk by playing the role. But I never thought that at all. My job is to represent humanity and being gay is a big part of humanity. And according to Isherwood himself, Michael York was probably the most like him out of all of the adaptations. Marissa Berenson, as we said, cast as Natalia Landauer. She was an American vogue model born to a Bostonian diplomat. And according to a 1975 Time Magazine article, quote, the French fashion magazine L once called Marissa the most beautiful girl in the world. That is not precisely accurate. Both the mouth and nose are a trifle too large, but it conveys the right idea. To which I say, fuck you, Time Magazine. And damning with faint praise there. Yeah, what the hell? Her eyes are amazing. She's so gorgeous. I thought she's very funny. She does a great job playing the straight person to Manelli's absurd catty behavior in the English only scene, which is really charming. One of my favorite moments in the entire movie is when Natalia says, I'm not eating between meals and South Pole says, well, I am. I am. And he passes her the bread and just throws it on her. It's so amazing. It's a great scene. Yeah, the movie is very funny, which I don't think I appreciated when I was younger. It's got a very sophisticated dry wit to it. Yes. Now, both Fritz Weber, who plays Fritz in the film, and Helmut Grimm, who plays Maximilian von Heine, were German TV and theater actors who were relatively well known in their country prior to cabaret. And as we discussed, I think they are both so, so good in this movie. And of course, we have to talk about the only member of the original Broadway production to make it into the film, the emcee himself, Joel Gray. So Gray was born into entertainment. His father was Mickey Katz, who was a musician and comedian who had made it big on the Borscht Belt, which we discussed in Dirty Dancing, with his Jewish comedy review. As Gray wrote in his memoir, his father was, quote, inserting Jews into pop culture so that we belonged to. Gray made his theater debut in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio at age nine in a production of On Borrowed Time. And from there on out, he dreamed of a life on stage. And he was kind of like an overnight sensation because he was so good. But it wasn't traditional theater that actually brought him initial success. It was nightclubs. Some TV work followed, but he really struggled to break out on Broadway because casting directors thought of him as a nightclub guy. Wasn't Fosse also kind of came up through nightclubs originally as well? I thought, isn't that where he was sexually abused as well? Yes, yes, yes, yes, by the older woman. Another woman? Yeah, that's right. Mm-hmm. However, he finally made it by replacing some original actors in Broadway runs and tours. And of this time, Gray said, for the first time since On Borrowed Time, I was being taken seriously as an actor. I should have been happy, but I was far from it. He was struggling deeply in his marriage and had a mental breakdown while on tour. Now, Gray would later come out as gay in 2015, but he said that his family and close friends had known for years. Obviously, his wife knew eventually and their marriage ended. He auditioned for Rolf in Sound of Music and didn't get it and was considered giving up all together when Hal Prince asked him to play the MC on Broadway. His daughter, six-year-old Jennifer Gray, would accompany him to the theater watching from the wings and even getting made up as one of the KitKat girls in the club. And a lot of the MC's look comes directly from Joel. He said that it mirrored how his mother had dressed him as a child with the slick back hair and the little bow tie. Well, you know, you mentioned the way he moves. He also, he's been made up to look like a classic Marionette doll in a lot of ways as well. Exactly. He also used a lot of his wife's makeup for the look. He wrote that he had found inspiration for the character in An Unusual Place, a nightclub in St. Louis when he was on tour. He said, quote, As I sat watching the comedian in the loud, smoky room, the spotlight illuminating his aging face, I was stunned. His broad delivery employed every virulent stereotype. Take my wife jokes, fat jokes, crude sex jokes, but not Jewish jokes, since the obviously Irish comic was playing to a mostly Jewish crowd. And then he said something that I'm not going to say here about the way that this man impersonated gay people because he uses an F word. But it wasn't his crassness that offended me most. It was his effectiveness. He would do and did do anything for a laugh, battering the audience into loving him. I couldn't believe that someone so willing to pander, someone who stooped to the lowest levels of entertainment, offering the most base and hackneyed material in exchange for the audience's affection was actually getting it. They were in his thrall screaming with laughter. Yeah, you know, there is that element, Lizzie, with the cabaret or that fossey and Joel Gray obviously do such an amazing job with, which is that it feels like it is both a safe haven and a celebration of the fluidity, let's say, of the human condition. But also, it exposes the basis desires by way of the mud wrestling, for example. Oh, yeah. Which is something he and Liza Minnelli saw for real in Berlin, by the way. Yeah. So it's so interesting how that cuts both ways in this movie and it makes it complicated in a great way. Yes. I think that the MC character is tough to wrestle with because you can't look away from him. He's disgusting, but he's also so charming and weird. It's amazing. He knows what I feel is like he knows you. Yes. And what made me so emotional is movies that actually feels like he knows that you're going to kill him, and yet he's still going to perform for you until that happens. That's how I was reading it. As the Nazis are slowly infiltrating this place and he's never going to leave and he's just going to keep going even though he knows what's coming. Interesting. So tragic. Now, how Joel Gray got cast in the film depends very much on who you ask. According to the producers, it sounds like they had always wanted him for the role, which makes sense. He won a Tony for this. He came up with so much of the part. I can imagine that on paper this was a hard character to grasp, but I think he said that because there's not much to it. So he really, really created this. And according to some sources, he was cast prior to Fosse joining the project, but there was one big problem now, Chris. What could the problem be? Who could the problem be? It's the problem, Bob Fosse. The problem's Bob Fosse. Yes. Fosse wanted to recast every single role in the movie. Does he want Richard Dreyfus? Well, he wanted to recast every role in the movie. And on the one hand, I understand he is trying to make this his production of Cabaret. He wants to put his stamp on everything. He just had a massive failure with Sweet Charity and feels like everything is riding on this for him. So I'm not going to completely vilify Bob Fosse for this because I get where he's coming from. This is not the role to recast though. Now, Gray was at the dentist when he picked up an issue of variety and read the following. He said, quote, Ruth Gordon had met with Bob Fosse regarding playing the MC in the upcoming Allied artist film Cabaret. What? After five years of deliberation, a movie version of Cabaret had finally been greenlighted, which set off a flurry of rumors that had been flying for weeks. She's such a weird choice. I actually thought you were going to say that Bob Fosse was going to cast himself as the MC. Well, hold that thought. Okay. Other actors continued to be rumored for the part. Meanwhile, Joel Gray is sitting there like, what the fuck is going on? According to Gray, six weeks before production was set to kick off in Munich, they still did not have an MC. And here's what it seems like was really going on. I'm doing a little bit of reading between the lines, but I think this is pretty supported. I believe the producers had very much told Gray that he would be a part of the film, but maybe had not officially signed him on anticipating no objection from the director. Then Fosse joins the project and wants to put a stamp on everything, so he pushes hard to replace Joel Gray. And Joel Gray has publicly theorized that Fosse wanted to play the role himself. And as we discussed, I absolutely believe this because of the Richard Dreyfus stuff in all that jazz. So they were down to the wire and a meeting was called with all the producers, Studio execs, and Bob Fosse. And Bob Fosse decided to play hardball. He figured, surely they're going to kick an actor to the curb over the director. So he walked in and he said, I guess this is the moment of truth. It's either Joel Gray or me. And with zero hesitation, Marty Baum, then president of ABC, said, then it's Joel Gray. Wow. I mean, kudos to him. Yes. Because I'm not saying it's the right choice and that you should choose Gray over Fosse, but it is strategically the right move in that he knows Fosse's not going to walk, right? Like, oh yeah. But he knows he needs both, I'm sure, to make the movie succeed. Yeah. And I think it's also, it would be important to call Fosse's bluff at this point because... That's my point. Exactly. You have to at some point show him that there's a limit that he can come up against. Yeah. Because otherwise Fosse will take everything as we've learned. Yeah. But from this point forward, Bob Fosse was an absolute dick to Joel Gray. In terms of their communication, as Gray put it, the only thing that came out of Fosse's mouth was cigarette smoke. But it didn't matter because Joel Gray kicked ass prepping for this movie. He worked with a dialect coach to perfect not just a German accent, but a specifically Berliner accent, and did it so convincingly that the German extras hired to play the audience assumed he was German. Apparently, so did the German crew who were pretty upset to discover at the end of production that he was American. And that betrayal runs a little deeper than you might think. The German crew were very concerned that the movie was going to demonize a whole generation of Germans. So finding out that the guy leading the nightclub was not, in fact, German would be a pretty big slap in the face. And here's Liza Minnelli talking to Alan Cumming for the BBC's documentary The Real Cabaret about this. And what did people think about the fact that there was this kind of Americanized version of what had gone on? Well, you know, they were a little weird about it. I mean, we're going to Germany to film a movie about the Nazis. What are we going to call it? The nifty Nazi follies. I mean, come on. So when they just all these guys who were cast as the Nazis, you know, we found them hiding, you know, they didn't want to be seen. So when it came out, they realized that it was really important and really on their side. And the German crew had already been a bone of contention for Fosse. Führer wanted to hire an entirely European crew for cost reasons, but Fosse was dead set on hiring Robert Sertes, who had been his DP on Sweet Charity. Now, the shit really hit the fan when Fosse overheard a conversation between Führer and Marty Baum, in which Seiführer said that Sertes was not going to happen and told Baum not to worry because, quote, I can control him, meaning Fosse. And Bob Fosse lost his mind. He accused Psy of hiring him as a director so he could use his choreography and then replace him. I don't think this was true. It does seem like Seiführer maybe thought that Fosse was perhaps easier to control than a bigger, more experienced director because of the failure on Sweet Charity. But boy, was he wrong. Yeah. And like Bob Sertes, to be clear, like, he did, you know, Quovatis and he also did Ben Hur. He did The Last Picture Show in 71. Yeah. This guy would not have been cheap. I understand why they're pushing back. Yeah. No, he was one of the greatest cinematographers working and of all time. Totally. Marty Baum flew out to facilitate a truce and they eventually settled on Jeffrey Unsworth as the DP, who does an incredible job. Shot 2001, Space Odyssey. Yes. Yeah. Not exactly, you know, not exactly a dog's body, if you will. Chopped liver, yeah. But Fosse was not done fiddling. With production looming closer, he decided oopsies, I hate your script, J. Press and Allen. And he decided it was too close to the Broadway production. So even though she had spent 10 months on the script, he kind of kicked her to the curb and brought in Hugh Wheeler, who was a friend of the actual Christopher Isherwood to rewrite it. And it was Hugh Wheeler who made some of the biggest changes from stage to screen by bringing the film closer to Isherwood's original work, Goodbye to Berlin. It was, I believe, Wheeler, who made the Brian Roberts character explicitly queer, which of course was accurate to Isherwood's own life experience. Well, he was gay. But despite the massive changes he brought to the script, Wheeler was credited only as a research assistant. He does not get a screenwriting credit at all. Oh, I think I saw his credit on this. That's interesting. I assumed that that was more to do with making sure that the period details were appropriate. That's so interesting. No, he did a major rewrite on this. Wow. Three songs were also added to the film that are not present in the play. Do you know what they are? I don't. I have no idea. Mine Hair. Oh, really? Written for the movie, which is amazing. Money, money, written for the movie. My personal favorite. I just love watching her and Joel Gray together do it. It's so good. They're just both so good together. And this also feels a little bit to me like a precursor for something like, oh, yes, they both reached for the gun, the gun, the gun, the gun, no, yes, they both reached for the gun, for the gun. You know, they're really fun two handers between Roxy Hart and Billy Flynn in Chicago. And then also maybe this time was added. Now, that had been written prior to the movie by Cander and Eb, but of course, Liza Minnelli had been performing it for years and she advocated for the inclusion of it in the movie and they did it. And I think most stage productions after the film actually do include these songs because the movie made them so iconic. Now, rehearsals finally began in early 1971 at various studios, 20 minutes outside Munich. And right away, Joel Gray and Bob Fosse were like oil and water because Gray felt very protective of the character he had created and Fosse wanted to fussy it up. According to Gray, quote, very often every word had a move assigned to it. He never expected improvisation and wanted every muscle choreographed to counts. The two were locked in a constant power struggle to the point where one day Bob Fosse was like, can you do a backflip? And Joel Gray was like, no, I can't. And Bob Fosse goes, there's nothing to it. Let me show you. And then according to Joel Gray, here's what happened next. He broke his back. Just wait. That's just what I'm imagining. We all watched as Bob threw himself backward into the air, but he didn't make it. Instead, he came crashing to the ground and landed on his face. For several horrifying long seconds, he lay there without moving. All of us around him were frozen with shock. Had he broken his neck? After a stunned moment, we all went to his aid. Bob stood up slowly and with an arm around each assistant, he was taken to the studio infirmary. When Bob came back to the studio the next day, he had the usual cigarette hanging out of his mouth, but the whole left side of his face was black and blue. No one mentioned his injuries or the backflip again. So embarrassing. In a way, though, is there a world where this is the best thing that could have happened to the production and Joel Gray and Bob Fosse because he gets taken down just one peg? Yes. Right. He needs it. He does need it. Bob Fosse is a genius. Literally, he's a genius. But he also needs to be reminded, perhaps on occasion, that the people he's working with are brilliant too. Yeah. I would argue Joel Gray's performance in this is genius. Oh, I think it absolutely is. Also, speaking of the cigarettes, as in all that jazz, people had to come over and remove them from Fosse's mouth before they burned his lips because he wouldn't even notice. Meanwhile, Michael York very politely mentioned to Fosse that he now felt his character was a little underwritten to which Fosse said, don't worry, we still have two weeks and then proceeded to lock himself, Maneli Wheeler and York, into a room for those two weeks, making final adjustments to the script. And Maneli was one of the only people who really did get along with Fosse, perhaps because she was used to strong perfectionist personalities. I was just going to say, she took care of her mother. She's Judy Garland's kid. I know. How much longer can Bob Fosse be? Judy Garland, who probably smoked more cigarettes on the production of The Wizard of Oz than Fosse had in his entire life at this point. Yeah, at 14, she's packing in six at a time. Also, I mean, they continued to work together. He directed her TV special, Liza with a Z as well. That's right, Liza. Yeah. But one problem he had with her was that she cried way too easily. So he told her, if you feel like crying, I want you to fight like an animal, trying not to cry, at which she immediately cried. But she took the note and you can see it really well in the film. She also contributed an enormous amount to the character of Sally Bowles, including her iconic look. Initially, she thought she should wear a blonde wig and do herself up like Marlena Dietrich. Side note, that's probably the best Halloween costume I've ever done was Marlena Dietrich. But her father, Vincent Minnelli, said, no, no, no. And he showed her pictures of Louise Brooks, a huge film star from the 20s and 30s. One of whose most famous roles was the German film Pandora's Box. Would you like to see a picture? Oh, yeah. Check it out. Of course. Look at those bangs. Oh, yeah. So Liza with a Z was like, okay. And she cut her hair into the iconic Sally Bowles cut, picked up some gigantic fake eyelashes and slapped those on and showed up to see Fosse on set and was like, what do you think, Bob? And according to her memoir, she said, quote, talk about naivete. I had taken an incredible, risky chance. What if the producers and Fosse didn't like the way I looked? What the hell would I have done then? I should have run this past them if only as a sign of respect. They told me as much, but they also loved it. Woof. The cameras began rolling in Munich. Got the idea. You've planned it all through. This start up needs starting. The next move is you. With support from NatWest and this thought we impart, you could do great things. Don't wait. Just start. With the range of accounts, including our Metal Mobile account, NatWest has helped tens of thousands of businesses get started in the last year. Search NatWest Business Accounts. Tomorrow begins today. Over 18s only, specific accounts and services eligibility applied. Source NatWest January to November 2025 data. Now Fosse and Cypher continued their rivalry on set. The fight was now about the look of the film and specifically the light of the film. Fewer wanted it to look like a traditional musical. Bright. Everything very obvious. Color. Punchy. Fosse was like, make it imperceptibly dark. He told camera operator Peter McDonald and DP Jeffrey Unsworth, quote, if you see me doing that show offy stuff I did in Sweet Charity, stop me. But he was taking a pretty big risk with this. You couldn't really check the shots and there was no way to correct an underexposed shot in post-production at that point. So if they fucked it up, they were screwed. Fortunately, they were filming in Germany, so the studio execs couldn't walk onto the set the way they could in Hollywood. And according to Manelli, quote, we'd take chances in the studio with CEN telegrams like too much smoke. The picture will break up on drive-in screens and Bob would tear it up and throw it over his shoulder in front of the whole crew. It's worth mentioning that Sweet Charity really, for example, they have a whole number in Sweet Charity that feels ripped out of West Side Story to me. Oh, well, I think it's making fun of it. Yeah, exactly. But it visually very much evokes that type of musical. And whereas this does not. No. Now, while Manelli seemed to enjoy her time on set, she was also having a rough go of it personally. She was, of course, working her ass off, eating a diet of mostly Coca-Cola and chips, all while becoming obsessed with doing everything Bob Fosse asked of her. And here she is again in the BBC documentary with Alan Cumming interviewing her. Everyone is mesmerized by mine hair. That must have been exhausting. Is that why you've got two false hips? Probably. I look at some of those poses and think, oh my God, they were so hard to do because, you know, when you're like this and leaning on the chair and then this leg is way back here. So you're literally like that, right? With your legs. The chair kept sliding and finally after about 20 minutes he said, nail the chair down. And that's the only way that we could shoot his poses. Secret. Yeah, I've wondered how they balanced and nailing the chair down. You'd have to. Yeah. But in addition to all of this, she was struggling with substance abuse of her own. She was known to be somewhat unreliable on set according to a 2004 article in the Times of UK, quote, on bad days, she would rave until she collapsed. The code phrase for these spells was she's having a willy, prompting a search for air sickness pills or something stronger. And she admits to this in her memoir saying, there were whispers in the gossip sheets that I was popping pills, drinking too much and snorting cocaine behind the scenes. Some of the stories were sympathetic saying I was fighting off stress and tension. And that was the truth as much as I didn't want to admit it publicly. And the press was not kind to Liza when whispers of this started leaking. As Manelli put it, quote, I don't need to spell out for you the inevitable comparisons. Mama had been there, done that. The February 20th, 1972 headline read Liza refuses to be shocking. I was becoming Sally Bowles in real life. The writer said, decadent and outrageous, as well as a mirror image of my legendarily tormented mother. I was now get ready for this, quote, a heartless hoidon dancing atop a table, drink in hand and devil may care look in my brown eyes. It was just plain cruel. Manelli did find a good friend and confidant in Joel Gray, who she'd known for years. He said, quote, there was something about Liza that invited you to take care of her. I relished our morning rides to the studio during which she would often fall asleep on my shoulder. Meanwhile, Fosse was doing the other thing that he does best besides fighting with collaborators, dancing and directing films, having affairs. Oh, yeah. I was seeing popping pills, but yes, also having affairs. Yeah. Yeah, smoking cigarettes. You're right. He does other things very well. He was having a very public affair with a German translator he'd hired named Ilse Schwartzwald, and this was unusual because normally he kept his affairs far more private. Maybe it was because he was far away in Germany, so his wife, Gwen Verden, wouldn't see. But wait, no, that's not it, because she was there on set and she was helping his ass out. The gorilla costume originally provided for if you could see her through my eyes was blue velour for some reason and Fosse hated it. So Gwen Verden flew back to New York, handpicked a new gorilla costume and flew it back to Germany herself. And then she walked in on Bob Fosse in bed with a couple of German girls and she had it. She sent him a letter saying she wanted to separate. By July of 1971, filming had a course run way over schedule, which Fosse blamed on fewer because the original schedule had been developed based on J. Press, now in terrible script and it's everyone's fault but Bob Fosse's fault. And the night before filming wrapped, Bob Fosse decided to throw a dinner party for the members of the crew that he felt had had his back throughout production, Chris. But it turns out the invite was maybe more of a punishment because at this dinner Fosse announced, now that I brought you all the dinner, I want you all to make big speeches about me telling me how wonderful you think I am. And it was not a joke. Michael York, who initially had really admired Fosse and even taken up smoking to try and impress him, described the dinner as such. Quote, it was like King Lear asking which daughter loved him the most. You know, it reminds me of Michael Scott asking the office to roast him in the office and he gets so mad when they don't say something nice about him. Yeah, there's definitely some Michael Scott in Bob Fosse. There is, yeah. As the film headed into post-production, Fosse's personal anxieties continued to get the better of himself. He was convinced he had failed again, like on Sweet Charity, and I suspect he was trying to distance Cabaret even further from that film, which is why when he screened the first cut for the cast and crew, almost every musical number had been gutted. Of this screening, Joel Gray said, when in that screening room, I watched all the hard work I had done cut into a million pieces, I was stunned to the point of tears. He had reduced the numbers to ins and outs so that they acted only as transitions or the glue between scenes. Not a single one was anywhere close to complete. That had been one of the worst moments of my career. And Gray was so upset that he called up Marty Baum, freak it out, and Marty Baum was like, don't worry, no one is ever going to see that version of the film again. The musical numbers will be in the film. And obviously, Baum got through to Fosse because I think this movie has maybe the most perfect balancing act of musical numbers of any movie musical ever. On February 13, 1972, Cabaret premiered at New York's Ziegfeld Theatre, an unlike sweet charity. It did great. On a budget of about $4.6 million total, so it did go over, Cabaret grossed over $40 million worldwide. It went on to win eight Oscars, including best supporting actor for Joel Gray, who was a class act and profusely thanked Fosse in his acceptance speech, saying he had an enormous gift and had helped him out tremendously, best actress for Liza Minnelli, and of course, best director for Bob Fosse. And Chris, I would like to play his speech for you. Thank you very much. Thank you. I must say, I feel a little like Clint Eastwood, that you're letting me stand up here because a couple of Mancowits hasn't shown up yet, but being characteristically pessimist and cynic, this and some of the other nice things that have happened to me in the last couple of days may turn me into some sort of hopeful optimist and ruin my whole life. There's so many people to thank. You've heard a lot of their names, but it's important for me to say them, and I'm sure I'm going to miss some of the ones and regret it tomorrow. Of course, Liza and Joel, Michael York, Marissa Berenstyn, Marty Baum, Manny Wolfe, Candor Nebb, a terrific guy named Doug Green, a dear friend of mine, but I'm Gwen Verden, and I'd also like to mention Sypher, the producer, with whom I had a lot of disputes. But on a night like this, you start having affection for everybody. Thank you. He cannot help himself. No, he can't. It's also interesting. I think we should mention that the big movie it was going up against at the Oscars that year was The Godfather, and he won Best Director over Coppola and sat reference, and Cabaret beat the Godfather. I think The Godfather won three Academy Awards, and Cabaret, you just said won eight. It kind of stomped it at the Oscars. I know in Box Office, The Godfather was the biggest movie of the year, but- Yes. I have a controversial opinion about that, which is that I think The Godfather winning Best Picture and Cabaret winning Best Director is correct. Oh, I don't think that's controversial. I agree. I think most people would probably say Coppola should have- that he was robbed of Best Director for The Godfather. I do not agree at all. No, I think Cabaret is pitch perfectly directed. I don't think you can get much better, much sharper than that. You can't. It is so- I mean, truly, it's perfect. It's a gem. Like, there's nothing I would change about this movie. The timing of it is insane, and I think maybe that that is Bob Fosse's biggest strength as a director, not so much in Sweet Charity, but definitely in his later work, is that he is so good at the timing, which makes sense. Nice razor sharp with the editing. Yes. I just want to mention, what a great year for movies in 72. We also had- The Heartbreak Kid. Deliverance as well, which we've covered, which is another movie that deals with the complex male sexuality component. You know, Last Tango in Paris is really controversial, Silent Running, Pink Flamingos, John Waters Breaking Out. It's a great year in movies. It is. And, you know, we just covered Taxi Driver, and this movie is really like- It's kind of like Taxi Driver, the musical. I mean, not in terms of the content, but like the vibe and feeling of the 70s. This captured so well in terms of what an audience, I think, would want to watch in a movie musical form. If this had been, you know, super brightly lit people bursting into song, I think it would have bombed the same way Sweet Charity did. And Cabaret's legacy has continued to endure for over 50 years, and Liza said it best in her memoir. Quote, We Got Away With Murder in 1972. It was the most exciting time of my life. On the day we wrapped, I cried because I didn't want to leave the set. Cabaret is the granddaddy of dark breakneck movie and stage musicals like Chicago, Sweeney Todd, and Moulin Rouge. It's the godfather of Hamilton and other pioneering shapeshifting shows that tell old stories in new ways. There's a link between Fosse's bold dance stylings and the explosive moves of Michael and Janet Jackson. For me, there's a clear line connecting Fosse's frantic jump-cutting camera style to the birth nine years later of MTV. Cabaret truly lives on. Those are great observations. I completely agree. She's very smart. The Michael Jackson one, I had not thought of it all. Oh, 100%. Everything with the gloves and the hat that he does is- Down to the way he's dressed. Yeah. It's so Fosse-esque. And then, yes, the way that not only the jump cuts, but the use of wide-angle cameras that punch in really close on people's faces for reactions and whatnot. Absolutely. The 90s style, that very in-your-face MTV Beastie Boys, you know what I mean? Sort of vibe is very cabaret. It's even like, I mean, you know, people dunk on Sweet Charity, but it's there too. There's some very funny moments. Oh, totally. Like, they'll do a freeze frame and then like punch in on Shirley MacLane's face. Sweet Charity is very unusual. Yeah, they have photo montages throughout it. It's very funny. Oh my God, what's the actor who proposed the Italian film star? Ricardo Montalban. Ricardo Montalban. He's very funny. Yes, he is very funny. It's very funny. It's a, like you mentioned, it's an uneven movie, but it's a fun watch and it's worth it if you like Fosse and seeing his evolution. Totally. For sure. Also, it's where we get big spender. And also, Lizzie, you have a little, you have a little early Shirley MacLane. A little early Shirley MacLane. Looks worse. What a good compliment. Cause I will tell you, watching both that movie and Cabaret back to back, I was like, should I cut all my hair off again? Cause they look so cute with those short haircuts and I had a pixie cut at one point and I really loved it. Just keep the bangs straight across. Don't love the widow speak down the top of the nose. Maybe not straight across like Simple Jack in Tropic Thunder. Yeah, don't go full bangs as they say. All right. Chris, what went right? So much went right in this movie. I am going to steal Joel Gray from you. Sure. He's perfect. And there's something so knowing about his character. There was, I'm trying to think of the right way to describe it, but you mentioned Greek chorus and that, I think is writer. I was thinking about like Cassandra. There's a way in which he can, because he knows us, he knows the audience to their core. Right? He's omniscient for sure. He's omniscient. He knows what's coming with Nazism, yet he does not leave. Well, I think it's a question of perception as to whether he is for it or against it. I would argue neither. I think he's a mirror. I agree. He's a mirror, but he knows he's going to be consumed by it. He knows it will destroy him is the way I see it. And what I think is so perfect about his character is that because he's a mirror, we oscillate between, is he a better angel on Liza Minnelli's shoulder? Is he mocking her? Is he a demon? Right? Is he just a sprite? Is he, is he, he's just so interesting. Like, is he a satyr? Like, what is this character and mirrors the perfect word for it? He, he reflects us back at ourselves and there's something uncomfortable and also wonderful and beautiful about it. That's why I love the money song so much. Is there clinking the coins against their perspective sex? Yes. When we were talking about this movie and all that jazz and we talked about it a little bit when we were discussing dirty dancing, we had mentioned Joel Gray, one best supporting actor. And I remember thinking, I don't remember Joel Gray being in that movie that much, right? I remember having this thought because I didn't remember the musical stuff as much as I remembered the Minnelli and Michael York stuff. And I was, I remember going into it thinking, oh, man, that's kind of odd that he won Best Supporting Actor. And then I watched it and I thought, this is one of the most deserving Best Supporting Actor wins in the history of Phil. I agree. You know, I can't imagine the movie without him and I can't imagine anybody else playing this role. So I'll give it to Joel Gray. Thank you. I was trying to think of who the performance reminds me of and the clown or the jester in 12th Night Fest Day is sort of one that comes to mind as being both definitely a clown in the true sense of the words, but also someone who seems to be kind of all knowing and in a weird way, all powerful while holding no actual power over anybody in the story, really. I know I should give it to Bob Fosse and I'm sure he wants it behind the grave because he cares about what went wrong. We gave it to him on all that jazz. I know. I'm not going to give it to him. I do love him. He's amazing. I do love him. He would probably hate me, but I love him. I'm going to give it to Liza Minnelli. I just think, like you're saying about Joel Gray, I don't know that there has been a more deserved Academy Award than her performance in Cabaret. It is truly transcendent. She takes a role that I think could come across as so sort of modlin and like treakly and she turns it into someone who is both extremely charismatic and lovable, very annoying, so embarrassing. She doesn't hold back and she's not really winking at the camera at all. It's something you said about Robert De Niro and Taxi Driver where you're like, he's never saying to the audience, like, no, no, I get it. I understand. She's just completely the character, warts and all, and I really love her as a performer, as a singer, but really, as an actor and comedian, I just think she's kind of unparalleled. And I love her hair. She looks great with a short haircut and she's probably inspiring me to make a terrible decision. And Shirley McClain, it's both your fault. You know, Paul Sheer when we covered Chinatown said, Faye Dunaway feels like porcelain to him and that she could crack at any moment. And I think that's Liza Minnelli's superpower in this movie. I mentioned how easily she cries. She always feels on the verge in this movie, but there's a steeliness beneath it that's really powerful. And the last thing I'd mention is I do think they do a great job, whether it was her or Fosse, whoever they decided, they give her a self-awareness, especially in the back half of the movie, that really is redemptive and I thought the moment they have between her and Michael York, they're in the forest and she senses his distance and insecurity and then she decides to have the abortion immediately afterward. And you're just thinking to yourself, Michael, it's because she lost faith in you in that moment. Well, I think she also understood what the situation was and what it would have been. And you know, it's funny, I always think of the last, just because Lena Dunham's new memoir just came out, we'll mention it, like I think of the last scene between her and Adam Driver and girls when they have the conversation about how they're going to get back together and raise the baby together and they're at the diner and they start crying because they realize what they're actually doing and saying goodbye. And I always, I now feel like, oh man, I feel like she pulled spiritually from cabaret for that scene, which I think is a great scene. Anywho, great job, Lizzie. Thanks, Chris. What a great, great, great movie. Guys, watch cabaret. This movie's so good. Lizzie, if folks are enjoying this podcast, how can they support it? You can leave us a rating or review on whatever podcast you're listening to this on. You can tell a friend or family member that, eh, I like what went wrong. I really enjoyed cabaret. Maybe you should watch that movie and also listen to this podcast. 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You are all so beautiful! Lizzie, thank you for holding that mirror to the grotesque desires of our audience. Next week, we are continuing Chris's sequel months with maybe, like, what was my secret favorite Indiana Jones as a child in the darkness of my heart? Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, a really interesting movie that came at a really interesting time, both in movie history and the personal life of Steven Spielberg. I'm very excited to talk about it, a movie that maybe hasn't aged as well as the other two, Indiana Jones, as we'll get into. Indiana Jones, sex criminal, as you put the first time we covered this. Less so in this next one, but yes, Kate Capchaw screams her way through this entire movie, as we'll discuss. So guys, go watch Indiana Jones and Temple of Doom we'll be back with you in a week. Great, can't wait!